[csaa-forum] CCCS Public Lecture 21st March at 5.30pm. Living With Flooding: Redistributing Environmental Expertise: Prof Sarah Whatmore

Wed Feb 13 09:00:48 CST 2013

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Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies
Public Lecture Invitation

[whatmore-lecture.jpg]<http://cccs.uq.edu.au/whatmore-lecture>Living with Flooding: Redistributing Environmental Expertise

Professor Sarah Whatmore
(University of Oxford)

Thursday 21 March, 5:30 - 6:30pm

Social Sciences and Humanities Library Conference Room,
Level 1, Duhig Building (No. 2),<http://www.library.uq.edu.au/ssah/duhig/ds1.html>
St Lucia Campus (Map<http://www.uq.edu.au/maps/index.html?menu=1&id=69>)

As flood events become more frequent and severe so their toll on communities and livelihoods around the world becomes articulated, not least through the imperatives of a twenty-four hour global news media, as a shared matter of concern. For all the science / policy talk of improving flood risk management, affected communities are unavoidably in the business of learning to live with flooding. In practice, this means learning to live with the scientific uncertainties and policy constraints that characterise flood risk management expertise quite as much as with the hydrological parameters of how much rain falls out of the sky, over what time frame and onto what kind of landscape/topography. In this presentation, Professor Whatmore will argue that these two dimensions of flood risk management  expertise and hydrology  are inextricably linked. This makes the challenges of learning to live with flooding centrally concerned with how effectively communities are able to bring their experience and knowledge to bear on the framing and management of flood risk problems that affect them.

The presentation reports on a collaborative project in the UK that set out to effect just such a 'redistribution' of expertise by means of an experimental research apparatus  the 'competency group' (CG)  inspired by Isabelle Stengers philosophical project of experimental constructivism. It draws on the work of one such group based in Pickering, a town in Ryedale in Yorkshire with long experience of flooding. This group involved social and natural scientists working collaboratively with people affected by flooding over a twelve-month period, to interrogate the science that informs local flood management and intervene in the public controversy to which it had given rise. The paper focuses on the ways in which various artefacts that mediated our collective flood apprenticeship in Ryedale were recharged as publicity devices through which the working practices and knowledge claims of what became the Ryedale Flood Research Group gathered political force in the wake of the group¹s work.will outline the pervasive ABC  Attitudes, Behaviour, Choice  model permeating policy making and program delivery, and introduce new theoretical perspectives that reframe the major sustainability challenges of our time.

Sarah Whatmore<http://www.geog.ox.ac.uk/staff/swhatmore.html> is a Professor of Environment and Public Policy. She is the Head of the School of Geography and Environment at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on relations between people and the material world, particularly the living world, and the spatial habits of thought that inform the ways in which these relations are imagined and practiced in the conduct of science, governance and everyday life.

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