ENV 365 - Disasters

How do we define a “disaster” and how do we know when it is occurring? This team taught course answers these enduring questions from two perspectives: geoscience and critical disaster studies. Geologists examine how geological forces shape the physical environment on earth’s surface and the resulting changes in climate, natural resources, and natural hazards. Social scientists working in the field of critical disaster studies treat “disasters”–and their attendant vocabularies of risk, vulnerability, and resilience-as a social construct that shape how people see and understand environmental change and appropriate responses. By doing so, social scientists examine how the analytical category and language of “disaster” shapes critical decision making about resource distributions, equity, and justice.

Satisfies Environmental Studies major and minor requirement.