Stories for Interdisciplinary Disaster Research Collaboration

Abstract

What if we used the stories that researchers and practitioners tell each other as tools to advance interdisciplinary disaster research? This article hypothesizes that doing so could foster a new mode of collaborative learning and discovery. People, including researchers, regularly tell stories to relate “what happened” based on their experience, often in ways that augment or contradict existing understandings. These stories provide naturalistic descriptions of context, complexity, and dynamic relationships in ways that formal theories, static data, and interpretations of findings can miss. They often do so memorably and engagingly, which makes them beneficial to researchers across disciplines and allows them to be integrated into their own work. Seeking out, actively inviting, sharing, and discussing these stories in interdisciplinary teams that have developed a strong sense of trust can therefore provide partial escape from discipline-specific reasoning and frameworks that are so often unconsciously employed. To develop and test this possibility, this article argues that the diverse and rapidly growing hazards and disaster field needs to incorporate a basic theoretical understanding of stories, building from folkloristics and other sources. It would also need strategies to draw out and build from stories in suitable interdisciplinary research forums and, in turn, to find ways to incorporate the discussions that emanate from stories into ongoing analyses, interpretations, and future lines of interdisciplinary inquiry.