Susan Cutter, Allan Lavell, Dick Eiser, and Anthony Oliver-Smith discussed their perspectives on disaster risk research and their roles in founding IRDR and leading its 4 Working Groups in a panel moderated by Science Officer Anne Castleton at NEEDS – The First Northern European Conference on Emergency and Disaster Studies convened by the multidisciplinary Changing Disasters project of the University of Copenhagen Dec 9-11th.

Changing Disasters is an interdisciplinary research project drawn from faculties of law, theology, economics, anthropology, disaster management, and art and culture at the University of Copenhagen. The project investigates modern societies´ interactions with disasters and is financed by COPE, the University of Copenhagen´s 2016 programme for excellent interdisciplinary research. The project is organised in three thematic clusters that cut across the traditional grid of scientific disciplines: (1) Imaginations addresses the social, political, technical, and cultural aspects of interpreting disasters, (2) Interventions investigates the trans-disciplinary and creative aspects of responding to disaster scenarios, and (3) Transformations sets out to cover the trans-disciplinary aspects of the technical, institutional and social transformations in societies, initiated by disasters on a short- as well as a long-term basis.