Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/Hofstra University/Disasters and Social Vulnerability (Fall 2025)
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- Course name
- Disasters and Social Vulnerability
- Institution
- Hofstra University
- Instructor
- Hofstra-Ed
- Wikipedia Expert
- Ian (Wiki Ed)
- Subject
- Geography/Global Studies
- Course dates
- 2025-09-02 00:00:00 UTC – 2025-12-21 23:59:59 UTC
- Approximate number of student editors
- 10
- Course Focus: Natural hazards and disasters drastically, yet unevenly, influence human lives, societies, and cultures around the world. Understanding how human wellbeing is related to hazard risk is integral to addressing the inequities that emerge from local-global relationships. Often disaster events are key moments of social and political change; for better or for worse. This course emphasizes a critical approach to understanding hazards and how they contribute to disasters while focusing on key case studies that stress the experiences of locals before, during, and after disasters. Key questions include: How can we understand terms such as nature, disaster, hazard, emergency, risk, and vulnerability? How are geographic concepts such as scale used to address disaster preparedness and response? How do different actors in different cultures and different governments use these terms? To what ends? Who is missing from these conversations?
- Outcomes By the end of the course, students will be able to
- Identify and discuss the nuances of key terms such as natural vs. unnatural hazard, disaster, risk, and emergency.
- Articulate how culture influences disaster risk, preparedness, and response across diverse case studies.
- Use the concepts from the course to analyze an existing hazard risk in the world and think through ways to address that risk that speak to broader power relations and material conditions.
- Develop their individual research and interdisciplinary teamwork skills with a critical approach to addressing the social and political relationships around hazards and the environment.
- Utilize geographic concepts, such as scale and landscape, to critically analyze issues of hazard risk and disaster preparedness to international case studies.
- Critically navigate disaster and emergency disinformation in the media