Workshop

Frontlines of protection: Thinking and defining protection against disasters in times of environmental disruptions

Date

Thursday 21 March 2024 - Friday 22 March 2024

Address

Wijnhaven & Schouwburgstraat

KIEM workshop programme

What does it mean to protect against disaster in the context of climate change and other cascading environmental crises? Although the question of protection against disasters has long been discussed in the case of humanitarian assistance (Redfield, 2012), current debates on climate change and other intensifying crises call for re-thinking what kind of protection is desirable in times of disasters and how to produce it. Protection can be defined in legal, economic, social, or technical terms, with various implications. How do these definitions interact with one another during disasters? What keeps people, properties, and the environment safe, and how: laws, policies, infrastructures, human interventions, technical systems, insurances? What are the implications of different modalities for states, international organisations, or private actors? And what does ‘safe’ even mean? Keeping safe involves a variety of expectations, interventions, and expertise, which all have different definitions, standards, concepts, and views regarding protection. Can different understandings of protection clash with one another? How do communities define protection and interact with the infrastructures of protection? 

Format of the discussions:  

• Keynotes: 25 minutes presentation, 20 minutes discussion 
• Panels: 5 minutes introduction, 10 minutes presentation per participant, 10 minutes discussion per participant 

Programme Thursday 21 March

Location: Wijnhaven building, Turftmarkt 99, Den Haag, Room 3.12A

13:00 Welcome lunch & coffee 

13.30 – 14:45  
Panel 1: Law and disaster protection 
Chair: Daniëlla Dam 

• Michael Faure (Maastricht University). Compensation for victims of climate change disasters.  
• Alan Gül (Leiden University). International Law and the Evacuation of Nationals Abroad in Cases of Natural Disasters.  
• Linda D'Amico (Winona State University).* Reserva Los Cedros and the Rights of Nature on Trial: Science and Laws Safeguarding Fragile Cloud Forests in NW Ecuador 

15:00 – 17:20  
Panel 2: Protection from below: individuals and communities’ perspectives on protection 
Chair: Lydie Cabane 

Keynote: Chika Watanabe (University of Manchester). Improvisation, Play, and a Logic of Fragility in Disaster Preparedness Education 

• Devin Flaherty.* (University of Texas at San Antonio) 'Be Your Own First Responder': Divergent orientations to hurricane protection on the American periphery. 
• Elizabeth MacAfee (Radboud University). Assembling protection at the margins: a case study of a chronically flooded urban kampung in Manado, Indonesia 
• Annaclaudia Martini (University of Bologna).* The right to be vulnerable: negotiating protection from future disasters in post-2011 Tohoku, Japan. 

• Alyne Delaney (Tohoku University). 'Communities' in Coastal Danger Zones: Thinking about Protection Holistically. 

17.30 – 18.15 
Roundtable: Creative approaches to thinking disaster protection.  
Chair: Andrew Littlejohn 

• Malka Older (ASU). Reimagining Disaster Protection at the Junction of Humanitarian Response and Emergency Management.  

• Andy Lawrence (University of Manchester). Fear of Drowning: faith, anxiety and protection during times of rising sea level in North Holland 

*: indicates speaker attending online  

Programme Friday 22 March

Location: A2.03 Schouwburgstraat 2, Den Haag 

09.00– 10.30 
Panel 3: Operationalising protection: Institutions and actors of protection  
Chair: Valerie de Koeijer  

Keynote: Paula Jarzabkowski* (City University of London, and University of Queensland). Disaster Insurance Reimagined: Protection in a Time of Increasing Risk.  

• Tanja Hendriks (KU Leuven). Dealing with Dilemmas in Disaster Protection: operationalizing the 2023 Disaster Risk Management Bill in Malawi.  
• Ayesha Siddiqi (Cambridge University). Protecting time? Temporality, agency and control in hydraulic infrastructures.  

10.45 – 12.30 
Panel 4: Changing objects and non-objects of protection: defining what and who gets to be protected 
Chair: Andrew Littlejohn 

Keynote: Elliott, Rebecca (LSE). Towards a Sociology of Incumbency in the Face of Climate Change.  

• Eric Kennedy (York University, Canada). Evolving Views of the Aims of ‘Protection' in Wildfire Management. 
• Bram Buscher (Wageningen University). The Great Conservation Tragedy? A critical reflection of (neo)protectionism in relation to the ‘30x30’ global biodiversity framework.  
• Reiko Hasegawa (Sciences Po). Who/What is Protected in Nuclear Disasters?  

12.30 – 13.00 Lunch & coffee 

13.00 – 15:00 
Panel 4: Devices and infrastructures of protection 
Chair: Paul Hudson (LUC) 

• Cassandre Rey-Thibault (Sciences Po). Adapting coastal port areas to climate change: opportunities and constraints of physical protections.  
• Martin Abbott.* (Cornell University) The Social Construction of Disaster Protection in New Orleans: Getting between the flood map on paper and the flood map in practice. 
• Youenn Gourain (LATTS/Gustave Eiffel University/CNRS). Planning the entangled risk zones: a challenge to face and protect against urban disasters.  
• Tania Messell (Graduate Institute).* Infrastructures of Resilience, Disaster Relief and Design Interventions.

*: indicates speaker attending online