CRASSH | Decentring disasters in disaster risk reduction: promoting life history research

Decentring disasters in disaster risk reduction: promoting life history research with children and older people
Convenor
Kelly Fagan Robinson (Department of Social Anthropology)
Speakers
Chika Watanabe (Senior Lecturer of Social Anthropology, University of Manchester)
Jenny Moreno (Assistant Professor, Social Work, University of Concepción)
Boris Sáez (Chief of the Department of Disaster Risk Management, Municipality of Talcahuano)
Abstract
In academic and policy work on disaster risk reduction (DRR), the expertise of disaster survivors in future-oriented resilience and action is often overlooked. This paper, co-authored between an anthropologist, a social work scholar, and a municipal official in Chile, promotes the use of life histories as a methodology to underpin DRR on disaster survivors’ experiences. Specifically, our life history research with children and older people showed that disaster experiences are embedded in other experiences of hardship and resilience in life. Counterintuitively, decentring the topic of disasters and foregrounding people’s broader life experiences can engage the most marginalised groups in DRR.
About the inReach - /ɪn riːtʃ/ seminar series
inside the distance to which someone can stretch out their hand.
within the capacity of someone to attain or achieve something
(inversion of ‘outreach’) considers the expertise of those usually closed off from academic and artistic reception.
The term ‘inReach’ signifies any action which reshapes elite institutions as inclusive domains through centrally placing work by people otherwise absent in traditional arts and academic spaces. This series will critically question and therefore set to prove false the too-common trope that certain people are ‘hard to reach.’ By bringing artists, academics, and key local publics together via CRASSH, inReach will amplify the underacknowledged value of lived expertise of socially marginalised people, while also fostering ongoing debates about transience, stigma and inequality in the UK.