Hazards, Risks, and Disasters in Society

Dr. John (Jack) F. Shroder received his bachelor’s degree in geology from Union College in 1961; his masters in geology from the University of Massachusetts – Amherst in 1963, and his Ph.D. in geology at the University of Utah in 1967. He has been actively pursuing research on landforms and natural resources in the high mountain environments of the Rocky Mountains, the Afghanistan Hindu Kush, and the Karakoram Himalaya of Pakistan for over a half century. His teaching specialties have been primarily geomorphology, but also physical and historical geology and several other courses at the University of Nebraska at Omaha where he was the founding professor of the Geology major. While there he was instrumental in founding the Center for Afghanistan Studies in 1972, and he was the lead geologist for the Bethsaida Archaeological Project in Israel in the 1990s. He taught geology as an NSF-, USAID, and Fulbright-sponsored professor at Kabul University in 1977-78, as well as a Fulbright award to Peshawar University in 1983-84. He has some 63 written or edited books to his credit and more than 200 professional papers, with emphases on landslides, glaciers, flooding, and mineral resources in Afghanistan. He is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and has received Distinguished Career awards from both the Mountain and the Geomorphology Specialty Groups of the Association of American Geographers. In the recent decade as an Emeritus Professor, he served as a Trustee of the Geological Society of America Foundation where he set up a research scholarship, the Shroder Mass Movement award for masters and doctoral candidates. For the past two decades, he has been the Editor-in-Chief for the Developments in Earth Surface Processes book series of Elsevier Publishing, as well as the 10-volumes of the Treatise on Geomorphology, and the Hazards, Risks, and Disasters book series, both in second editions. Recently, Dr. Shroder was ranked among the top 2 percent of researchers worldwide by the October study conducted by Stanford University.

• 1. Introduction: hazards, risks and disasters in societySection 1: Perspectives on people centred prevention and response to natural hazards2. Against the drive for institutionalization: two decades of disaster volunteers in Japan3. Disastrous disasters: a polemic on capitalism, climate change and humanitarianism4. Disaster risk governance: evolution and influences5. Developing sustainable capacity for disaster risk reduction in Southern Africa in disasters: a case for affirming human dignity6. Reactive to pro-active to reflective disaster responses: introducing critical reflective practices in Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) Section 2: Hazards in social, technological and political-economic change7. Vulnerability, coping and loss and damage from climate events8. Flood shelters in Bangladesh: some issues from the users’ perspective9. Natural disasters and violent conflicts10. Everyday practices and symbolic forms of resistance: adapting to environmental change in coastal Louisiana11. Political responses to emergencies12. Double disaster: disaster through a gender lens Section 3: Cross-disciplinary and non-mainstream futures of dealing with hazards, risks and disasters in society13. Disaster risk reduction in the shadow of the law14. Self-care in Bangladesh: local level resilience and risk reduction 15. Culture: the crucial factor in hazard, risk and disaster recovery – the anthropological perspective16. Risk, resilience and readiness: developing an all-hazards perspective17. Interpretative frameworks of disaster in society close up18. Therapeutic communities in the context of disaster19. View of Abrahamic religions on natural disaster risk reduction20. Conclusion: hazards, risks and disasters in society