The Effects of the Cold Drop of 29 October in Valencia

Presentation of a research project as part of the "Jeudis de la Maison Suger", a residents' research seminar.

This session will welcome Albert Moncusí-Ferré for a discussion on the methodological, epistemological, and political challenges of conducting emergency ethnography following a major natural disaster that struck the Valencia region (Spain) in October 2024. Drawing on an ongoing fieldwork project, he will offer an analysis of the social, cultural, and institutional impacts of an extreme weather event, and reflect on the role of anthropology in the face of contemporary disasters.

Presentation of the project

"On October 29, 2024, an Isolated High Altitude Depression caused unprecedented flooding, affecting 90 localities in the province of Valencia (Spain), particularly in a densely populated region (L'Horta Sud) with a high concentration of commercial and industrial activity. The disaster claimed 228 lives and destroyed homes, businesses, services and public infrastructure. Several months later, the material and emotional damage persists, a wave of popular protests is calling for institutional and political responsibility, and efforts are multiplying on several fronts to bring the difficult reconstruction process to a successful conclusion. A few weeks after the disaster, colleagues from the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology launched an ethnography of the emergency, which continued with the reconstruction. Interviews, press readings, observation sessions and field diaries were combined with immersion in texts that, since the late 1960s, have consolidated a field of socio-anthropological study of disasters triggered by natural phenomena, among other things. The aim of this seminar is to share ongoing reflections and conclusions from this ethnography of emergencies and reconstruction. Particular emphasis will be placed on the development of ethnographic methodology and the ethical and epistemological implications it implies, as well as the limits it may entail. In addition, the results will be cross-referenced with those of other research projects, in order to contribute to an understanding of the effects of DANA at three levels: socio-structural, socio-cultural and socio-political."

Speaker

Albert Moncusí-Ferré holds a PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology from Rovira i Virgili University (Tarragona, Spain) and is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the University of Valencia (Spain), where he has worked as a professor since 2000. He was Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the same university (2018-2024) and Director of the Masters in Cultural Management (2009-2015). He is a member of the MIDICO (Migrations, diversity and social cohesion) and ANTROPIA (Groupe d'études en Antrhopologie, patrimoine et imaginaires culturels), and a member of the Institut d'Estudis Catalans since 2021. He has also been a visiting researcher at Queens University Belfast (UK, 2003), at the Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Urbaine (CNRS, France, 2011) and COMPAS (Center on Migration Policy and Society, (Oxford, UK, 2015). He has participated in research projects and contracts and has published books, chapters and articles on intercultural conviviality in urban contexts, immigration and skilled migration, as well as cultural heritage and collective memory.