Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
Headlines from Social Science Research
‘After the rain has gone’
http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/jfrm_enhanced/default.asp
A great number of books have been written about disasters. With this book we wanted to offer a fresh approach and consider ways of writing about disasters which are non-linear, non-prescriptive and humanistic. Most importantly, we think that people ‘inside’ a disaster should tell their own story.
Post disaster, people often come to feel estranged from the rest of society and lose confidence in the structures of
government…voices like those deserve to be listened to carefully.
Kai Erikson (1979) Everything in Its Path
The importance of listening in disasters
Key Areas of Learning from Recent Flood Research
• The experience of flooding continues long after the rain and flood waters have gone
‘It’s not so much the floods, it’s afterwards’Warwick Road area resident (Group discussion)
– Damage to both individuals and communities
– Displacement and separation
– Managing the recovery
– Maintaining normality
– Rebuilding social life
Erikson (2003) notes that a home can be closely bound with notions of identity and a sense of place:
‘if you have brought children up in a house; if you were yourself brought up in a house, if you have spent hours and hours fixing a house, if you have organized your lives around the shape of that house. To lose it is to lose a part of you’.
Homes Matter
Ethnographic study of 1995 Kobe earthquake, Japan (Harada, 2000)
‘She needed some things that had belonged to that life before the earthquake…a strong desire for continuity in daily life.’
Materials Matter
Harada T. Space, materials, and the ‘social’: in the aftermath of a disaster. Environ Plann D: Soc Space 2000, 18, 205–212.
Key Areas of Learning from Recent Flood Research
• Insiders/Outsiders. Flooding changes communities – insured and non-insured, flooded and non-flooded
– Carlisle: respondents spoke of a ‘renewed community spirit’ and ‘neighbours pulling together’ they also spoke bitterly of burglary and theft from their flooded properties, and a corresponding loss of trust towards their community.
• Better understanding of traumatic experience: while distress is universal following a disaster, most people are not psychologically ill
– ‘share like experiences’, friends, family, colleagues…
– Hull – ‘it is critically important to allow pupils to tell their story and in the process discover that they are not unusual in their reactions and feelings’
– Need safe spaces to do this - circle time
– FMD – ‘we healed each other’
– debriefing and peer support for front line workers
Key Areas of Learning from Recent Flood Research
• ‘Shift from a trauma approach to a community-based approach, which frames the event within the everyday life and priorities of the community and recognises that communities have the capacity to help themselves through natural support networks and coping strategies that existed before the crisis event’
– Hull: this includes the reintegration of children and families into community structures and schools can and do play a significant role in this process.
Key Areas of Learning from Recent Flood Research
UNICEF Conference Report. Psychosocial effects of complex emergencies. March 18–19 in the Board of Governors Hall at the American Red Cross, Washington, DC, 1999.
Some Questions/issues for 2009 Cumbrian Floods Research
• How do we ‘learn to live with floods’?
• How to plug the recovery gap?
• What does recovery look like?
• Building resilience
• Paucity of research re children’s experience of flooding
• What ‘spaces’ do people need for recovery and how to best facilitate…schools, pubs, post offices?
• Do we need closer working between statutory & non-statutory agencies?
