Program

Wednesday, April 30th, 2014

6pm-8pm   Pre-workshop event at the Courtyard Marriott
Registration, exhibition, and reception with light fare & cash bar.

Workshop participants with ongoing funded research projects  presented posters on their work. 

Daily Workshop Schedules
Thursday, May 1st & Friday, May 2nd, 2014

DRC 50th Schedule

DRC Celebration Day
Saturday May 3rd, 2014

10am-2pm    Brunch at the Disaster Research Center, Graham Hall
Tours of DRC & guest lecture with Debra Hess Norris, Chair of the University of Delaware’s Art Conservation Department and Professor of Photography Conservation

230pm-4pm    Walking tour of the University Campus with David Ames
Director of the Center for Historic Architecture and Design, University of Delaware

6pm-9pm   DRC’s 50th Anniversary BBQ Cookout!


Workshop Details

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.

While to a large extent appropriate scientific knowledge is available (Hurricanes Katrina or Sandy, destructive as they were, yielded few surprises), other events such as the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami challenged the inventiveness and decisionmaking stamina of a wide spectrum of officials and citizens. Moreover, missed connections over the past half century among knowledge production and effective disaster policy would seem to suggest the need for development of a systematic implementation science—a science aimed at matching research findings to policy needs and possibilities.

For this reason, workshop participants brought expertise in disasters, environmental studies, engineering, policymaking, and Science, Technology, and Society (STS) research—that is, those whose métier is in the analysis of science and technology as forces shaping and shaped by social relations. Risk and disaster specialists have been working in parallel, but our workshop facilitated an integration of basic disaster science research, the perspectives of STS, and those specialists in the burgeoning implementation science.

Our goal in this workshop was to probe existing knowledge in light of this crisis and to suggest how what we know and what we need to know can help the global society confront the ubiquity of hazard. In doing so, we witnessed new combinations of researchers and methods at the workshop—contributing to interdisciplinary creativity in disaster research.

Plenary & Breakout Sessions

The workshop was organized into plenary sessions and breakout sessions. In the plenary sessions, panelists delivered short talks of about 10 minutes meant to spark discussion and a moderator ensured a good flow of conversation and time management. Plenaries focused on broad themes aiming toward integration and synthesis of ideas.

In breakout sessions, a facilitator engaged workshop participants on discussions of particular disasters and their implications for research and further refinement of practice, while other breakouts focused on disaster themes more broadly.