From risk to learning. Cultivating the memory of crises

How do pandemics and floods compare? A priori, one might think that these are two completely different major events. Two major crises that have affected Belgium in recent years, but apart from their topicality and their major disruptive effect on society, what links these two events? This thesis is based on the premise that thinking about the covid-19 pandemic and the July 2021 floods in the Vesdre valley together allows us to formulate questions, in the sense of Isabelle Stengers (2009). We need to move beyond the singularity (Borraz, 2020) of each event to derive elements for comparison. " By singling out the ordeals that our societies are going through, we prevent us from thinking about what unites them, whether it's their root causes or the responses to them " (Borraz, 2020). The comparative approach is important for learning from these events.

Indeed, it is tempting to analyze each event in a singular way, considering it as something out of the ordinary or exceptional. Here, I'm interested in what links these two events. In a socio-anthropological approach, both events are studied over the "long term", the temporal shift is important to follow the reconfigurations induced (or not) by disasters (Revet and Langumier, 2013).What makes a disaster and what are the concrete practices of crisis managers (Oliver-Smith, 1996; Tierney, 2019; Lagadec, 2000, 2003; Bogardi, 2004; Giry, 2023) ; how do these events reconfigure or not the normal and the abnormal (Borraz, 2020; Hagen & Elliott, 2021) ; and finally, how is the memory of these events constructed (or erased) (Revet and Langumier, 2013; Centemeri, 2021).

Thesis by Aline Thiry under the supervision of Sébastien Brunet