APG5575 · Inside disasters: Living through response and recovery

Overview

This advanced unit examines disasters through the lens of lived experience in both Global North and Global South contexts, with particular emphasis on the intensifying impacts of climate change. Through international case studies, you will analyse how climate‑driven hazards intersect with social inequality, governance arrangements, economic conditions, identity and other factors that shape disaster experiences and outcomes. The unit centres on how people navigate disasters across different phases of disaster risk management—particularly response and recovery—within an era of increasing climate volatility. You will examine how individuals and communities move through a range of disaster management institutions, spaces and processes, including evacuation systems, emergency shelters, insurance and compensation schemes, disaster relief programs, community recovery initiatives and local planning processes aimed at reducing disaster risk. You will also engage with diverse knowledge systems, including Indigenous perspectives, to highlight alternative understandings of risk, resilience and environmental stewardship, and to consider how these perspectives can inform more effective and context‑sensitive disaster responses in which diverse actors exercise agency and participate meaningfully. You will develop practical skills used in disaster response and recovery, including community engagement, trauma‑informed practice and participatory methods. By foregrounding lived experience and climate realities, the unit enables you to critically examine how disaster risk management operates on the ground, and why policies and interventions succeed or fail in different contexts. You will be equipped to design and justify initiatives and programs that are human‑centred, climate‑responsive and attentive to diverse knowledge systems and local contexts.

Offerings

Assessment

The Handbook does not list a final examination among the assessment items. That is not a guarantee there is none.

Within semester assessment: 100%

Assessment details may change. Please refer to the assessment information in Moodle closer to the start of the teaching period.

Requisites

Learning outcomes

1. critically evaluate how disaster response and recovery are experienced across different social, political and economic contexts, and how inequality, governance systems and local conditions shape vulnerability and resilience;
2. analyse and interpret how individuals and communities navigate disaster risk management institutions, spaces and processes across the phases of response and recovery;
3. compare and synthesise disaster risk management approaches and lived experiences across Global North and Global South contexts, critically reflecting on implications for policy and practice;
4. design and justify community-centred approaches to disaster response and recovery that incorporate stakeholder engagement, participatory methods and inclusive governance;
5. communicate arguments effectively in writing and verbally.

Workload

Minimum total expected workload to achieve the learning outcomes for this unit is 144 hours per teaching period typically comprising a mixture of scheduled learning activities and independent study. Scheduled activities may include a combination of teacher directed learning, peer directed learning and online engagement.

Student experience, not official rules. Nothing here changes what the Handbook says.