slides - DRY Project

DRY: Drought Risk and You
Storytelling for
drought resilience:
local communities,
memories and legacy
Liz Roberts (UWE), Lindsey McEwen (UWE),
Caitlin DeSilvey (University of Exeter), Antonia
Liguori (University of Loughborough).
RGS IBG 2015
Structure
• Project and methodology
• Narratives for participatory research
• Drought narratives
• Three lenses:
– Drought memories
– Local/lay historical knowledge(s) and ‘watery sense of
place’
– Visual archives as prompts and illustrations
• Implications for future decision-making
AIM: To integrate narrative
methods/resources and drought science
to assist multi-stakeholder decision-making
for drought mitigation and management.
• Current approaches primarily expert/sciencefocused
• Drivers and stakeholders treated in isolation
• Poor understanding of direct/indirect impacts and
trade-offs; factors in community/individual
preparation and response
Narratives so far…
• Captured through:
– Local advisory group meetings (local
stakeholders)
– One to one discussions
– Engagement activities
– Digital stories
• Trialling development of ‘drought-sciencenarrative’ workshops
Drought Narratives
Who: farmers, land
owners, indigenous
populations, domestic
water users (rural)
Methods: oral
histories, interviews,
archives, elicitationmethods, photovoice,
Mmogo Method
Framings: climate
change, water v. heat;
the ‘social construction
of drought’; gender;
adaptation; risk;
narratives of identity and
perseverance;
desertification; irrigation
“…we cannot expect to fully understand
the significance that climate change
impacts will have in societies by
anticipating those changes to occur in
isolation from economic, social, and
cultural conditions. “
Redsteer et al. (2012)
“…a shift in the management of drought
has been gradually reflected in policy
discourse—in tandem with the
privatisation of agricultural governance in
Western cultures per se, focusing on the
individual rather than society as the site of
regulation–away from a welfare-oriented
discourse to that of risk management“
Anderson (2008)
ICS12/15878 – Early Effects of Drought on the back Garden of Charles
Woolf, 1976 © Estate of Charles Woolf, Courtesy of Archives and Special
Collections, University of Exeter Penryn Campus
Drought
memories
Capturing peoples’ drought
memories through public
engagement activities
Potato farming, Fowey catchment
Farmers, local knowledge & memories
Local historical
knowledge(s) and
‘watery sense of
place’
“Right, well the little rivers that were used that eventually found their way into the
Fowey river, they would bring china clay over the viaduct in bygone times, and would
find its way to Lostwithiel and to Fowey that were tannery towns. In other words, the
ore of tin and other products were all weighed there and it were loaded on to barges
and off it went to wherever it was going. Lostwithiel only lost its tannery status when
the river became silted up. ... So they used the water system from the tin, from the
English china, to transport it by rail.”
Business sector, Fowey catchment
Visual archives
as prompts and
illustrations
River Derwent – ‘bone dry’ at
Seathwaite on 3 May 2011’.
(The Guardian, 10 June 2011)
Newspaper archives
•
Iconic evocative images – linked
to place (1976 drought) ‘empty
reservoirs, queues of women at
standpipes…’
•
Cartoons (Giles in 1976)
•
Reused/ shared through Flickr
•
Selected voices (dominant
narratives?) archived
Reservoir – Walton on Thames –
1976 (Daily Mail, 1976)
“I've never seen the river Ebbw dry from the
Ebbw bridge near Newport to just a mile and
half up upstream just outside Bassaleg, the
location of the famous viaduct. I walked it
with the camera. There is one or two parts
where there had always been a deep pool,
they were still there. In a mile plus there were
probably two or three pools but other than that
everything was dry.
And it was quite weird just to be stood in the
middle of the river because I've also seen it
furious with flooding. The power of the water
coming down there is quite frightening.”
Community Member, Ebbw catchment
Talking through a map to elicit memories
• Professional/personal
• Place attachment
• Place-specific anecdotes
Community Member,
Bevills Leam catchment
Initial Findings/Themes
Implications for future decision-making:
initial explorations
Story as
knowledge carrier,
broker or
translator
Complexity in
narrative analysis
Emotion in risk
communication
Perhaps
use emboldere
Science-
Narratives and
counter narratives
narrative
interaction
Unheard voices (cf.
media narratives?)
Spaces for critical
reflection
Visual
narratives/
stimuli
Inter- and intragenerational
communication