Paper short abstract:

This paper provides a critical ethnographic exploration of the significance and challenges involved in utilising oral narrative methodologies in contemporary disaster-response and policy-impact research in a UK context.

Paper long abstract:

Although anthropology fully recognises the significance and limitations of personal oral narrative methodologies in the post environmental disaster context, much less attention has been given to examining the complexities involved in the use of oral narratives within the emerging growth of applied projects in climate change adaptation and disaster-mitigation research. Furthermore, as anthropological research in local experiences of disasters has gradually become more policy-driven and impact-based, researchers working within this field have been increasingly engaged in interdisciplinary and inter-institutional research that has placed new demands on data-collection and knowledge transfer processes. With this increasing emphasis on policy-driven research, oral narrative methodologies of local experiences of disasters can be regarded to have become increasingly neglected as a tool for data-collection and analysis. Yet, the production of oral narratives in the post-disaster context retains its value in providing insights about the generation and transmission of local forms of meaning, as well as for communicating local voices. This paper provides a critical ethnographic exploration of the significance and challenges of utilising personal oral narratives of local experiences of extreme weather events in Scotland and England, as part of a broader inter-organisational, cross-sectorial, impact-based environmental crisis mitigation project. Drawing attention to how oral narratives can transcend trajectories of invisible power that operate at the collective level in UK communities, I argue that they can capture insights into personal ways of attributing meaning to extreme weather events and enhance trust in policy-driven research in ways that collective-based public-participatory approaches favoured by UK policy makers cannot.