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Abstract
This paper explores diverse ways in which social scientists help to construct the meaning of particular events (or cases). It does so by focusing on an incident that occurred on the bridge to Gretna when a group of New Orleanians tried to escape their flooded city in August 2005. After scrutinizing three ways (the Scientist's, the Technician's, and the Phroneticist's) in which social scientists and others typically try to make sense out of particular cases, the paper suggests that the meaning of an event depends most crucially on how diverse stories and arguments about the event interact within place-based webs of relationships. Recognizing the crucial role that circulating stories play, social scientists could combine social scientific and humanities-based skills to generate “superior stories” that can transform understandings and facilitate better collective action. This would involve subjecting individual stories to a close reading, juxtaposing stories against one another, and linking the stories to key contextual features. Doing so in the case of the Gretna Bridge incident reveals five important contextual features that forced New Orleanians to undergo a “trial by space”: the contestable meaning of “racism”, the national news media's role in exacerbating fears, the emotional truth of factually suspect claims, the hyper-segregated pattern of residence in the New Orleans city-region, and the relationship between fear and the imprisonment of young black men.
Notes
1. For historical, political, and social background about New Orleans and its surroundings, see Barry, Citation1997; Campanella, Citation2002; Campanella, Citation2006; Campanella & Campanella,Citation1999; Colten, Citation2005; Eckstein, Citation2005; Kelman, Citation2003; Lewis, Citation2003. For a larger perspective on what happened in and around New Orleans before and after Katrina struck, see Birch & Wachter, Citation2006; Brinkley, Citation2006; Brookings Institution, Citation2005; Crocco, Citation2007; Hartman & Squires, Citation2006; Horne, Citation2006; Lee, Citation2006; Pastor et al., Citation2006; Select Bipartisan Committee, 2006; Trout, Citation2006; Van Heerden, Citation2006.
2. This vignette appears in Kaufmann (2005) and is based on a report first published by Bradshaw and Slonsky (Citation2005). See also Brinkley (2006, pp. 468–473) and “This American Life” (Citation2005). For a more recent account that incorporates responses from bloggers, see Kirkham & Purpura (2007).
3. While most conventional social scientists trust their ability to explain behavior, few feel confident about their ability to predict it. In response, Theodore Schatski (2006) observes that many of them try to vindicate the possibility of universal predictions by (1) harnessing an auxiliary theory or (2) adding background practices and understandings to the theory as conditions that must obtain for the predictive law to hold. So laws, models, and complex representations would hold only for people who experience similar types of situations.
4. As Pierre Bourdieu (Citation2000, pp. 21–22) puts it, they imagined they can adopt “a single, fixed point of view” and use “a frame that cuts out, encloses and abstracts the spectacle with a rigorous, immobile boundary.”
5. Elsewhere (Throgmorton, Citation2000) I have argued that this form of planning practice which I call “skillful meandering” takes place within an actual built environment and within a complex web of relationships. Consequently, a skillful practitioner must be able to navigate his or her way through all the actually-existing features of contemporary society and politics. This skillful meandering is also embodied; one acts as a skilled-voice-in-the-flow of persuasive argumentation in a place of five dimensions (height, width, depth, time, and habitus); that is, in the messy world instead of apart from it.
6. Pasqui (Citation2007) draws upon the work of Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou to suggest that an event can be understood to be either part of the continuous immanence of life or a break that generates a new object and the possibility of a new world. According to the first, an event can generate new perspectives, new meanings for old words, and new uses for old things, whereas according to the second an event can constitute a new beginning, a sudden re-framing. In either case, according to Pasqui, events can induce a major re-shaping of conceptual frames and can stimulate creativity and innovation. While I agree with Pasqui's stress on the potential importance of singular events, I would also agree with philosopher Stephen Toulmin's (Citation1990, pp. 178–179) claim that “All we can be called upon to do is to take a start from where we are, at the time we are there; i.e., to make discriminating and critical use of the ideas available to us in our current local situation, and the evidence of our experience, as this is ‘read’ in terms of those ideas.”
7. Here I would want to emphasize that being born into a web of relationships places people in particular locations (physical and social space); i.e., into subject positions and settings, that constrain their awareness of the web's full dimensions. Moreover some strands in the web are “thicker” than others; i.e., individual capacities are limited by social circumstances, and hence some people have more power than others. While people act in webs of relationship, therefore, we should be alert to the effects of material conditions as they actually exist and are experienced in New Orleans and elsewhere.
8. Michel de Certeau (Citation1984, p. 116) claims, for example, that stories “carry out a labor that constantly transforms places into spaces or spaces into places.” They fulfill two primary functions as they transform places into spaces: first, “to authorize, or more exactly, to found” (p. 123), or “'to set in place'” (p. 124); and second, to turn “the frontier into a crossing, and the river into a bridge” (p. 129). Without rejecting it outright, Eckstein challenges de Certeau's claim that stories can necessarily bridge differences.
9. It is important to understand that I define “the planner” to include not just professionals who occupy positions formally titled “planner” but also a diverse array of actors who collectively help to shape the production of space in US cities. For further insight into the relationship between planning and storytelling, see Sandercock (Citation2003).
10. Note that while the raw material of “factual” stories emerges from the practical world of day-to-day life, stories cannot tell themselves. Rather, they must be transformed into narratives and then be told. Later on, these stories might be written down.
11. In my earlier work I have argued that this construction is purposeful and therefore political. In a series of publications, Michael Gunder and Jean Hillier (2004) have compellingly argued that while planner-authors might think they know their own motivations and purposes, in fact they are often guided by subconscious forces that elude their conscious control.
12. The narrators' story gains emotional power though its implicit connection with stories that reach back into the historical and mythical past. Consider first the powerful story of Martin Luther King, Jr, and other Civil Rights marchers being tear-gassed and beaten by armed state troopers (some of them on horseback) while trying to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge on their march to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965 (Garrow, Citation1986, pp. 397–400). But consider too the way that the Roman poet Virgil has Aeneas tell a rapt audience about the catastrophe that befell his great city (Troy), how he and other Trojans had to evade their Grecian enemies while fleeing the city, and how that catastrophe set him on a successful quest for a new home and a new future.
13. Brinkley also reports an account that came from Shepard Smith, anchor of The Fox Report. Observing the Gretna Bridge incident, Smith walked up to the Gretna police and asked, “What are you guys doing?” The Gretna officer pointed to a group of largely African American “refugees” trying to cross the bridge and said, “We just want to keep them fucks out of there”. Apparently the police were angry that much of the nearby Oakwood Center Mall had burned Thursday afternoon. A crowd of people who had crossed the bridge earlier in the day had watched the mall smolder, and hence raised the officers' suspicions. Smith asked the officer, “Are you telling me that these Convention Center people can't go over the bridge? That you're forcing people not to evacuate?” The officer nodded affirmatively. Brinkley reports that Smith was “dumbfounded” (Brinkley, Citation2006, p. 471). For an extended electronic conversation about the facts and meaning of the incident as of September 2007, see Kirkham and Purpura (Citation2007).
14. Note also that when the sheriffs speak metonymically of bridge crossers as being part of “the Superdome,” they are creating characters for themselves and for the walkers. The sheriffs could have acted differently; they could have referred to the bridge crossers as fellow citizens (or fellow human beings) who had become trapped in an awful situation beyond their control.
15. Here I want to emphasize the connection between my work and that of neo-pragmatist scholars such as Charles Hoch (Citation2007) and Thomas Harper and Stanley Stein (Citation2003).
16. This web extends well beyond the immediate locus of the New Orleans city-region. Economic globalization, global communication systems, transnational migration of people, complex environmental flows and cycles, and ex-urbanization of development in the regions of “the North” have been producing “global”, “postmodern”, or “transnational” city-regions that have complex patterns of place-connection. See Throgmorton (Citation2003).
17. By focusing attention on these five factors I do not mean to exclude other important contextual features (e.g. the role that class played in shaping perceptions, interpretations, and behaviors) or to be claiming that I am offering the definitive account. Rather I mean to be making space for further transformative dialogue.
18. A few weeks after the Superdome had been evacuated, the Times Picayune wrote that just two people were found killed and there had been no reports of rape. The murder rate in the city the week after Katrina hit was unchanged. Notice, however, that there is no purely objective point of view from which these numbers can be counted and that understanding about the severity of violence is being shaped by the larger narratives in which the alleged facts are embedded.
19. See Cashin (Citation2006, p. 36), White (Citation2006) and Gotham (2007).
20. Portelli (Citation1991) characterizes these as “telling errors”. Note that placing emphasis on emotional truth while expressing skepticism about the factual veracity of this particular claim parallels the argument I have made elsewhere that statistical models, surveys, and other “scientific tools” act as tropes in the flow of persuasive argumentation.
21. I met this leader while visiting New Orleans in October 2006 with a group of students and professors from the University of Iowa. I would like to express gratitude to Ms Pam Dasheill, Leslie Alley, Steven Bingler, Ralph Thayer, Barry Hokanson, Robert Collins, Martin Lanrdrieu, Jane Brooks, and especially Bob Becker for helping us to understand the complexities of the situation in their city. For details about the planning that has taken place since Katrina struck, see ACORN Housing/University Partnership, Citation2007; Baum, Citation2006; Brookings Institution, Citation2006; Horne & Nee, Citation2006; Louisiana Recovery Authory; and City of New Orleans (2007).
22. On this point, it is also important to understand the difference between the city and the city-region of New Orleans. Before the storm, the New Orleans metropolitan area (or city-region) had nearly 1,425,000 residents and the city itself had a population of 437,186. By October 2006, the city's population had been reduced to approximately 225,000 people, while greater New Orleans was estimated to have a population of 1,141,000. In other words, it was the city of New Orleans that was truly devastated, not the surrounding region.
23. It was possible to quantify the risk that New Orleans would be hit by a Category 4 or 5 hurricane and that the city would be flooded as a result. That said, efforts to predict the precise path and intensity of particular hurricanes are, despite being rooted in the physical sciences, rife with uncertainty (see Van Heerden, Citation2006). Moreover, there was no way to quantify the risk that a particular sequence of events would be placed in motion or that a particular set of consequences would flow from the hurricane's strike.
24. As planning scholar Heather Campbell (Citation2006, p. 101) has recently argued, “Planning is concerned with making ethical choices about better or worse with respect to specific contexts; it is about…collective action, based on an understanding of the relational nature of human existence.” In her view, which I share, “Justice in planning is about situated ethical judgment” (p. 104).
25. As a planning theorist, for example, I could connect this case to Karen Umemoto's (Citation2001) argument about the importance of familiarizing oneself with the cultures of unfamiliar communities, partly in order to gain the other communities' trust.