RT6: Social Media, Social Justice Panel

More and more people around the world use blogs and social network services. Their power to connect people and publish diverse voices raises questions about the possibility of using new media as organizing tools for social change. For example, blogs played a crucial role in organizing protests in Jena, Louisiana, in 2007. This panel will examine the intersection and interaction of social media with the struggle for a more just and humane society. Can tools such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, blogs, YouTube, et cetera, facilitate such work, and if so how? We’ve all heard about how social media fueled the revolution in Egypt, but what’s going on locally? Conversely, might social media actually impede the struggle for justice? Are we just “amusing ourselves to death”? Does new media present new opportunities, or do we face the same issues as ever?

Moderator: Bart Everson from Xavier University’s Center for the Advancement of Teaching.

Jordan Flaherty - Flaherty was the first journalist with a national audience to write about the case of the Jena Six, and his award-winning reporting from the Gulf Coast has been featured in a range of outlets from the New York Times to Al Jazeera to Argentina's Clarin newspaper. He has reported on protest movements in the Middle East and met with Egyptian bloggers after the revolution there. He is the author of Floodlines: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six and has blogged at justiceroars.org.

Cherri Foytlin - Foytlin is an oil worker's wife, mother of six, Louisiana resident and journalist whose family has been deeply impacted by the BP Oil Disaster and consequential moratorium on deep water drilling. She co-founded Gulf Change, blogs forwww.BridgeTheGulfProject.org, and walked to Washington D.C. from New Orleans (1,243 miles) to call for action to stop the BP oil disaster. She has been a constant voice, speaking out to the Obama Administration's Gulf Oil Spill Commission, and in countless forms of media. Cherri will continue her fight for the industries, people, culture and wildlife of south Louisiana and the Gulf Coast "until we are made whole again."

Jimmy Huck, Jr. - Huck is a professor at Tulane University in the Stone Center for Latin American Studies and functions as the Center’s Graduate Advisor. He sits on the Executive Committee of Tulane University’s Center for Public Service and is currently a Board member of Puentes New Orleans. His blog is “The Huck Upchuck” and he has been blogging since August of 2002. He has been involved in monitoring anti-illegal immigrant legislation in the Louisiana Legislature over the past three years and has traveled up to Baton Rouge on occasion to testify against such legislation. He has used his blog as well as other social media such as Facebook to mobilize grass-roots action regarding such legislation, and in the general promotion of social justice. His professional and intellectual interests include re-invigorating the idea of the academy as a proper vehicle for cultivating civic identity, educating for democracy, and transforming knowledge into social action.

Stephen Ostertag - Ostertag is a sociologist at Tulane University. His research and teaching are in the areas of news media, democracy and citizenship; and crime, incarceration and inequalities. He is currently researching the growing social organization of bloggers and its implications for the production, dissemination, and consumption of news and information. He also recently started a blog named PublicSphereNOLA. Stephen is originally from Connecticut, where he was a volunteer with the Hartford Independent Media Center.

Register for Rising Tide 6 at Eventbrite.

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RT6: Louisiana Coastal Health Panel

Re-capping the well. The aftermath of the Macondo oil disaster and the future of the Gulf Coast. A discussion about how what's just happened over the past year will affect the land and the people for years to come. Moderated by Alex Woodward.

Alex Woodward is a staff writer with New Orleans alt-media Gambit, covering the environment, arts and culture of south Louisiana. With Gambit since 2008 he has covered everything from marching bands and cold cases to the effects of the BP disaster on the Gulf Coast.

Anne Rolfes is the founding director of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade. Anne began her organizing career in West Africa as a Peace Corps volunteer in Togo. It was there that she first witnessed the destruction of oil production. After six years of working on Nigerian issues, Anne returned to Louisiana in 1999 to protect her home state from petrochemical pollution. Anne was born and raised in Lafayette, Louisiana where many people made their fortunes from the oil industry. She has seen the wealth and the poverty created by oil production and seeks to make the industry more equitable. In October 2007 Anne was recognized by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation as a Community Health Leader.

David Hammer is an award-winning reporter for The Times-Picayune in New Orleans. He led the paper's investigation of what went wrong on the Deepwater Horizon rig and broke several stories about key engineering decisions that contributed to the BP well blowout. His beats since the oil spill also include the drilling moratorium and Kenneth Feinberg's administration of spill claims. He was part of a team of journalists that won the Naonal Journalism Awards’ 2010 Edward J. Meeman Prize for environmental reporting and The Associated Press Managing Editors’ Frank Allen Award for the year’s best overall news writing in Louisiana and Mississippi. Hammer is a seventh-generation New Orleanian and a graduate of Harvard University. He worked five years for newspapers in New England and four years with The Associated Press. In 2005, he won the Dallas Press Club's Katie Award for best wire feature story of the year. After Hurricane Katrina, Hammer returned to his hometown paper to cover Louisiana's multi-billion-dollar recovery programs and won the 2007 Louisiana Press Association award for best coverage of government. As hurricane recovery money flowed to the local level, Hammer shifted to covering New Orleans City Hall. His investigation of bribery in the city's technology office earned him the 2009 Frank Allen Award.

Bob Marshall is The Times-Picayune's Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has spent much of his career chronicling the people, stories and issues of Louisiana's wetlands culture. Although best known as outdoors editor of the newspaper, Marshall's 35-year career includes extensive work as a reporter and columnist covering professional, college and Olympics sports, feature writing, op-ed columns, and special projects specializing in environmental issues.

In 1997 Marshall was a member of the T-P's three-man team that won a Pulitzer Prize for the series "Oceans of Trouble" which examined the plight of the world's fisheries.

In 2005 Marshall's investigations into Corps of Engineers missteps in building the New Orleans levees and floodwalls was part of the T-P reporting package that won the Pulitzer for its coverage of Hurricane Katrina. In addition, Marshall was a finalist for the Investigative Editors and Reporters award and the Polk Award for his on-going coverage into the causes of the disaster.

In 2007 Marshall was co-author of the series entitled "Last Chance: The Fight to Save a Disappearing Coast," about Louisiana's coastal erosion problems, which won the 2007 John H. Oakes Prize for Distinguished Environmental Reporting from Columbia University.

Marshall's other national and regional awards for journalism include top honors from the Associated Press, United Press International, Scripps-Howard Foundation National Journalism Awards, Society of Professional Journalists, National Association of Sportswriters and Sportscasters and the Pro Football Writers of America, Outdoor Writers Association of America, Louisiana Outdoor Writers Association, and Southeastern Outdoors Press Association. His environmental reporting and essays have also earned recognition form a wide range of conservation and environmental groups, and including Conservationist of the Year awards from the Louisiana Wildlife Federation. And in 2004 Marshall was elected to the Circle of Chiefs by the OWAA, that group's highest award for contributions to conservation.

In addition to his newspaper work, Marshall's professional credits include his current assignment as conservation editor for Field&Stream Magazine, and terms as South region editor of Field&Stream; South columnist of Outdoor Life Magazine; host of the F&S Radio Network; co-host of ESPN's The Outdoors Writers and feature assignments for a wide range of national publications from Men's Journal and Reader's Digest to National Geographic Adventure.

Marshall lives in New Orleans with his wife, Marie.

Dr. Len Bahr is the former director of the Governor's Applied Coastal Science Program who currently publishes the La Coast Post website.

Drake Toulouse is a BP and Gulf Coast Claims Facility critic who writes at Disenfranchised Citizen.

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RT6: New Orleans Food Continuity and Change

Cooking in all its branches should be studied as a science, and not be looked upon as a haphazard mode of getting through life
-- Lafcadio Hearn

These are fascinating times for food culture in New Orleans. The years following the Katrina flood have seen much upheaval and loss but also innovation and rebirth. Boosters frequently boast that there are now more restaurants open in the city than there were before the storm, but the food scene in New Orleans encompasses much more than just a number of operational businesses. While the industry is certainly a key component of the city's economic health, New Orleanians consider their cuisine a core component of their familial and civic identity. Meanwhile, spurred by trends in popular culture, more American cities can lay legitimate claim to first-class dining scenes. How do such trends affect the way we think about food in New Orleans? During a time of rapid change, are the elements that make New Orleans unique being preserved? And what innovations are occuring here that continue to set us apart as a world class culinary destination? Our panel of New Orleans food writers and professionals will address these issues as well as other challenges and rewards of cooking and eating in a city long defined by its love of both tradition and creativity.

With:

Todd Price: Freelance writer, featured contributor to the Times-Picayune, former food editor at Offbeat Magazine, columnist at New Orleans Living Magazine, contributor to Zagat Survey New Orleans, blogger at A Frolic of My Own, author of several local dining guides including Night and Day New Orleans and a New Orleans' Best Bars iphone app.

Peter Thriffley and Rene Louapre: Food columnists at Offbeat Magazine, authors of popular New Orleans food blog Blackened Out.

Chris Debarr: Chef at Green Goddess, formerly of The Delachaise, long time New Orleans "excitable chef" blogger

Adolfo Garcia: Chef & Owner: RioMar, La Boca, a Mano, Gusto, High Hat Cafe, Ancora Pizzaria. From Chef Garcia's bio:

Growing up in New Orleans, Adolfo Garcia was keenly aware of both the city’s culinary reputation as well as dishes his ancestors enjoyed. His family is Panamanian and they loved to travel and explore other cultures.

Garcia studied history at the University of Texas, and chose to pursue his passion for gastronomy. Garcia graduated from the prestigious Culinary Institute of America. After stages in high-end London, Madrid, and NYC restaurants, he returned to New Orleans eight years later inspired to cook from an historical perspective. He was ready to introduce traditional dishes, albeit ones wholly new to the city.

Chefs Garcia and Debarr were named "Best Chef" and "Best New Chef" respectively by New Orleans Magazine in 2006

Alex del Castillo: Chef and owner of Taceaux Loceaux Alex and Maribeth Del Castillo are among the pioneers in bringing the gourmet food truck trend to New Orleans and leveraging social media tools like Twitter and Facebook to promote it. They've recently added a permanent location taking over the kitchen at Chickie Wah Wah music club.

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