Residents begin to assess the damage after Hurricane Maria hit the island of Dominica in September 2017. (Public domain image by Roosevelt Skerrit on Flickr). 

By Joe Pickett, OCW Publication Director

We noticed that these courses, published in the past month, seem particularly relevant in light of recent events.

11.027 Global City Scope—Disaster Planning and Post-Disaster Rebuilding and Recovery, taught by Cherie Miot Abbanat.

What’s your town’s disaster mitigation plan? Does it even have one? Does it seem like a viable way of handling an emergency, or is it just a report that sits on a shelf?

Analyzing and evaluating one of these plans is one of your assignments when you take this course.

And what course could be more timely? Recent months have seen so many mind-blowing disasters, one after another—hurricanes of phenomenal destructive power, monster wild fires, crushing mud slides, earthquakes, a bomb cyclone.

The course has four modules: Disaster Mitigation, Preparedness and Planning, Disaster Response, Disaster Recovery and Rebuilding.

21A.429J Environmental Conflict, taught by Professor Christine Walley.

Is there a recent  environmental issue that has not generated conflict? Fracking? The regulation of chemicals and toxins? Offshore oil drilling? The status of natural parks and preserves?

This course provides the theoretical frameworks for thinking about such conflicts, and focuses

…on a number of often contentious issues, including: ideas of “nature” and the politics and practices of nature conservation; the links between toxic pollution and health effects; the complexity of human / non-human relations as seen through the lens of multispecies frameworks; and debates over crucial contemporary issues ranging from climate change to natural gas exploration.

17.269 Race, Ethnicity, and American Politics, taught by Professor Ariel White.

The course description sums it up nicely:

What is “race”? How could we possibly measure it, and does it really matter? What does it mean to say that a policy is discriminatory, and how have social scientists and courts tried to measure racial discrimination? What do Americans think about race in the 21st century, and how do these opinions shape their voting and protest behavior?

After taking this course, students will be able to discuss different ways of imagining race and ethnicity, and their historical underpinnings. They will be able to describe and critique the ways in which racial attitudes are theorized and measured, and think about how these different attitudes are expected to shape political behavior…

Teaching a course on such a sensitive subject requires more than a little thoughtfulness. The course site includes some fascinating Instructor Insights, including “Facilitating Talk about Race and Ethnicity” and “Fostering Intuition about Social Science.”

21H.983 Gender, taught by Professors Lerna Ekmekcioglu and Elizabeth A. Wood.

As much as gender is discussed in the popular media, this course explores some challenging questions that you don’t see posed very often, at least not directly:

How does gender work? How is the body itself sexed and gendered in different times and places? How do gender, race and class work in historical context? Does gender influence state formation and the work of the state? What role does gender play in imperialism and in the welfare state? What is the relationship between gender and war? How does the state regulate the body in the modern world? What are some new directions in the study of gender?

17.480 Understanding Military Operations, taught by Professor Owen Cote.

Right now some 300,000 US military personnel, often using highly sophisticated technology, are deployed in over 150 countries around the world. This course offers the chance to assess the thinking behind deployments like these and how they might change in the future.

The course covers a full range of topics, from military doctrine to tactical mobility. As the course description states:

This seminar will break apart selected past, current, and future sea, air, space, and land battlefields into their constituent parts and look at the interaction in each of those warfare areas between existing military doctrine and weapons, sensors, communications, and information processing technologies. It will specifically seek to explore how technological development…is influenced in each warfare area by military doctrine.