Archiving and memorializing disasters report of a UN international workshop

This paper reports on the Archiving and Memorializing Disasters International Workshop, a side event organized for the Third World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction, held on March 14-18, 2015 in Sendai, Japan. The public workshop consisted of presentations by experts of disaster archives and a panel discussion. The wide-ranging backgrounds of these experts – anthropology, history and engineering – provided for a pioneering and interdisciplinary approach to the fields of disaster archives and memorialization. The aim of this workshop was to reflect on the potential roles of disaster archives and memorialization, with particular reference to the third priority for action – Investing in disaster risk reduction for resilience – of the new UN-endorsed Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (2015-30). Presentations covered several projects in digital archiving of disasters and research on memorialization processes of disasters. It was concluded that archiving and memorialization can, and should, play a complementary and significant role in disaster risk reduction.