Below list the five working groups of the Collaboratory (listed in alphabetical order).
1. Blue Justice
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2. Ethics and Equity in Disaster Science
The intensification of climate-exacerbated hazards has created profound ethical dilemmas for disaster researchers (Barron et al. 2009; Gaillard and Peek 2019; Louis-Charles et al. 2020). While scholarship has long acknowledged the complex landscape of vulnerability within affected communities, the ethics of disaster research remains underdeveloped in practice (Phillips 2014; Barrios 2017). In particular, the urgency of data collection in post-disaster contexts often results in extractive, neo-colonial research relations that prioritize academic outputs over community needs. This paper argues that an ethics of praxis, defined as an ethics embedded in ongoing reflective practice rather than abstract theory and principle, is urgently needed in disaster research. Drawing from critical geography, anthropology, decolonial studies, and feminist epistemologies, we identify how concepts like vulnerability and decolonial research methods reshape what ethical disaster research entails. We highlight contextual examples of praxis, including preemptive, community-led listening and engagement, equitable provision of resources and information, and long-term research-community partnerships. By reorienting disaster research toward praxis, we contend that scholars can move beyond extractive research models and procedural compliance toward long-term sustained accountability, reciprocity, and collaboration that not only humanizes the research process but remembers and recenters the true priority of any disaster research—preparedness.
3. Instituted Approaches
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4. Pedagogy and Justice
Taking inspiration from adriane marie brown’s insight in Emergent Strategies (2017) that ‘small is all’, we asked ourselves ‘how to build the conditions for student brilliance’ in the classroom and beyond. In order to answer in a manner that emulated the type of pedagogical engagement we seek, we chose to create a video (see video link) with the goal of naming the disrupting invisible structures that frame the educational landscape. We organized them into four pillars, while also identifying five elements of learning and pedagogy that we aim to have students leave with and to continue to build upon. We believe that in making the invisible visible and in committing to our ‘five elements of learning and pedagogy’, our students can experience, in all be it small ways, their ‘own brilliance’ and this experience for some, for many, is akin to experiencing justice. In other words, when we are able to actualize our own ‘brilliance’, not as measured by set criteria but as an act of stepping into our own creative and divergent selves, then we are a party to an individual and collective expressions of justice. It is from such experiences that we as educators can move beyond our own, at times limiting roles, and join our students in moving beyond the walls of the academy to share with them the freedom to grow.
5. Time for civic engagement
Modern western society is in a time crunch. Always more to do than there is time for. Even as technology has enabled vast improvements in productivity, we are working more hours. This was not envisioned by economist John Maynard Keynes when he suggested in his 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” that we would (by now) be working 15 hour weeks and have ample time to pursue interests outside of work. We have schedulers and time management tools at the ready, but less time than ever.
Our working group on Time for Civic Engagement examines the paradox. Why are productivity gains not resulting in more free time for most of us? How can we make time to engage in pursuits related to our families, our communities, and our creativity? What structural, social, and policy changes would be needed?