Aug. 27, 2011

Friday Night Party: Tracey's, 2604 Magazine St, 7 p.m.
Conference Venue: Xavier University
Lunch: J'Anitas
Ashley Award: TBA

8 a.m. - 9 a.m.
Registration & Breakfast
8:55 a.m. - 9:05 a.m. 
Rising Tide Welcome Comments
9:05 a.m. - 9:15 a.m.
Sister Monica Loughlin, SBS,  Xavier University Welcome Comments

9:15 a.m. - 10:10 a.m. 
Morning Keynote: How New Orleanians came to perceive, delineate, name-- and argue about-- the neighborhoods of their city.

Tulane University geographer Richard Campanella is the author of six critically acclaimed books on the physical and human geography of New Orleans, including "Bienville's Dilemma," "Geographies of New Orleans," and "Lincoln in New Orleans." The only two-time winner of the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Book of the Year award, Rich has also received the Williams Prize for Louisiana History and the Mortar Board Award for Excellence in Teaching from Tulane University.

10:15 a.m. – 11:25 a.m.
Panel Discussion: Social Media, Social Justice

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: Dr. Kimberly Chandler - Dr. Kimberly J. Chandler is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Xavier University of Louisiana. As well, she is a faculty contributor to the Women’s Studies program at Xavier. In 2011, Dr. Chandler began a blog as an extension of her work in gender and communication entitled, “Confessions of an Ex-Superwoman.” Dr. Chandler is a passionate advocate for the use of service-learning as a method of instruction within the classroom. In doing so, she engages in the use of social media, especially blogging, in order to expand students’ notions of using one’s voice as an instrument of social justice and activism.

• 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.
  

11:40 a.m. – 12:50 p.m.
Panel Discussion: 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.

Moderator: Alex Woodward - staff writer, Gambit, covering the environment, arts and culture of south Louisiana.

• Anne Rolfes - 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 - 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. 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.
  
  
• Dr. Len Bahr - The former director of the Governor's Applied Coastal Science Program who currently publishes the La Coast Post website.
   
  
• Drake Toulouse- A BP and Gulf Coast Claims Facility critic who writes at Disenfranchised Citizen.
  
  
• Bob Marshall - 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.
  

12:50 p.m. - 2 p.m. Lunch by Janita's

2 p.m. – 3 p.m.  
Afternoon Keynote

David Simon is creator and executive producer of HBO's New Orleans dramaTreme. He is a Baltimore-based former journalist for the Baltimore Sun and television producer of acclaimed programs such as The Corner, The Wire and Generation Kill.

3:05 p.m. – 4:15 p.m.  
Panel Discussion: 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.

• Todd Price - Freelance writer, featured contributor to the Times-Picayune, former food editor at Offbeat Magazine, columnist at New Orleans Living Magazine, contributor toZagat Survey New Orleans, Fodor's New Orleans, blogger at A Frolic of My Own, author of several local dining guides including 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.
  
  
• 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.
  
  

4:15 p.m. - 4:30 p.m.
Ashley Award
The Ashley Morris award was established in 2008 to honor and remember one of the founding members of Rising Tide, Dr. Ashley Morris. It is presented in cooperation with Hana Morris. The award is given annually to someone who embodies Ashley's fierce passionate defense of New Orleans, its people and its culture.

4:35 p.m. - 5:45 p.m.
Panel Discusion: Brass. New Orleans. Music.

Moderator: "Big Red Cotton" Deborah Cotton - Writer (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube)

• Lawrence Rawlins - Band director of Roots of Music
  
  
• Alejandro de los Rios - Producer of the Brass Roots documentary
  
  
• Edward “Juicy” Jackson - Trombonist TBC Brass Band 
  
  
• Joe Maize - Trombonist TBC Brass Band 
  
  
• Sean Michael Roberts - Trumpeter TBC Brass Band 
  
  This panel will be followed by a performance by the TBC Brass Band.