MSc International Disaster Management / Course details

This is a mandatory unit for HCRI students taking the MSc in International Disaster Management. Considering the plethora of mythological ‘models’, ‘frameworks’ and ‘cycles’ that infest non-academic takes, one might easily be led to believe that disasters and their governance are issues evacuated from the reality out of which they arise and across which their impacts reverberate. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth and, if assumed, more dangerous. Engaging with literature from Human Geography, Sociology, Anthropology, Economics and International Relations, the course introduces students to the most important literature to explore disasters and their governance. In doing so, it looks to cultivate in students a properly informed understanding of how disasters and their governance are inseparably embedded within the circumstances that shape their occurrence and guide their ramifications across the world. By the end of the module, students will understand the fundamental elements that orient disasters and their governance, including the range of issues that accumulate to shape the courses of action governments take in relation to disaster events, how global economic shifts determine what governments do and do not do, the mechanisms through which people’s conduct amidst disasters is organised, how understandings oof the world are dramatically changing with futures increasingly understood by their indeterminacy and how disasters themselves might instigate much broader societal change.

• Develop students’ understanding of the social, political, economic and cultural processes that overlap to shape disasters and their governance
• Provide students with the opportunity to conduct substantive research into disasters and their governance.
• Afford students the conceptual toolkit required to rigorously analyse disasters and their governance
• To use definitive critical literature concerning disasters to develop new properly informed strategies for governance.

• The course is predominantly delivered through interactive lectures. These lectures are spaces for instructor-led teaching, but students are also expected to participate in discussion and activities as directed
• Online resources will also be used for teaching delivery. This includes delivery of content online in some weeks, and the use of online discussion forums (Blackboard), in which students are expected to actively participate
• Independent reading learning

• Understand the embeddedness of disasters and their governance within intersecting societal, cultural, political and economic forces that collectively constitute 21st century life.
• Identify key theories and research that open up the effects of disasters and their governance to analysis
• Appreciate how and why disasters are often apoliticisised in the theoretical and practical considerations of disaster governance and the barriers this creates to effective disaster management strategies
• Develop a broad understanding of a range of key empirical cases of disaster.

• Critically interrogate the literature related to disaster governance, particularly how theory shapes practice
• Develop a critical understanding of the relationship between politics and disasters, using contemporary and historical case studies
• Compare and contrast different post disaster spaces
• Critically reflect on how and why different narratives of disasters are mainstreamed or marginalised and how this is connected to the wider political economy of place
• Articulate and defend their own positions on the value and importance of linking governance and disaster politics

• Develop an understanding of how social, economic, cultural and political processes underpin and shape disasters and their governance
• Understand how academic work guides practice and where the linkages between critical thinking and practice need to be developed further.
• Demonstrate analytical and debating skills with peers and tutors through tutorials and online discussions and forums
• Show effective use of library resources drawing on relevant academic and grey literature, and seeking out information through the use of virtual sources to underpin learning and gathering information for written work.

• Develop communication skills for a variety of audiences

• Work effectively in a team and engage stakeholders

• Develop, plan and achieve individual research outcomes

• Develop analytical skills and the ability to articulate ideas verbally and in writing

Adam B, Beck U and Van Loon J (2000) The Risk Society and Beyond: Critical Issues for Social Theory, Sage, London. Especially Introduction

Adey P and Anderson B (2011a) Affect and Security: Exercising Emergency in UK Civil Contingencies, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Volume 29, pp1092-1109

Amoore L (2013) The Politics of Possibility: Risk and Security Beyond Probability, Duke University Press, Durham

Anderson B (2010a) Preemption, Precaution, Preparedness: Anticipatory Action and Future Geographies, Progress in Human Geography, Volume 34, pp777-798

Escobar, A., 2018. Designs for the pluriverse: Radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds. Duke University Press

Foucault M (2007) Security, Territory, Population, Lectures at the College De France 1978-79, London, Palgrave Macmillan

Grove, K., 2018. Resilience. Routledge.

O’Grady N (2018) Governing Future Emergencies: Lived Relations to Risk in the UK Fire and Rescue Service, Palgrave, London

O’Malley P (2004a) Risk, Uncertainty and Government, Glasshouse, London. (Especially the Introduction)