Senior Research Seminar with Dr Chika Watanabe (University of Manchester)

Pedagogies of Disaster Futures: Play and Habitual Preparedness in Japan and ChileDr Chika Watanabe (University of Manchester)

Devastating ‘natural’ disasters from earthquakes to floods loom large in many societies, many of them ushered forward under the crises of climate change. And yet, despite scholarly observations that we now live in an era of preparedness, disaster risk reduction (DRR) practitioners or ‘preparedness advocates’ around the world lament that most people do not prioritise disaster preparedness in their daily lives. Thus, preparedness advocates are experimenting with various ways to make disaster futures, and accordingly anticipation and preparedness, present in people’s daily lives. Based on multi-sited and patchwork ethnography in Japan and Chile since 2016, this paper presents the preliminary thoughts of a book manuscript, which will examine the playful pedagogies of disaster preparedness—through gamification and otherwise—that have proven to be popular among preparedness advocates. The paper will work through a planned early chapter that outlines how preparedness advocates seek to make preparedness habitual, that is, primarily embedded in people’s everyday routines of domestic life. The analysis will also propose possible methodologies for an anthropology of the future.

 

Please note the venue for this term's seminars is lecture theatre A, in the Arts School (https://map.cam.ac.uk/Lecture+Theatre+A#52.203448,0.119533,17).