Main presentation title heading to go here
Presentation by
First NameSecond Name
Job Title
Date
Sustainable flood memories,
lay knowledges and
development of community
resilience to future flood risk
Flood and Coast 2017 29th March 2017, Telford UK
Lindsey McEwen1., Joanne Garde-Hansen2 and Andrew
Holmes1 ([email protected])
1Centre for Floods, Communities and
Resilience, University of the West of
England, Bristol, UK
2Centre for Cultural Policy Studies,
University of Warwick, Coventry, UK
Sustainable Flood Memories (SFM)
project
• how communities remember/ archive flood experiences
• how these memories are materialised, assimilated, embedded and protected in contemporary communities/culture
• how sustainable flood memories might have a particular role in developing community resilience to residual risk
• how communities themselves, and agencies charged with flood resilience planning, can engage with, and support, development of sustainable flood memories
Evidence bases: narratives, oral and archived histories, physical
marks and material practices in landscape, and folk memories of previous flood
events and their impacts - embedded in local communities' heritage and culture.
‘Sustainable flood memory’
Links between flood memory, lay/local flood knowledges, and resilience:
– community focused
– involving archival access and dissemination
– integrating individual/personal and collective experiences
– involving inter- (vertical) and intra-generational (horizontal) communication
– concern for:• strategies for capturing and protecting
memory
• strategies for dealing with future flood risk
Materialisation of memory: flood
marking as practiceTraditional
Formal/ informal
Persistence/ transiency
Relationships to active remembering and
forgetting?
New approaches to flood archiving
(mobile, digital archives)
Changing social media practices?
Ownership?
Democratisation?
Permanency and persistence?
‘What is no longer archived in the same way is no longer
lived in the same way’ (Derrida 1996, p18)
• Flood experience + time lag
• Trauma/ fatigue
• Deferral of responsibility
• Denial through ‘protection’
• ‘Open for business’• ‘Forgetting for annulment’
‘forgetting in the formation of a new identity’ (Connerton, 2008)
• Lack of connection between horizontal and vertical axes of memory
• Anecdotal lay knowledge
• Flood memory as ‘grit’ or catalyst to remembering; collective activism for mitigation
• Community solidarity; ‘flood friends’ for sharing memories/knowledge (local and beyond ‘the local’)
• ‘Flood archives’ - built, organised shared
• Connection between horizontal and vertical axes of memory
Active forgetting Active remembering
Archiving for knowledge integration: ESRC Flood Memories digital storytelling project
esrcfloodmemories.wordpress.com
• Critical reflection
• Knowledge
exchange
• Archive of 21
‘preparedness’
stories
• Evaluation in
different settings
A framework for
Sustainable
Flood Memory as
process-practice
within flood risk
management
decision-making
for local resilience(McEwen et al. 2016)
Building,
Organising,
Sharing…..
Find out more: ESRC Sustainable Flood
Memories project
• Website: esrcfloodmemories.wordpress.com
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/floodmemories