| Title | All the Years Combine: The Expansion and Contraction of Time and Memory in Disaster Response |
| Publication Type | Book Chapter |
| Authors | Faas, Aj |
| Publisher | CRC Press |
| Abstract | Disaster response is a process that entails neutralizing a bio-physical hazard—often quite rapidly—while mitigating effects sustained by humans, animals, and their property and environment. These are sites in which histories of relationships among communities, institutions, and in environments are thrown into relief, where parties to disaster response draw on memories in acts of narrative construction in discourse with the past. This paper explores how these memories are produced, negotiated, and translated in multiple contexts by contrasting two bundles of stories drawn from studies of disaster-induced resettlements in highland Ecuador and wildfires in the northwestern United States to interpret the production of memory and cultures of response. In Ecuador, I identify ways in which practice informed memory, whereas among wildfire responders, I find memories informing practice. In both instances, people’s thoughts radiate outwards and expand the spatiotemporal scale of emerging response contexts. They draw on existing cultural repertoires and memories that are simultaneously compressed under the weight of time, retelling, and shared cultural meanings that reduce difference and idiosyncrasy in individual experience. During response, memory appears to expand, scanning a range of recollections that bear on these interactions, and expanding people’s referential spheres beyond the present emergency. These memories seem to occupy the interstices between individual experience and the shared interpretive and behavioral repertoires we refer to as culture. This study also points to the ways in which the spatiotemporal expansions and contractions of memory affect practice in neutralizing hazards, mitigating impacts, and resettlement and recovery. |
| URL | https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281348285_All_the_Years_Combine_The_Expansion_and_Contraction_of_Time_and_Memory_in_Disaster_Response |
| Short Title | All the Years Combine |
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