Wageningen Disaster Network (WiDeN)
Building on a longstanding tradition of disaster studies at WUR (stretching back to the creation of a Chair in 1996), this cluster brings together scholars from Wageningen University and Research interested in conceptual and applied issues around environmental hazards, disasters, ‘dangerous natures’, events, and socio-technical or industrial catastrophes and collapse. We strive for multi-disciplinarity, from a recognition that ‘natural disasters’ are in fact ‘social disasters’, hence our embeddedness in the Centre for Space, Place and Society (CSPS).
Vision and Scope
Disasters are a major feature of contemporary life, capturing global headlines and with serious impacts on the built environment, agricultural production systems, biodiversity, and socio-economic institutions. From widespread urban flooding to droughts and wildfires, hurricanes to earthquakes and tsunamis, and from dam breaks to pollution catastrophes, the ways in which disasters are conceptualised as well as responded to provoke intense academic interest. While media and government coverage frequently emphasises spectacular natural hazards or ‘unavoidable catastrophes’, disasters are usually slow-onset, building up over time through the forms in which human and industrial settlement and infrastructural extension unfolde, and the ways in which certain populations become more vulnerable than others (e.g. those dependent on unstable livelihoods, the poor, disabled, female home workers). This WIDENs the analysis beyond ‘events’.
Activities
We will act as a Wageningen-wide hub for disaster and risk knowledge internally and externally. We organise lectures or seminars by participant researchers or inspiring visiting speakers. Our co-organised two-day CSPS workshop in 2018, Exploring Urbanization: Resources, Events, and Movements brought in important speakers from across the globe. On 22 May 2023 we held a well-attended kick-off WiDeN lunch after a keynote by Dr Corinna de Guttry from Hamburg University on high winds and disaster cultural resilience.
On 11 December 2023 we plan to co-organise an (online) seminar on the theme of ‘What if’ – unexpected municipal disaster scenarios in the Netherlands and the Dutch Caribbean’ together with UNDRR Caribe. In late January, an inperson event will be held on wildfires co-organised with the Cerides Disaster Centre, European University, Cyprus in the context of the SEMEDFIRE project.
We encourage multidisciplinary student dissertations, bridging environmental and social science, and have already produced exciting theses.
We welcome new (Wageningen and ex-Wageningen) members and their suggestions for new initiatives and activities.
Collaborations within this cluster resulted in a successful double session on Catastrophic Events at the RGS-IBG conference (London, 2019) and a journal special issue in IJDRR around the same theme.
