Academic literature on the topic 'Applied theatre as post-disaster response'

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce applied improvisation (AI) as a tool for training humanitarian aid workers. AI incorporates principles and practices from improvisational theatre into facilitation and training. It is an excellent modality for training aid workers to deal with crisis and disaster scenarios where decision-making and collaboration under pressure are critical. Design/methodology/approach – This paper provides a theoretical base for understanding skills needed in disaster response and provides a case for innovative training that goes beyond the current standard. AI principles, activities and case examples are provided. Interviews with development experts who have participated in AI training are excerpted to reveal the impact and promise of this methodology. Findings – Different from typical training and games, which simulate potential crisis scenarios, AI works with participants in developing the skills necessary for success in disaster situations. The benefit is that workers are better prepared for the unexpected and unknown when they encounter it. Research limitations/implications – The current paper is based on author observation, experience and participant interviews. While AI is consistently transformative and successful, it would benefit from more rigorous and structured research to ground the findings more deeply in larger evidence based processes. Practical implications – The authors offer specific activities, resources for many others and practical application of this modality for training purposes. Social implications – Its application has tremendous benefits in training for specific skills, in creating greater cohesion and satisfaction in work units and breaking down culture and language barriers. Originality/value – This work is original in introducing these training methods to humanitarian aid contexts in general, and disaster preparedness and response in particular.

ABSTRACT IMPACT: Working alongside news staff as community partners is feasible for community engagement to co-create a post-hurricane health assessment and connect it to our academic health center’s disaster response capacity. OBJECTIVES/GOALS: Successful academic-community partnership in post-disaster response depends on shared understanding of impact. Community newspapers could provide valuable insight into health needs and inform strategic recovery plans. Our objective was to determine methodological feasibility of using newspaper stories to identify post-disaster needs. METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: Community-Based Participatory Research principles were applied to engage newspaper staff and conduct qualitative analysis of stories published in the weekly Port Aransas South Jetty newspaper, serving this small rural coastal community. Using directed content analysis, the team derived and validated constructs from Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and Phases of Disaster models to create a codebook. Scientists and newspaper staff examined the codebook for congruency regarding interpretation and themes. With copyright permission to access online newspaper files, NVivo software was used to search for Hurricane Harvey-related terms (e.g., ‘Harvey, tropical storm, flood, damage, volunteer’). Stories from 3 days post-Harvey to 6 months post-Harvey were examined and again at anniversary date. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: The weekly South Jetty newspaper was published continuously from August 31, 2017, through the date our study ended, February 22, 2018. Analysis showed themes of the storm and community response to disaster at multiple levels. Harvey caused catastrophic flooding, destruction, on par with 2005 Hurricane Katrina as the costliest storm on record. In Port Aransas, 130 mph winds and a 12-foot storm surge damaged 90% of the buildings. Stories reflected Phases of Response: Pre-disaster, Impact, Heroic, Honeymoon, Disillusionment, and initial phases of Reconstruction and Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Story: ‘It’s not just the physical part of Port Aransas that was hurt by the hurricane. Harvey also wounded the town’s collective psyche. We’ve wept for our losses, then counted our blessings, then wept for our losses again.’ DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE OF FINDINGS: Newspapers were a rich source of post-disaster data. Text and pictures were poignant. Thematic analysis identified stages of recovery. Working alongside news staff as community partners is feasible for community engagement to co-create a post-hurricane health assessment and connect it to our academic health center’s disaster response capacity.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to understand the crisis communication strategies used by the Caribbean medical tourism industry in the 2017 hurricane season, and also evaluate the quality of the disaster communication messages delivered via digital mediums. Design/methodology/approach This study includes a comprehensive, qualitative content analysis of 149 risk and crisis messages from 51 healthcare organizations distributed through digital media. The medical tourism providers (MTPs) include hospitals, medical tourism facilitators, practitioners/private physicians, specialty clinics, and dental and cosmetic providers. Findings Nearly half of the MTPs included in the data set delivered no post-disaster information to external audiences. The most prominent post-disaster message strategy utilized was conveying operational messages. Furthermore, an unexpected finding was the sheer magnitude of unrelated health-oriented and promotional destination marketing content disseminated before, during and after these events. Research limitations/implications This analysis excludes internal organizational channels of communication which may have been used to communicate risk and crisis messages during these events (i.e. employee e-mails, announcements made through intercom systems, etc.). Our analysis does not include content disseminated through medical tourism forums (i.e. Realself.com, Health Traveler’s Forum, FlyerTalk Forum). Practical implications Small-scale MTPs can improve on any weaknesses through proactive planning and preparation by creating organizational goals to complete basic crisis communication training courses and in doing so support the applied professional development of disaster and crisis responders in the Caribbean region. Second, MTPs exposed to similar risks of natural disasters may use these findings for comparative analysis purposes to support their own organizational planning. Finally, this study supports the continued utility of the National Center for Food Protection & Defense guidelines for analyzing and evaluating organizational performance. Originality/value Currently much of the academic scholarship of applied disaster communication narrowly focuses on the response strategies of one organization, or analyzes one social media platform at a time (i.e. Twitter). A strength of this analysis is the inclusion of an organizational sector (i.e. Caribbean medical tourism providers) and the range of platforms from which the content was captured (e.g. websites, org. blogs and social media networks).

SynopsisPost-traumatic stress disorder was first recognized as a diagnostic category embracing reactions in response to overwhelming environmental stress ‘outside the range of usual human experience’ in DSM-III (APA, 1980). Such abnormal stressors are by no means a product of the twentieth century but have featured, sporadically, in all societies from the earliest civilizations. Longitudinal investigations of traumatic stress have rarely gone further back than the nineteenth century, and have been concerned, almost exclusively, with adverse effects following railway accidents and military combat. The present study, utilizing a mid-eighteenth century medical source, presents an analysis of the impact of a natural disaster on members of a peasant family trapped in an avalanche in the Italian Alps in 1755.

Purpose – Bantul in Central Java was the most severely damaged area by a devastating earthquake in May 2006. Even after being victims themselves, nurses and midwives at public health centers worked devotedly. The purpose of this paper is to identify the nurses’ and midwives’ perceptions and understanding of their roles, as well as the needs of training in disaster preparedness and management. Design/methodology/approach – Focus group discussions and questionnaire survey were conducted with 11 nurses and 11 midwives of public health centers in Bantul. Content analysis was applied to analyze transcripts of the focus group discussions and the responses to questionnaire. Findings – Health care for survivors and community were provided by highly committed health professionals supported in strong community resilience. Donors driven relief programs tended to be unorganized and insensitive for local health providers. Besides, organized disaster management trainings are strongly needed to develop disaster nursing and preparedness. Research limitations/implications – Embedded problems of local health system and current nursing practice were highlighted. Originality/value – Focus group discussions provided vital information that can and must be used to improve disaster response capabilities. Moreover, it was equally it is crucial to examine carefully what unfolded during post-disaster intervention.

As today’s catastrophic Covid-19 pandemic exacerbates ongoing crises, including systemic racism, rising ethno-nationalism, and fossil-fuelled climate change, the neoliberal world that we inhabit is becoming increasingly hostile, particularly for the most vulnerable. Even in the United States, as armed white-supremacist, pro-Trump forces face off against protesters seeking justice for African Americans, the hostility is increasingly palpable, and often frightening. Yet as millions of Black Lives Matter protesters demonstrated after the brutal police killing of George Floyd, the current, intersecting crises – worsened by Trump’s criminalization of anti-racism protesters and his dismissal of science – demand a serious, engaged, response from activists as well as artists. The title of this article is meant to evoke not only the state of the unusually cruel moment through which we are living, but also the very different approaches to performance of both Brecht and Artaud, whose ideas, along with those of others – including Benjamin, Butler, Latour, Mbembe, and Césaire – inform the radical, open-ended, post-pandemic theatre practice proposed in this essay. A critically acclaimed dramatist as well as Professor of English and Playwriting at California State University, Northridge, Mitchell’s published volumes of plays include Disaster Capitalism; or Money Can’t Buy You Love: Three Plays; Brecht in L.A.; and Ventriloquist: Two Plays and Ventriloquial Miscellany. He is the editor of Experimental O’Neill, and is currently at work on a series of post-pandemic plays.

Abstract How does Shakespeare’s ambivalent character Shylock affect British theatre artists of Jewish heritage today? Since the 1970s, stage adaptations of The Merchant by British Jewish directors and actors have struggled to glean an interpretation that would make The Merchant relevant or palatable for a post-Shoah generation. This article has a double focus: we discuss the difference between the adaptations of the older generation – Arnold Wesker’s character rewriting in The Merchant (1976) and Charles Marowitz’s deconstruction in Variations on the Merchant of Venice (1977) – and the contemporary revision in Julia Pascal’s 2008 The Shylock Play. Secondly, we focus on the reaction of contemporary Jewish theatre artists in Britain to the centrality of Shylock as the canonical figure of the Jew in Britain. We asked a number of contemporary British Jewish theatre artists – from Tom Stoppard to Samantha Ellis – about their personal relationship to Shylock and we present a digest of their responses.

After the occurrence of significant natural disaster, the resulting damaged roads interrupt the rapid emergency response for disaster, and therefore, the disaster relief department is desperate for the destruction condition of roads in the devastated region, which can help make relief decisions and deploy rescue actions. In view of the practical needs of the disaster relief department and the objective fact that at present there is not any special, high automatic damage detection system of roads, we develop Road Damage Detection and Evaluation System (RODDES). Using the basic road data in GIS (Geographical information system) as the prior knowledge, the system extracts the pre-disaster and post-disaster roads from post-disaster remotely sensed imageries, and then detects the damaged regions and evaluates the destruction condition. This paper emphasizes the overall design of the system and the submodule design and their functions. The system is applied in detecting and evaluating the damaged roads in Wenchuan County, China and the experiment results show that nearly all producer’s and user’s accuracies of the road extractions and damage detections are above 75%, and it accurately evaluates the destruction condition of roads.

Flood disaster is one of predominant disaster event in Indonesia. The frequency and intensity of this disaster tend to increase from year to year as well as the losses caused thereby. To reduce the risks and losses due to flood disasters, innovation in disaster mitigation is needed. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are technological innovations that have been widely applied in various fields of life and can also be used to improve flood disaster mitigation. A literature study conducted in this research shows that the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning has proven to be able, and succeed to fastly and accurately perform flood prediction, flood risk mapping, flood emergency response and, flood damage mapping. ANNs, SVM, SVR, ANFIS, WNN and DTs are popular methods used for flood mitigation in the pre-disaster phase and it is recommended to use a combination or hybrid of these methods. During the flood disaster response phase, the application of artificial intelligence and machine learning are still not much has been done and need to be developed. Examples of the application are the use of big data from social media Twitter and machine learning both supervised learning with Random Forest and unsupervised learning with CNN which have shown good results and have a good prospect to be applied. For the use of artificial intelligence in post-disaster flood phase, are still also rare, because it requires actual data from the field. However, in the future, it will become a promising program for the assessment and application of artificial intelligence in the flood disaster mitigation.

In this dissertation, I foreground local elders’ epistemology and ontology embedded in sea rituals and traditional fishing methods in a typhoon-battered community in the Philippines. I do this through the practice of applied theatre to explore agency, relationality, and creativity in the aftermath of a disaster. By locating this dissertation within the intercultural, interdisciplinary, and intersectional applied theatre, I mobilize local disaster narratives by using auto-ethnography, Practice-as-Research, and Participatory Action Research towards the co-creation of local/transnational community-based-theatre performances. These applied theatre performances underscore the solidarity and collective creativity of community members, elders, local government officials, local artists in the Philippines and diasporic Filipinos in Canada. The dissertation engages in personal narrative inquiry, reflective memoir, oral stories, ritual performances, collective creations, archives, and in reclaimed objects to address the existing colonial mode of theorizing theatre and organized post-disaster recovery programs in a local island community decimated by Super Typhoon Yolanda (international name: Haiyan). Cognizant of the complex networks of post-disaster reconstruction, recovery, and planning in local and international spheres of development work, I formulate an applied theatre performance method as a post-disaster mitigative approach stemming from the specter of Super Typhoon Yolanda and other disastrous events wrought by climate crises. This collective and emancipative method emerges from an affective, hybrid, and cross-cultural mode of inquiry to tackle climate change and bring Indigenous ways of knowing into the center of the climate change conversation. I use this method in co-creating performances on local climate crises that critically examines coloniality and cultural misappropriation in an intercultural milieu. I discuss Indigenous ecological epistemology against the backdrop of climate change processes through autoethnographic inquiry and multi-narrative discourse on agentic, performative, and collective performance creations. I argue that Indigenizing the performance method mobilizes a decolonial theatre that broadens, equalizes, and diversifies the climate change dialogue. Informed by the vernacular concepts of affective and intersubjective criticality (Abat), relational collaboration (Pakiki-pagpulso, Pakiki-pagkapwa, Pagmamalasakit), and shared improvisation (Pintigan), this performance method deploys emancipative subjectivities and considers possible futures. By using applied theatre as a practice of post-disaster recovery, I channel its artistic practice and tools in engaging the local and transnational communities in collective acts of re-centering marginalized narratives and peripheralized bodies of knowledge. Stemming from the wounding memories of disasters, traumatic stories of a super typhoon, and political disjuncture, my collaborators and I mobilized communities, deployed diverse voices, and engaged with non-human subjectivities in sites with histories of environmental destruction and colonization both in local and diasporic communities. Driven by principles of decolonial theatre and emancipated dramaturgy, I aim to offer an ethical inquiry and practice of applied theatre that tackles climate crises in sites with a long history of disasters. These performance principles valorize the Indigenization of theatre’s capacity for social, political, and cultural intervention to re-future climate crises. Finally, this dissertation emphasizes the persistence of Indigenous knowledge, social relationality, and local creativity beyond the incursion of modernity and colonialism.
Graduate

Earthquakes are a huge global threat. In thirty-six countries, severe seismic risks threaten populations and their increasingly interdependent systems of transportation, communication, energy, and finance. This book provides an examination of how twelve communities in nine countries responded to destructive earthquakes between 1999 and 2015. And many of the book's lessons can also be applied to other large-scale risks. The book sets the global problem of seismic risk in the framework of complex adaptive systems to explore how the consequences of such events ripple across jurisdictions, communities, and organizations in complex societies, triggering unexpected alliances but also exposing social, economic, and legal gaps. It assesses how the networks of organizations involved in response and recovery adapted and acted collectively after the twelve earthquakes it examines. It describes how advances in information technology enabled some communities to anticipate seismic risk better and to manage response and recovery operations more effectively, decreasing losses. Finally, the book shows why investing substantively in global information infrastructure would create shared awareness of seismic risk and make post-disaster relief more effective and less expensive. The result is a landmark study of how to improve the way we prepare for and respond to earthquakes and other disasters in our ever-more-complex world.

The intention with this study is to examine and develop the discourse of arts in education and applied drama/theatre in relation to democracy, in particular the concept of “post-democracy” (Crouch, 2004, 2016; Mouffe, 2009; Rancière, 1999; Swyngedouw, 2011). Post-democracy is a concept that holds a critical view on current societies, describing conditions of economic, ecological and social crisis including boredom, frustration, oppression, apathy, disillusion and violence. We have identified a few key characteristics and challenges within a post-democratic society, such as “consensus”, “fictionalization” and “paradoxicality”. In this chapter, we are interested to see how such characteristics may influence individual democratic life, and how drama/theatre in education can respond to those key characteristics and influences. We argue that such responses concern the working procedures and production formats, as well as the recognition of the social and political role of arts education. This relation of art and society asks for aesthetic platforms that allow young people to explore felt issues of (post-)democracy on the individual and/or the collective level. It furthermore asks for a social responsibility and an ethics which are autonomous to the critical, artistic participant, ethics perhaps different from the ethical expectations distributed by neoliberal society. This is shown by two cases of performance that also solve the potential relation and political role by blurring art and social activism.

Understanding where, when, and how conditions are changing along the extent of an energy pipeline system, which can be vast, is a challenging task. The challenge can be even greater when natural disasters1 create a condition where access to affected pipelines, qualified personnel, and equipment is limited. To address these challenges, pipeline operators are working directly with experts in satellite technology to develop innovative applications incorporating the use of satellite technology and analytical processes to improve natural disaster monitoring and response. Through recent experiences following Hurricane Harvey in the Gulf Coast region of the United States in August-September 2017 and the wildfires and mudslides in Southern California that occurred in December 2017 to January 2018, space-borne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellite data was shown to be a useful tool for wide-area monitoring. Satellite-based SAR imagery has the unique advantage of penetrating through cloud cover and smoke and is capable of providing an early view of the extent of damage in both conditions. Satellite data and continuous improvements to their derived analytical products have resulted in significant benefits for pipeline operators preparing for and responding to the effects of potentially damaging natural processes, including river scour, erosion, avulsion, mudslides, and other threats to pipeline integrity and public safety. SAR change detection algorithms and processes can provide effective results in identifying areas affected by natural disasters that are not readily available by other means. These methods also provide timely information for allocating and directing resources to the most critical locations in support of post-disaster assessment and analysis. SAR satellite data and Amplitude Change Detection (ACD) algorithms provided the basis for confirming where flooding near pipeline infrastructure was most substantial following Hurricane Harvey. In the case of the Southern Californian forest fires and mudslides in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, recent investigations into ACD and Coherence Change Detection (CCD) algorithms showed promising results, providing a detailed view of damaged areas in near-real time. This paper describes the process of collecting, analyzing, and applying satellite data for assessing the impacts of natural disasters on pipeline infrastructure, and the methods applied, consisting primarily of multiple change detection algorithms, that are used to process the large volume of satellite archive images to extract relevant changes. This paper also describes how these tools and products were practically applied to support decisions by pipeline operators to protect and ensure the integrity and safety of pipelines in the affected areas.