• How did we get to this? Understanding social construction of risk and capacities from the neighborhood history, Elisa Puga Cevallos, María Isabel Cupuerán
• Interdisciplinary public history interventions in DRR in Museums and schools in Quito, Elisa Sevilla, María Elena Bedoya, María Antonieta Vásquez, Karina Barragán, María José Jarrín, Camilo Zapata, Marjorie Encalada, Wilson Ruiz
• Co-creating an online platform on disaster risk reduction with highschool students in Quito, Ecuador: Lessons from Evaluation, Agathe Dupeyron, Paul Narvaez, Casandra Sabag
• Disaster Passed: a singing, flashing and sobering glimpse into coping with volcanic eruptions, Teresa Armijos Burneo, Karen Pascal, Jenni Barclay, Wendy Mcmahon

Panel description

Throughout human history and the evolution of social, economic, and political systems, humans have always urged the necessity to imagine the space they have occupied, and the relationships they have established with it. Through imagination, humans, individually and collectively, have integrated their perceptions, experiences and desires with natural features and the environment. From this, they have provided their own representation of the world by generating diverse visions and perspectives, experiencing short and long term changes, and eventually reshaping and reorganizing the space and the reality accordingly. Traditionally, research and practice have represented these multiple imaginations mainly through narrative descriptions and cartographic representations. This has relegated other creative forms such as visual and performative arts (e.g., dance, theater, painting, poetry, music, drawing) in a subaltern position in comparison with more classical research methods from the humanities and social and physical sciences. Indeed, in Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) research and practice, arts and memory studies are being used just in the last years as powerful means with therapeutic effects to recover from a disaster, and with the opportunity for stimulating creativity and imagination to provide a future vision to places and communities that are proactive in reducing disaster risks. Visual and performative arts, as well as public history projects, are a medium to encourage individual and collective emotions sharing, overcome trauma, offer mutual closeness and support, and provide a visual and aesthetic sensibility to affected places. They have been also instrumental in promoting interpersonal trust and confidence, as well as in challenging powerful forces in environmental and social justice struggles.

However, an interdisciplinary perspective is missing in the use of visual and performative arts in DRR. There has indeed been limited engagement in establishing a dialogue with other disciplines in a truly interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary perspective, in particular with those disciplines that just apparently seem far from arts such as physical and environmental sciences, as well as disaster root cause analysis and public history in DRR. This challenges efforts towards a more integrated DRR research and practice because creative and performative arts can establish a dialogue with other disciplines and policy-makers to provide relevant information on e.g. hazards, livelihood and resource management, short and long term social and environmental changes, as well as on vulnerabilities and capacities. These creative arts have the potential for engaging stakeholders from different perspectives and to work towards action that can build a safer future. Therefore, this panel proposes to explore, theoretically and empirically, how visual and performative arts operate together with other disciplines in creatively envisioning and imagining the future in interdisciplinary DRR research and practice. Based on this, the panel welcomes contributions that explicitly address the role of visual and performative arts in future-oriented interdisciplinary DRR. Potential topics include but are not limited to:  

Arts and natural resource management

Multi-hazards arts

Arts and the digital future

Arts and public history

Ethics of arts in DRR

Arts and decolonial imaginations

Arts and utopian place-making

Arts and post-capitalism

Interdisciplinary art methods

Arts, conflicts and power

Arts between disaster recovery and future visions 

Arts and knowledge co-creation

Arts, Reflexivity, and Participatory Assessments

Arts, politics and policy-making

References

Cloke, P., & Dickinson, S. (2019). Transitional ethics and aesthetics: Reimagining the postdisaster city in Christchurch, New Zealand. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 109(6), 1922-1940.

Cosgrave, E. J., & Kelman, I. (2017). Performing arts for disaster risk reduction including climate change adaptation in Kelman, I., Mercer, J., & Gaillard, J. C. (Eds.). (2017). The Routledge handbook of disaster risk reduction including climate change adaptation. Routledge, 214-226.

Gavron, T. (2020). The Power of Art to Cope With Trauma: Psychosocial Intervention After the Tsunami in Japan. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 0022167820982144.

Huss, E., Kaufman, R., Avgar, A., & Shuker, E. (2016). Arts as a vehicle for community building and post‐disaster development. Disasters, 40(2), 284-303.

Monteil, C., Barclay, J., & Hicks, A. (2020). Remembering, forgetting, and absencing disasters in the post-disaster recovery process. International Journal of Disaster Risk Science, 11, 287-299.

Paton, D., Michaloudis, I., Pavavaljung, E., Clark, K., Buergelt, P., Jang, L., & Kuo, G. (2017). Art and disaster resilience: perspectives from the visual and performing arts, in Paton, D., Johnston, D.,  Disaster resilience: An integrated approach, 212-235.

Peek, L., Tobin-Gurley, J., Cox, R. S., Scannell, L., Fletcher, S., & Heykoop, C. (2016). Engaging youth in post-disaster research: Lessons learned from a creative methods approach. Gateways: International Journal of Community Research and Engagement, 9(1), 89-112.

Puleo, T. (2014). Art-making as place-making following disaster. Progress in Human Geography, 38(4), 568-580.