ICS Seminar Series

UPCOMING

Presenter: Fiona Miller

Discussant: Willow Forsyth

Chair: Emily Rytmeister

Date & Time: 11 June | 11:30am - 1:00pm

Room: PS.EA.G.18 Parramatta South Campus

Abstract

Drawing on ongoing research on community experiences of extreme floods, this seminar traces the emerging geographies of loss and repair apparent in the long-tail of recovery following disaster. It is in the context of compounding and intensifying climate disasters that a reconfiguring of relations between communities and formal institutions is occurring; the burden of responsibility to prepare, calculate risk, comprehend warnings, absorb impacts and recover is increasingly falling on climate-affected communities. A weakening (and even a withdrawal) of market-based mechanisms together with increasingly restrictive and complicated forms of government support for disaster affected communities contributes to elusive and uneven patterns of recovery. Yet, beyond the stories of loss that characterise this era of long disaster, this paper considers the multifarious ways in which people engage in repair – of home, of place, and of community. The paper argues that through situated, placebased storytelling, people both make sense of disaster and think beyond loss to enact reparative relations with people and place.

Biography

Fiona Miller is a human geographer in the School of Communication, Society and Culture at Macquarie University and is currently a visiting researcher with ICS. She is an internationally recognised scholar on the social and equity dimensions of environmental change. Her research focuses on four intersecting themes: vulnerability and adaptation to climate change; post-disaster recovery; climate-related loss and displacement; and cultural dimensions of water. Fiona is co-founder of the Shadow Places Network and is currently involved in research concerned with place-based repair in climate-affected communities and community experiences of floods. She recently edited the Handbook on Climate Change Vulnerability, Environments and Communities and was a contributor to the volume Stories of Place.

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