Subject Area: Environmental Humanities

Increases in disasters along with the current and future predicted impacts of climate change has meant that disaster management and disaster risk reduction have emerged as a key project and policy areas. This course, Disasters and Society, provides you with critical perspectives to examine this natural disasters/society interface. The emphasis of the course is focused on natural disasters being better understood as social disasters with natural triggers. Thus, in the course you will develop an understanding how forms of social vulnerability to hazards emerge and shape subsequent disaster impacts. You will also examine how natural disasters are disrupting events that can critically jolt and shape future social, economic and political outcomes in the context of governance and politics. In the first half of the course you will examine different theories and frameworks for understanding disasters. This will provide a critical platform for the second part of the course, where you will focus on different thematic areas of disasters governance and society, using case study disasters from around the world.