Workshop: Cultural Competency for Disaster Risk Reduction and Recovery

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This award supports participant costs for a workshop and panel of anthropologists and anthropologically-informed humanitarian aid practitioners at the United Nations Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction in Cancun, Mexico, May 22-26, 2017. After a half-century of research on the human impacts of disasters, anthropologists know that it is necessary to take local cultures into account to reduce post-disaster suffering and speed recovery for disaster-affected communities. However, these well-documented findings are almost never implemented in disaster planning. Therefore, this workshop convenes a group of anthropologists and anthropology-minded practitioners to communicate anthropological disaster science findings directly to international policy makers concerned with disaster response and recovery. At the same time, by investigating the contexts of disaster policy-making itself, the workshop provides the anthropologists an opportunity to learn from the policy makers why local culture is consistently omitted from disaster planning. Convened by the American Anthropological Association, the workshop brings together for the first-time practitioners, researchers, and academics whose work spans the fields of cultural anthropology, risk perception and communication, disaster risk reduction, recovery management, post-disaster needs assessment, reconstruction, and resettlement. Drawing on extensive fieldwork to theorize the persistent issues surrounding the role of culture in disaster policy and practice, workshop participants will share: (a) lessons learned from past disaster cases; (b) knowledge about best practices; and (c) action steps to advance the recognition and inclusion of cultural priorities and values among groups vulnerable to or impacted by disaster. These action steps will include strategies for how to adaptive capacity in contexts of disaster risk reduction and recovery planning. Additionally, the team will conduct a rapid ethnography of the UN Global Platform and the reactions to anthropological theory and application and work collaboratively to conduct a thematic analysis of documents and public statements produced as part of the Global Platform. Outcomes of will include: a roundtable presentation at the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association; publication of a report in Anthropology News and in Natural Hazards Observer that identifies key themes and opportunities that emerge from the workshop; a paper that summarizes key themes of disaster anthropology and the implementation of cultural competency, and which critically assesses their potentiality within other disaster and risk reduction policy arenas; and the development of a policy brief outlining the role of cultural competency in risk reduction and disaster response.