he CUIDAR project began as a response to a timely call by the European Commission’s Secure Societies theme within its Horizon 2020 programme for culturally sensitive disaster management plans. So we argued that children and young people should be considered as a cultural group whose perspectives and insights were overlooked in the adultist cultural worlds of emergency planning and disaster risk management (DRM). This was a risky step, perhaps – clearly there are many ‘cultures’ and ‘subcultures’ among ‘children and young people’, just as there are in societies at large. Although perhaps a risky concept to use, culture allowed us to shift the strong ‘naturalist’ narrative that exists around disasters and that is used in the field of DRM. Employing the phrase ‘cultures of disaster resilience...’ allowed us to speak of disasters as comprising troubling entanglements of nature and culture, and of a variety of logics and ways of understanding and making sense of disasters. And ‘cultures of disaster resilience’ also allowed us to denaturalise another important concept, ‘resilience’, and view this in its social context (about which more below).Following a staged approach, CUIDAR researchers began with a Scoping Review of policies, practices and programmes relating to children’s involvement in disaster management in each partner country and of the published literature. The next step, Dialogues with Children, was to explore children’s perceptions and experiences of disaster and then to use what we learned to build a series of practical encounters, or Mutual Learning Exercises (MLEs), between them and decision-makers.