Research Update:The September 5th, 2025, Hot Topic Open House featured roundtable discussions with partners from TRU’s Institute for Wildfire Science, Resiliency, and Adaptation, FireSmart, United Way, Kamloops Fire Rescue, and the City of Kamloops and yielded crucial insights into community resilience barriers. Participants consistently emphasized that moving from awareness to action in fire mitigation depends upon an enhanced sense of individual and collective agency.
From July 8 to August 30, 2025, the Kamloops Museum and Archives, in collaboration with Thompson Rivers University, presented Hot Topic, an interactive laboratory and exhibition. Visitors were invited to visually map their personal experiences with wildfires using art materials before sharing their maps in interviews with TRU student researchers. These symbolic “maps” offer deep and often unexpected insights into residents’ wildfire perceptions, preparedness, and emotional responses. Displayed alongside historical artifacts from Kamloops Fire Rescue and KMA Archives’ photos, the project blended storytelling with research—highlighting gaps in community knowledge, motivating fire-smart practices, and strengthening communal resilience. Hot Topic turned lived experience into actionable insights for public safety and collective learning.
The project is part of a larger set of mapping initiatives, funded by a research grant from the Wawanesa Wildfire Community Resilience Funding, bringing together multiple community partners, including TRU, the Kamloops Museum and Archives, the Kamloops Art Gallery, the United Way, and the City of Kamloops’ FireSmart™ Program.
The September 5th, 2025, Hot Topic Open House, featuring a roundtable discussion with partners from TRU’s Institute for Wildfire Science, Resiliency, and Adaptation; FireSmart; United Way; Kamloops Fire Rescue; and the City of Kamloops, yielded crucial insights into community resilience barriers. Participants consistently emphasized that moving from awareness to action in fire mitigation depends upon an enhanced sense of individual and collective agency.
Community members reported a pattern of deferring responsibility, denying or ignoring wildfire threats when no immediate danger exists, or when the skies are clear of smoke. The sense of the situation being out of their control leads to inaction, to a kind of social paralysis. Yet programs like FireSmart, with extensive outreach to individuals and neighborhoods, and if aided by cultural mapping techniques, can help communities reimagine and re-envision their collective sense of agency, yielding greater community cohesion and a more coordinated response to wildfire emergencies. As a result, we are beginning to explore how such a change would require thinking of FireSmart as not only or primarily a prescriptive mitigation strategy to be encouraged or enforced, but also as a vehicle for developing community cohesion and action in the face of wildfire threats—for extending support and participation beyond the local to a regional or even national strategy and response capacity.
The research is continuing beyond the exhibition phase, with the Research Group, in collaboration with the City of Kamloops, conducting site visits with neighborhood associations to gather additional cultural maps and personal narratives. Following the community dialogue, all collected maps and interviews will be coded and analyzed to draw out key themes and insights regarding the impact of wildfires and wildfire mitigation on individuals and communities. This systematic approach ensures evidence-based development of replicable methodologies that can be adapted by other communities.
The Wawanesa grant has already strengthened the collaboration between the Community and Cultural Mapping Research Group and TRU’s Institute for Wildfire Science, Resiliency, and Adaptation, creating a unique synergy where scientific understanding of wildfire behavior and risk assessment combines with cultural mapping’s community engagement capabilities to produce holistic preparedness strategies. This partnership positions TRU to lead the kind of community coalition development required to support local and regional development of a community-centered, culturally informed disaster response infrastructure. Ongoing updates and presentations will be documented on the research website, culminating in spring 2026 with a comprehensive exhibition and research symposium that will synthesize and share the project’s findings.
Ongoing updates and presentations will be documented on the research website https://firesmart.trubox.ca, culminating in spring 2026 with a comprehensive exhibition and research symposium that will synthesize and share the project’s findings.
