Reframing Disaster Conference 28—29 November, Leeds Reframing Disaster Conference Abstracts Friday 28 November, The Carriageworks, Millennium Square 10.00: Plenary – Reframing Disaster Anthony Carrigan, University of Leeds Anthony Carrigan is Lecturer in Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures at the University of Leeds. He is the author of Postcolonial Tourism: Literature, Culture, and Environment (Routledge, 2011), and editor (with Elizabeth DeLoughrey and Jill Didur) of Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches (Routledge, 2015), and a special issue of Moving Worlds on Catastrophe and Environment (2014). He is a Fellow of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, and an AHRC Early Career Fellow, and is currently writing a book on postcolonial literature and disaster.
[email protected] 10.30: Panel 1 – Disasters in the Field Ilan Kelman, University College London Megabytes of doom: Exploring ‘disaster’ through island photography One of the hardest disaster research messages to convey to the public (as well as to many scientists in the field) is that 'disaster' is not an event. Reams of books and academic papers, along with blogs and newspaper columns, express this point theoretically and empirically while connecting the academic ideas with the evidence. This fundamental tenet rarely engrains itself into the public consciousness, policy, or practice. Given this disconnect, do techniques exist beyond prose and logical argumentation for working with the public to understand 'What is disaster?' This talk uses the presenter's own photography from islands around the world to visualise different elements of 'disaster' being more than an event. The photos illustrate what island residents and visitors observe every day, yet might not realise or accept that they are witnessing the location's disaster.