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2022 unit information
Unit delivery will be in line with the most current COVIDSafe health guidelines. We continue to tailor learning experiences for each unit to achieve the best possible mix of online and on-campus activities that successfully blend our approaches to learning, working and research. Please check your unit sites for announcements and updates.
Last updated: 4 March 2022
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Students will on average spend 150-hours over the trimester undertaking the teaching, learning and assessment activities for this unit.
1 x 1-hour class per week, 1 x 1-hour seminar per week
1 x 1-hour class per week (recordings provided), 1 x 1-hour online seminar per week
How can we understand and survive a more disastrous world? In the twenty-first century, disasters are becoming more common, more frequent and more dangerous all around the globe. This unit examines catastrophic events in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries to help us better understand disasters, and be more prepared for our future. We begin with the eruption of Krakatoa in the Sunda Strait in 1883, which is still one of the deadliest volcanic eruptions on record. Over the course of the trimester we investigate a series of disasters around the world, including the 1918 influenza pandemic, London's Great Smog of 1952, the Bhopal industrial disaster in India in 1984, Hurricane Katrina in the United States in 2005, and the Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria in 2009. Each disaster offers us a case study in the experiences, impacts, and long-term effects of catastrophic events. They demonstrate the way that disasters can make a society's divisions, inequalities and vulnerabilities both more visible and more pronounced. They also show that disasters can be disruptive in a range of other ways, including by prompting major social, political and cultural change. This unit concludes with an examination of the world's most recent disaster in global and local contexts: the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
Understand global disasters in historical and contemporary contexts.
GLO1: Discipline-specific knowledge and capabilities
GLO8: Global Citizenship
Evaluate the causes, experiences, impacts and long-term effects of global disasters.
GLO4: Critical thinking
Critically analyse understandings of vulnerability, risk and responsibility before, during and after a disaster.
Research and write a Ministerial Brief to provide advice on how catastrophic events in the past can inform current disaster response.
GLO2: Communication
GLO3: Digital literacy
GLO5: Problem Solving
Demonstrate the way that historical knowledge can be used to inform present and future action.
These Unit Learning Outcomes are applicable for all teaching periods throughout the year.
The assessment due weeks provided may change. The Unit Chair will clarify the exact assessment requirements, including the due date, at the start of the teaching period.
Recommended Learning Resources
Disasters are the subject of a large body of scholarly research across a range of fields, including history, anthropology, geography, sociology, and political science. A sample of some of the most relevant scholarship for this unit is listed below.
Atkinson, CL 2013, Toward resilient communities: examining the impacts of local governments in disasters, Routledge, New York.
Bankoff, G 2003, Cultures of disaster: society and natural hazards in the Philippines, RoutledgeCurzon, London.
Bankoff, G 2013, Mapping vulnerability, Routledge. Bogard, W 2019, The Bhopal tragedy: language, logic, and politics in the production of a hazard, Routledge, London.
Cooper, G 2019, Reporting humanitarian disasters in a social media age, Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, New York.
Curato, N 2019, Democracy in a time of misery: from spectacular tragedies to deliberative action, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Davis, DL 2004, When smoke ran like water: tales of environmental deception and the battle against pollution, Basic Books, New York. Dickel, S 2015, After the storm: the cultural politics of Hurricane Katrina, Transcipt, Bielefeld.
Enarson, E & Pease, B (eds) 2016, Men, masculinities and disaster, Routledge, Abingdon.
Fortun, K 2001, Advocacy after Bhopal: environmentalism, disaster, new global orders, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Hartman, C & Squires, GD 2006, There is no such thing as a natural disaster: race, class, and Hurricane Katrina, Routledge, New York.
Hoffman, S & Oliver-Smith, A (eds) 2002, Catastrophe & culture: the anthropology of disaster, School of American Research Press, Santa Fe.
Hyland, A 2011, Kinglake-350, Text Publishing, Melbourne.
Janku, A Schenk, GJ & Mauelshagen, F (eds) 2012, Historical disasters in context: science, religion, and politics, Routledge, New York.
Kelman, I 2012, Disaster diplomacy: how disasters affect peace and conflict, Routledge, Abingdon.
Kenny, R 2013, Gardens of fire: an investigative memoir, UWA Publishing, Perth.
Kierner, CA 2019, Inventing disaster: the culture of calamity from the Jamestown colony to the Johnstown flood, The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill.
Koritz, A & Sanchez, GJ 2009, Civic engagement in the wake of Katrina, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.
Lynteris, C 2020, Human extinction and the pandemic imaginary, Routledge, Abingdon.
Oliver-Smith, A & Hoffman, SM (eds) 2020, The angry earth: disaster in anthropological perspective, Routledge, Abingdon.
Peltonen, H 2013, International responsibility and grave humanitarian crises: collective provision for human security, Routledge, Milton Park.
Phillips, H & Killingray, D (eds) 2003, The Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918-19: new perspectives, Routldge, London.
Raab, N 2017, All shook up: the shifting Soviet response to catastrophes, 1917-1991, McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal.
Samuels, A 2019, After the tsunami: disaster narratives and the remaking of everyday life in Aceh, University of Hawai'i Press, Honolulu.
Stanley, P 2013, Black Saturday at Steels Creek, Scribe, Melbourne.
Tamura, A 2018, Post-Fukushima activism: politics and knowledge in the age of precarity, Routledge, New York.
Walters, LM, Walters, T & Wilkins, L (eds) 2020, Bad tiding???: communication and catastrophe, Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, London.
Watson, SD 2020, International order and the politics of disaster, Routledge, New York.
Winchester, S 2003, Krakatoa: the day the world exploded, 27 August 1883, Penguin, Melbourne.
Yablokov, AV Nesterenko, VB & Nesterenko, AV 2009, Chernobyl: consequences of the catastrophe for people and the environment, Blackwell, Boston.
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