.png)
Gallery II: Human Curation
Archives, Institutions, and Control
Human institutions shape how disasters are recorded, remembered, and publicly understood. Gallery 1 examines how media outlets, government agencies, and cultural institutions curated Hurricane Katrina through selective storytelling—foregrounding certain narratives while silencing others. By tracing these acts of curation, this gallery exposes how power shapes memory long before we encounter the archive.
This story centered chaos—whose chaos?
Hurricane Katrina: August 30, 2005 in Photos
Houston Chronicles
Which neighborhoods were photographed most frequently?
NPR.org
From devastation to determination: Hurricane Katrina's legacy in pictures
NPR Staff | August 29, 202512:09 AM ET
What is preserved—and what is erased?
NOLA.com
Then & Now: Interactive Map of New Orleans Housing Developments
Dan Swenson, Graphic Editor, August 20, 2015
01
Archival Newspaper digital Archives From 2005
Archival newspapers offer one of the most powerful windows into how Hurricane Katrina was curated for the nation. Through headlines, photographs, and selective storytelling, the media constructed a narrative that shaped public understanding of disaster, responsibility, and community identity. What appeared on the front page—and what never made it into print—reveals the racial, economic, and spatial biases embedded in institutional memory. By revisiting these headlines, visitors can see how journalism functioned not simply as reporting, but as an act of curation that framed whose suffering mattered and whose was rendered invisible. This section invites viewers to question how official narratives are produced, circulated, and preserved.
Human Exceptionalism
Media frames humans as the only meaningful actors, erasing the nonhuman forces that shaped the disaster.
Curatorial Power & Control
Headlines reveal who institutions treat as worthy subjects—and who is depicted as a threat, burden, or absence.
Links to Digital Archives
From the Archives: Dozens killed, damage heavy as Katrina
roars in
By Scott Gold, Ellen Barry
Aug. 29, 2005 12 AM PT
From the archive, 30 August 2005: Katrina batters New Orleans
Jamie Wilson and Julian Borger
Mon 30 Aug 2010 07.06 EDT
Hurricane Katrina Slams Into Gulf Coast; Dozens Are Dead
By Joseph B. Treaster and Kate Zernike
Aug. 30, 2005
Chapter One: Katrina in Perspective
White House, President George W. Bush
September 8, 2005
02
Memorial & Offical Narratives From the Media
Memorials and official narratives shape how a nation remembers—and forgets—Hurricane Katrina. This section brings together news footage from major U.S. networks in 2005 to show how early public memory was constructed in real time. Through tone, framing, and selective focus, these broadcasts helped define heroes and victims, assign blame, and establish which neighborhoods were worth saving. When placed alongside maps of memorials and rebuilt sites, a clearer picture emerges of how institutions curate collective memory, often sanitizing the deeper structural failures. This gallery invites viewers to question whose stories became “official” and whose experiences were left unrecognized.
Winners Write History
Official memorials often reinforce state-sanctioned narratives, centering resilience while obscuring state failures, racialized neglect, and structural abandonment.
Agency Shaped by Political Institutions
Institutions exercise agency by deciding what forms of memory deserve permanence, legitimacy, and public space.
03
Government Curation & Political Decisions
Government policy is itself a form of curatorship: it selects certain forms of life to protect, fund, or rehabilitate, while letting others decay. These decisions shape not only material outcomes—who returned, who rebuilt—but also the historical record that later generations inherit.
On the right, you will find policies that have been created since Hurricane Katrina to prevent another catastrophic event like Hurricane Katrina. Click the "Read More" buttons to get more information about each policy.
S.3721 - Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act of 2006
Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act of 2006 - Title I: National Preparedness and Response - (Sec. 101) Amends the Homeland Security Act of 2002 (the Act) to make extensive revisions to emergency response provisions while keeping the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Disaster Recovery Reform Act of 2018
On Oct. 5, 2018, President Trump signed the Disaster Recovery Reform Act of 2018 into law as part of the Federal Aviation Administration Reauthorization Act of 2018. These reforms acknowledge the shared responsibility for disaster response and recovery, aim to reduce the complexity of FEMA, and build the nation’s capacity for the next catastrophic event.
H.R.3858 - Pets Evacuation and Transportation Standards Act of 2006
Pets Evacuation and Transportation Standards Act of 2006 - Amends the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act to require the Director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to ensure that state and local emergency preparedness operational plans address the needs of individuals with household pets and service animals prior to, during, and following a major disaster or emergency.
Pre-Disaster Mitigation (PDM) Grant Program
The Pre-Disaster Mitigation (PDM) grant program makes federal funds available to state, local, tribal, and territorial governments to plan for and implement sustainable cost-effective measures designed to reduce the risk to individuals and property from future natural hazards, while also reducing reliance on federal funding from future disasters. The program is authorized by Section 203 of the Stafford Act.
01.
Human Exceptionalism
Because official narratives often treat humans—especially institutions—as the sole narrators of disaster, ignoring nonhuman forces (storms, wetlands, infrastructure), this section benefits from signaling how human institutions attempt to dominate the story.
02.
Bruno Latour — Actor-Network
Even though Gallery 1 centers human curation, it’s important to mark that institutions, technologies, policies, media systems, and material infrastructures are all actors shaping meaning. This tees up the transition to later galleries where nonhuman actants appear more prominently.
03.
Capitalocene James Moore
Perfect here. News media and governmental narratives often obscure the economic systems—petro-capitalism, infrastructural neglect, racialized disinvestment—that prefigured the disaster. The Capitalocene lens helps the viewer see official memory as part of a larger economic ecology that distributes vulnerability unevenly.
04.
Power/Knowledge – Michael Foucault
This section explicitly shows how institutions produce “truth” through selective representation. Foucault gives you the vocabulary for how states and media shape public memory by controlling what counts as knowledge.
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
