2022 Conference Report

Report on the 2022 OHA Biennial Conference in Launceston. The blog post covers the opening plenary session with keynote speaker Mark Cave. The full report is available by download.

Report on Opening Plenary Session of the 2022 OHA Biennial Conference in Launceston. Keynote speaker Mark Cave presented ‘Why did this happen? Making meaningful answers in the aftermath of crisis.’
This is an excerpt from a more comprehensive conference report. A download link to the full report is available at the end of this page.

By Jeanette Thompson, OHT scholarship winner

Mark spoke about his experience working for a private foundation museum in New Orleans at the time of Hurricane Katrina. At first there was a heavy reliance on media ‘reportage’ of the devastation and unfolding events, but a scarcity of reliable information. Oral histories began to appear on social media as a means of coping and sharing information about first hand experiences. Mark’s organisation began to critically appraise the news coverage that was sensitive to market forces yet responsible for shaping what ‘we’ collectively remember of the events.   In particular, the Louisiana Superdome which served as the main evacuation centre during the crisis, became the focus of news media. With a paucity of news and information, attention turned to events happening within the facility – assaults and criminal behaviour. This triggered a reaction to the crisis in which a narrative of blame helped people cope with the breakdown in social order within the facility. 

After the emergency, when order was restored to the community, a communal ‘cleansing of memory’ was important so that the Superdome could once again be associated with football and events that could drive the economic recovery of the state. The news reports about assaults and criminal behaviour inside the Superdome became regarded as apocryphal urban myths.      

Five years later, Mark was involved in creating a retrospective exhibition challenging the mainstream news media narrative. He played for us an audio clip of a Superdome relief worker who was disturbed by how quickly the social order broke down within the Superdome. After four days of privation ‘the beast comes out’ as humans are pushed beyond the social contract of ‘civility’ and moved into ‘survivor mode’. The local communal memory had shifted to enable the economic recovery and did not acknowledge negative events such as the Rooftop Riot.

Ten years after the disaster, New Orleans Public Radio broadcast oral histories of the events. By 2008, prominent politicians had visited the sites of recovery for photo opportunities. A new community market was built on the site of the rooftop riot. The market was soon trashed and vandalised by angry locals who saw the recovery campaign as a PR exercise that tried to erase their experiences of the events.          

At this time, a catastrophic oil spill and unquenchable fire, originating from Deepwater Horizon a British Petroleum oil rig, affected the whole Louisiana coast. The images of birdlife covered in oil and the magnitude of the disaster triggered memories of the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina. Ironically, an early Christian image of a pelican feeding her young from the blood of her breast had been used in the recovery campaign.

It was associated with the ‘Optimism Narrative’ used for the recovery, but now pelicans were oiled and dying in multitudes along the coast. British Petroleum took up this narrative and established a Bird Rescue mission, which deflected public attention from the prolonged crisis. Oral Histories collected at this time focussed on Bird Rescue rather than the issue of the environmental impact of offshore drilling for oil. Some of this testimony of bird rescues was used in the Response Tea for volunteers. Mark played a video clip of Burt Segal, a citizen who volunteered after seeing news items on the Pelican Rehabilitation program. His work with the rehabilitation program gave him agency, being able to do something to assist, in contract to the helplessness he felt over the Katrina events. He felt a need for an active response to some cause of the crisis, an opportunity to ‘do something’ to make things better. Mark pointed to the example, during the Covid crisis, of the death of George Floyd. An everyday example of police methods leading to the death of a black man, which may have gone unremarked upon at any other time, became a cause celebre. People felt they could do something by protesting and marching across the country. A dominant narrative in the Covid era oral history recordings was the active pursuit of social justice in the present as a redress for past social problems. Race and social justice became the core of the Covid recovery. The first female black woman was elected Mayor of New Orleans on a platform of social justice. New Orleans became a ‘bright spot’ in the otherwise embarrassing Federal response to the Covid crisis.

Mark suggested researchers either let the process of Memory Creation play out on its own and study it, or take an active role in the process of Memory Creation by sharing alternative oral histories of topical events on line. The narratives of Rooftop Riot survivors challenged the mainstream political and economic narrative of recovery. Over time, the conflation of events in memory make it difficult to understand what actually happened. Media reportage at the time of the incident is inadequate and often driven by economic and  political agendas. The sharing of alternative narratives can encourage the community to acknowledge events and issues that don’t fit with the approved narrative.

We evolve through our responses to and lessons from crisis, but we need to understand the processes involved in memory creation.

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