Post-disaster memoryscapes: Communicating disaster risks and climate change after the Leh flash floods in 2010

Abstract

Drastic life events like that of a disaster are not easily forgotten. Various narratives emerge to keep alive the memory of a disaster, its precursors and its consequences in the minds of those who experience it. Therefore, disaster memories become an important source of information and learning, not only for the community but also for policy makers who can work towards identifying the precursors and reducing the consequences of a disaster. Discourses in Indian disaster studies have largely ignored the exploration and importance of memory and memorializing practices in communicating disaster risks and climate change. Ontologically speaking, most research in this area has continued to look at disaster as an external, materialistic and objective reality, which has resulted in the production of a large body of literature focused on different types of ‘assessment’ studies. However, disasters also have an ‘experiential’ reality, the memory of which results in the formation of memoryscapes with strong psychocultural consequences. Therefore, this article turns its attention to the experience of the disaster and uses the tool of ‘communicative memory’ to explore the ‘experiential’ world.