Hi all

Below are details of AHRC network I am involved in on landscapes, floods community, remembrance, resilience, performance.

A range of network activity will take place inc 3 workshops (dates not set yet); website, collecting and linking between other works in similar area, publications  etc etc.

If you are interested in knowing more, taking part, suggesting work / papers / art / literature / performance / community action / stories/histories please email me

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Other organisers are   

Professor Lindsey McEwen, University of Gloucestershire (PI)
Dr Iain Robertson, University of Gloucestershire
Professor Mike Wilson, University College Falmouth
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AHRC Researching Environmental Change Networks


Learning to Live with Water: Flood histories, Environmental Change, Remembrance and Resilience


Recent extreme floods (Gloucestershire, 2007; Cumbria, 2009) have brought community resilience to changing flood risk high on research and political agendas. Anecdotal evidence suggests that traditional flood coping strategies have been lost. There have been, however, past extreme floods and considerable historical evidence about flood character, and how communities remembered/ materialised these events, and protected themselves. Floods are remembered in diverse ways: from stories and archives to social networking sites. Taken together, this suggests strong potential for an arts and humanities approach that would work alongside that of the natural/social sciences to deepen our understanding of watery memories and resilience to the wet.

This project imagines a network that seeks to engage with ‘watery’ (wet, floodprone) landscapes and those with episodic incursions of wet onto dry. The perspective will contrast the everyday (continuous, expected) and the extreme (transformational, unexpected), and on the active interaction between academic and ‘watery’ actants.


Sub-aims:
•	To identify new theoretical and conceptual frameworks for exploring wet and episodically flooded landscapes

•	To explore how memories, archives and mnemonic practices surrounding extreme and casual flooding, awareness of flood/watery heritage, local/lay/informal knowledge of 18th-21st century floods have been and are experienced, remembered, materialised, formalised and enhanced in UK lowland/wetland floodplain communities.

•	To research the changing and potential role of different creative practices including flood marking, oral history, creative writing, local archives, websites, local history writing, storytelling/digital storytelling, reminiscence theatre, performance arts, digital archiving, social networking, and photography/film making in materialising informal knowledge about flood histories and environmental change.

•	To apply this research to explore how social learning around extreme floods/flood risk watery sense of place and their histories and impacts might draw on these innovative research perspectives to build informal flood knowledge and flood memory to increase community resilience and develop more sustainable lowland/wetland floodplain communities in the 21st century. The idea here is that the deep, time-rich and embodied practice of coping with water in and on the landscape is one that can be both shared and materialised in the ‘wateryscape’.


Workshop and conference themes

Each research workshop event is designed to combine an interdisciplinary mix of newer and more established scholars and practitioners in the arts and humanities. Key discursants will address the project’s central concerns and possess the necessary expertise and publications to generate interest, debate and interaction amongst our target audiences. The workshops are designed to move from the theoretical and conceptual (formal, academic) through explorations of flood heritage and stories (decreasing formality) to the present, performance and practice (Living Conference). This latter will be performed in a setting that has experienced recent extreme flooding and will bring together previous workshop participants with international scholars.  Stakeholder engagement/ knowledge co-generation will be built into the entire research process.


Workshop 1: Floods and environmental change: conceptual frameworks for watery landscapes and living with floods (lead - Dr Owain Jones, cultural geographer; UWE); location – UWE, Bristol

Workshop 2: Flood heritage: exploring flood archives for understanding the known pathways to resilience (lead – Professor Lindsey McEwen, flood archives; flood hydrologist); location – University of Gloucestershire, Cheltenham

Workshop 3: Flood Stories: Exploring Informal Narratives of Resilience Past and Present (lead – Professor Mike Wilson; storytelling, University College Falmouth); location: University of Glamorgan, Cardiff


Dr Owain Jones 
Senior Research Fellow 
Countryside & Community Research Institute 
http://www.ccri.ac.uk/

Chair of the Royal Geographical Society Research Group on Children, Youth and Families
http://www.gcyf.org.uk/

Associate Editor; Journal of Children’s Geographies
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/14733285.asp

Mobile: 07871 572969

Alternative email: [log in to unmask]




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