Professor Miwa Hirono is hosting a Global Multilingual Virtual Forum “Meridian 180”

Professor Miwa Hirono is hosting an international forum, entitled “Local Knowledge and Community Participation in Disaster Response” on 26 January 2023, 10 am to 1 pm. (JST)

Disasters affect us more frequently and severely than ever before. To save lives and mitigate the adverse impacts of disasters, local knowledge is an indispensable resource and a capacity that should be utilized in any disaster response. Local knowledge connects people within and between communities and offers a basis for trust-building. It contextualizes disasters in relevant historical, cultural or traditional settings, and provides established human relationships useful in addressing disasters. Community participation is essential to identifying and drawing on local knowledge. By bringing together scholars and practitioners of disaster response, this forum first explores the significance and nature of local knowledge in disaster response and discusses how it has been adopted and used in disaster responses, and second, discusses a wide range of methods to identify or revalidate local knowledge, which may live within the experiences and memories of a local community.

Session1: Disaster-affected Communities in the Intersection of Global and Local Knowledge

Session2: Interdisciplinary Methods to Identify Local Knowledge through Community Participation

For more information and registration, please check this link.

This forum will be organized by Buffet Institute of Northwestern University and Ritsumeikan University as a global platform to promote crisis preparedness from interdisciplinary perspectives through multilingual exchange of people in different sectors.

This event will be conducted via online zoom webinar, with simultaneous interpretation in English, Japanese, Chinese Mandarin, Korean, and Indonesian.