Start of Year Special Seminar and IRDR Annual Report 2020

For those students joining us it is a leap of faith in these uncertain times that you are choosing now to invest in your futures. But the pandemic is demonstrating society’s growing need for experts trained to analyse and provide solutions to complex issues, manage risks and reduce the impact of disasters, while at the same time understanding their socio-economic, political, environmental, ethical and cultural contexts. This welcome extends to the new PhD students who will be joining us shortly including, Brig Gen Md Main Uddin, Naif Alrehaili and Alexander Thompson. These new members will maintain the IRDR PhD student cohort at about 25. And of course applications are currently open for the BSc Global Humanitarian Studies. Unique in the UK, this multidisciplinary programme aims to educate and train future generations of humanitarian leaders in the theory and practice of humanitarian action. (See Humanitarian section below for further details.)

As our first public event of the academic year and by way of welcome to the new members of the IRDR, we are delighted to invite you all to the Special Seminar on Planning from the Future: Humanitarian Action in a Transformative Age. This will be delivered by Dr Randolph Kent, a world-renowned humanitarian, on Tuesday 13 October from 17:00–18:00 BST. This will be delivered both face-to-face in the Haldane Room at UCL (but limited to 15 current IRDR students who must book through Moodle) and also livestreamed on the IRDR YouTube channel (no booking required). Current students and staff, graduates, alumni and members of the public are all warmly welcome to join us. The seminar will be followed by a Zoom reception for staff and students. We are planning for a full year of events despite the restrictions. This term, following the Special Seminar, we will host a Humanitarian Masterclass Online on Earth Observation and Natural Hazards. We will hold an Alumni-Student Mixer event on November 24 in the evening through Zoom, where we will also present student awards. (Please see the IRDR Events section below.) 

As the IRDR continues to grow we are delighted to welcome Dr Punam Yadav and Dr Jessica Field who were appointed as Lecturers in Humanitarian Studies in June. We also welcome Lucy King who joined in September as Interim Departmental Manager, providing maternity cover. Over the summer, Drs Eija Meriläinen and Laura Peters joined us as research fellows working on community collective action to respond to climate change; Dr Susanne Luedtke as a senior clinical research fellow and Phil Baker as researcher, both in the Centre for digital Public Health in Emergencies; Dr Virginie Le Masson as GRRIPP Global M&E Coordinator and Dr Louisa Acciari as a research fellow and both as co-directors, Centre for Gender and Disaster. Applications have just closed for the Associate Professor position in Humanitarian Science and applications are open for a Social Science Research Fellow in Conflict and Migration (closing 14 October).

2020–21 will be a challenging year for university teaching and learning. The IRDR Guiding Principles in response to the pandemic have been that universities provide an intellectual environment that pushes students beyond their comfort zone, and forces them to engage with new ideas. It is this intellectual mission, delivered through teaching and research, that gives universities their unique purpose. The IRDR will place at its core personalised learning experiences and socialised learning experiences that are accessible both to students at UCL and fully online to students in different time zones. The threat that Covid-19 poses to young adults is small but vulnerable individuals including staff will need to be shielded and the IRDR needs to prepare for sudden shifts in government restrictions and local closures, to flex between in-person and fully online delivery modes. UCL is open – subject to the 25% capacity limit.

The coronavirus crisis has been particularly difficult for the IRDR. Our professional service staff were running at about 50% capacity for much of the time. There were senior academic staff absences. Difficulties have been compounded by parts of the UCL central administration falling over. Exams were delayed and masters project starts pushed back. Most students were granted long extensions for extenuating circumstances, which means that we are still actively teaching, supervising and assessing the 2019–20 cohort while starting to teach the new cohort. Academic and professional staff have worked extraordinarily long hours managing student recruitment, preparing online teaching for this year, setting alternative exam assessments and taking on roles that they would not usually be asked to do. The heroic efforts of IRDR staff, particularly early-career staff, has really been appreciated. And we have had strong support from the MAPS Faculty. We have put in as much teaching support as possible, with summer interns to support transitioning online, online teaching assistants (TAs), expansion of TA module support and appointing two PhD/TAs who will teach two months per year while studying for their PhDs.

We had a very successful year in 2019–20, even if it has been our toughest. This is captured in the IRDR Annual Report. With our close involvement with some of the world’s most vulnerable people, such as the Rohingya refugees, we are only too well aware of the impact of Covid-19 around the world. This year’s Humanitarian Summit and IRDR Annual Conference both reflected this, with the former focusing on the Covid-19 and climate crises as humanitarian crises, and the latter looking at the pandemic from a global perspective. However, so many positive things have happened in this our tenth year. We are now established by UCL Council as UCL’ s newest academic department. We are promoting our new BSc Global Humanitarian Studies programme, to start in 2021, and welcomed the appointment of two lecturers in Humanitarian Studies. The Centre for Gender and Disaster launched its global GRRIPP project. Prof Patty Kostkova won IT Innovator of the Year. Research meetings from the Spring Academy to a workshop on Identities and Education in Crisis successfully transitioned online. It was pleasing to see research not just thriving in the IRDR, but striking out in new directions – even during lockdown. Taster lectures IRDR staff produced over the summer covering a broad range of topics in risk and disaster reduction were a big hit. We responded to the coronavirus crisis with initiatives including the IRDR Covid-19 Laboratory, #MyLockdownJournal, the European-wide perceptions survey, Covid-19 Emergency, Recovery and Improvement, and My Activity Journal App! (download from: play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dphejournal)

We are going to come out the other side of the coronavirus crisis a strengthened department with a mission to develop the IRDR themed around disaster resilience, cascading crises, natural hazards, humanitarian crisis response, health in emergencies, conflict and migration, climate change adaptation, and gender responsive resilience, in order to integrate education, research, innovation and enterprise for the long-term benefit of humanity. If our vision appeals to you, we invite you to join with us.

BSc Global Humanitarian Studies
In the Global Humanitarian Studies BSc, you will learn about the political, historical and development context, but you will also gain an understanding of the emergence, impacts and response to humanitarian crises. The critical and analytical research skills you will acquire, grounded in practice, will equip you to anticipate evolving humanitarian threats and manage widening vulnerability and crisis response.

Applications through UCAS now open
Deadline: 15 January 2020
Find out more about the Global Humanitarian Studies BSc

Webinar 
If you missed the Climate Change and Human Migration webinar on 9 October organised by Dr Bayes Ahmed, you can watch it now on our YouTube channel.

Humanitarian Masterclass Online
Through the UCL Extend platform (tbc)
Earth Observation and Natural Hazards.
Open to: Students | Alumni | Staff | Members | Public

• Transforming my M.Sc. Dissertation into a Journal Article
• Imagined ‘Belongingness’ through Culture: Rohingya Journeys of Resilience and Survival in India
• Beirut Explosion: What History Tells Us About Accountability
• Multiple faults across strike versus isolated faults, is there a difference in stress loading?
• Study of Icelandic active faults shows fault bends must be considered throughout fault development and maturity
• The challenges that Covid-19 has brought to the newly elected women leaders in Nepal
• What Could Delay the Activation of an Early Warning System?
• Governance ‘of’ and ‘by’ COVID-19: the Spotlight on Private and Non-State Actors

• Can women benefit from war? A close examination of the lived experiences of women in post-conflict Nepal (Journal of Peace Research) 
• When the Personal is International: Implementation of the Women, Peace, and Security Agenda in Nepal (Journal of Gender, Technology and Development) 
• Unruly Wives in the Household: Toward Feminist Genealogies for Peace Research (Journal of Cooperation and Conflict) (with Minna Lyytikäinen, Annick TR Wibben