Workshop Overview

   Giving Russell plaque   Dr. Russell Dynes   Governor's Proclamation

 “Taking Stock and Taking Action:

Disaster Research and the Challenges Ahead”

Wednesday April 30th – Saturday May 3rd, 2014

The Disaster Research Center was established in 1963 and now, fifty years later, the DRC celebrated its continued success in research, training, and service to the disaster community. The 50th Anniversary Workshop and Celebration brought together researchers and practitioners from throughout the history of DRC and the larger disaster science, policy, and management field in a unique opportunity to assess the state of the art and to map out future research paths.

The premise of the workshop was that we are living in the midst of a “second environmental crisis,” an unfolding disaster era as compelling, but not as recognized, as the environmental crisis of the 1960s: a complex of seemingly intractable hazards across the intersections of natural, social, and technical systems.  Rapid urbanization, growing populations, global economic adjustments, environmental degradation, decaying infrastructure, climate change, and technological failures of every description create a universal risk milieu whose origins and outcomes are hard to identify and for which ameliorative steps are elusive. This crisis demands new research directives that build new theory, explore new methods, and that foster synthesis and integration of ideas that can be useful in creating more adaptive risk management institutions.

Registered Workshop Participants:

DRC 50 Workshop-Participant-List

Events Included:

Tours of the Disaster Research Center including the E.L. Quarantelli Research Collection, breakout sessions, plenaries, and discussion on emerging research and policy needs, followed by the DRC BBQ Celebration at the Marriott on Saturday May 3rd.

 

About the Disaster Research Center

DRC is located at the University of Delaware in Newark, DE, USA. With fifty years of experience, we are widely recognized as one of the pioneering institutions in the area of disaster research.

We are known for our insights into human behavioral and social scientific issues; for the development of new research methodologies; for our commitment to graduate and undergraduate research training; and for our portfolio of over six-hundred field studies in the aftermath of disasters, catastrophes, and community crises.

For more information about the DRC, our past and present research and our extensive resource collection, please visit our main website: www.udel.edu/DRC.