CARISMAND Final Conference “Making a difference Managing differences: Cultural factors in disaster management” will be held at the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence on 18-19 September 2018. The conference will be an opportunity for the CARISMAND project to present the CARISMAND Toolkit made up of Recommendations and a Cultural Map.
“Culture And RISk management in Man-made And Natural Disasters” (CARISMAND) aimed to deal with issues of preparedness, response to disasters and after-crisis recovery which are, inevitably, influenced by the cultural background of individuals and the society they live in. Cultural factors play an important role in determining the way people response to stress, engage in crisis management and accept disaster relief in an emergency. A disaster management which is aware, respects, and makes use of local cultural aspects will be not only more effective but, at the same time, also improve the community’s disaster coping capacities.
CARISMAND provided an in-depth multi-disciplinary review of state-of-the-art knowledge, previous and on-going EU research, integrating the academic expertise from the fields of cultural and social anthropology, cognitive science, sociology, science and technology studies, law, victimology, and natural sciences; and identified cultural factors, exploring existing gaps and opportunities for improvement of disaster policies and procedures. It also developed a comprehensive toolkit for practitioners and disaster managers that could help in raising cultural awareness, promote culturally informed best-practices, and support citizens in exploring their individual and communal cultural strengths in the preparation for, response to, and recovery from disasters.
CARISMAND incorporated the experience of practitioners and disaster managers from different local and organisational backgrounds, and innovative public-private initiatives which are based upon and track citizens’ active role in the distribution of information about disasters. The project placed at its very core the continuous information exchange with and between disaster management stakeholders and citizens, through three Stakeholder Assemblies and six large-scale Citizen Summits in different European locations.
More information about the agenda and any further conference details can be found at: http://www.carismand.eu/final-conference.html
