Olaf Kühne & Lara Koegst 
Land Loss in Louisiana [PDF ebook] 
A Neopragmatic Redescription

This book is oriented on testing and developing the neopragmatic approach of horizontal geographies, in which we follow approaches of natural sciences, social sciences, and cultural studies. Regional focus is thereby put on a rapidly changing elemental space and its social representations, characterized by unstable and not well-defined hybridities: coastal Louisiana. This region is highly dynamic: the Mississippi River in particular, with its extensive sediments, has shifted the coastal fringe of present-day Louisiana into the Gulf of Mexico. This land gain is contrasted by natural processes, but also by processes resultant of human intervention which cause marine encroachment. A complex interplay of different aspects is directly and indirectly leading to coastal land loss which makes the question of how to describe emerging hybrid spaces virulent and highlights the limits of a positivist understanding of boundaries that is also physically geographical. In the neopragmatic tradition, positivist research findings will be framed in social constructivist terms and supplemented by phenomenological approaches to Louisiana’s coastal space, thus suggesting the need for and potentials of horizontal geographic integration of different theoretical and methodological approaches as well as researcher perspectives and data bases.

Table of Content

A neopragmatic theoretical framing and its operationalization.- The multiple causes of coastal land loss in Louisiana – an overview.- Land loss and life chances.- The loss of land in mass media representation.- Terrestrial marine hybrids on the Louisiana coast – a phenomenological acces.- Conclusion.

About the author

Prof. Dr. Dr. ​Olaf Kühne, University of Tübingen,  Research Department of Geography



Lara Koegst, University of Tübingen,  Research Department of Geography