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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 (Lindsey.McEwen@uwe.ac.uk)

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