At the REPLACE project, we are contributing new knowledge and academic research to heritage studies and disaster risk reduction practices. Links to our project blog and our published academic works can be found below.
Academic publications
The main purpose of this paper is to analyse and discuss the co-creation process we undertook with residents of the town for the making of an immersive documentary Italia Terremotata which explores life before, during and after the earthquake.
This paper aims to bridge this knowledge gap by reviewing the literature on the use of place-centric digital technologies in disaster settings. Understanding how these technologies address the social dimensions of human perception of risk and human responses to the loss of place during disasters is crucial for supporting long-term recovery efforts of communities and place.
Three-sixty video-ethnography is a growing field of research, offering novel insights into the complex interactions between individuals and their environments. Despite its potential, the application of 360-degree video in qualitative research remains underexplored. The study presented here aims to bridge this gap, by discussing an approach to data collection and visual analysis, grounded in a multimodal epistemological framework for in-depth qualitative exploration of place-based interactions.
Disasters disrupt not only physical environments but also socio-cultural identities and sense of place. This study explores the role of Virtual Reality (VR) in post-disaster recovery, focusing on the earthquake-affected towns of Amatrice and Accumoli, Italy. This study contributes to digital heritage research by showing how VR can go beyond documentation, supporting storytelling and story-sharing, memory work, restauration of sense of place, and resilience-building, while calling for further study of its long-term impacts.
This article investigates the evolving methodology of 360-degree video-ethnography, particularly in qualitative inquiries concerning the interconnectedness of individuals and their surroundings. It delineates some unique affordances of 360-degree videos in capturing multimodal elements and interpreting environments within place-centric research frameworks. This work elucidates some methodological and practical complexities of employing 360-degree video-ethnography to investigate community resilience post-natural disasters in Italy.
General Publications
When natural disasters strike, they shatter lives, disrupt routines and loosen the emotional ties people have with the places they call home. For the Italian towns of Amatrice and Accumoli, devastated by a 6.2 earthquake in 2016, the damage extended far beyond bricks and mortar. Streets vanished. Landmarks were reduced to rubble. The past seemed to disappear while the future became very uncertain.
This article is part of a dossier in partnership between SyriaUntold and Orient XXI, exploring the consequences of the devastating earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria in February 2023.
To better understand the grief caused by human-made or natural disasters, we looked at two examples in different parts of the world and very different circumstances: the earthquake at Irpinia in southern Italy in 1980, and the destruction of Homs during the Syrian conflict.
Mettendo a confronto la sensazione della perdita causato dal terremoto dell’Irpinia del 1980 e dalla distruzione della città di Homs dopo un assedio durato anni, i due autori parlano del perché è importante ricostruire le case distrutte dopo il sisma per ritrovare la propria comunità. L’articolo è parte di un dossier sulle conseguenze del terremoto che ha colpito la Siria e la Turchia nel febbraio 2023, frutto della collaborazione tra OrientXXI e UntoldStories.
By using case studies, REPLACE will contextualise disasters and their legacies in the communities that deal directly with and inherit the fallout of earthquakes. This approach will provide us with concrete data to understand the impact disasters have on the feeling of ‘belonging’ somewhere, and how rebuilding is integration maintaining a sense of place.
22 Aug 2023
In 2015, the UN world conference of disaster risk reduction convened to discuss the reconstruction of communities after disasters, contemplating the lessons learnt from previous disasters and subsequent rebuilding experiences. The brief established that simply rebuilding communities to pre disaster standards will recreate the vulnerabilities that existed pre disaster, and expose them to continuing devastation from future disasters.
8 Aug 2023
Lying close to the Eurasian and African plates, Italy is particularly vulnerable to seismic activity and regularly suffers ‘shaking’ events that are sometimes incredibly destructive.
Communities affected by the major earthquakes are often displaced and their homes are sometimes completely destroyed. Dubbed ‘Terremotati’ by Italian press, they live with the impact of earthquakes knowing that they may see another in their lifetime, or the lifetime of their loved ones.
Policy documents and toolkits
Values-Led Design Toolkit
06 Nov 2024
The Values-Led Design Toolkit is a card-based resource designed to support and guide archaeologists and heritage professionals in foregrounding ethical considerations and embedding values in the design process of a diverse array of projects.
The toolkit is composed of:
- Design instructions
- Five decks of design cards – Values, Vision, Concept, Design and Challenge
- Design outputs
- Toolkit Board
The current version of the toolkit is the result of the latest iteration of testing, implementation and redesign carried out within REPLACE. Credits for the original version and following iterations of this work go to the EMOTIVE project team (with key contributions from Laia Pujol, Narcís Parés and collaborators at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra), Francesca Dolcetti, Claire Boardman, Rachel Opitz and Sara Perry.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
