Archives: Research Blog

Saturday, September 2, 2023

Summer (and Wildfire Season) Are Not Yet Over

As September ushers in feelings of a new school year, the once casual "how was your summer?" exchange has taken on a sombre tone. Informally speaking, nearly every conversation I've had this past week with friends from across the country has come with a tone of hesitation. "I didn't really feel like I had... More

Thursday, June 8, 2023

The “Canadian” Wildfires of 2023

On June 5, 2023, as over 200 wildfires raged across the country, the federal government through a whole-of-cabinet approach issued a lengthy official update informing Canadians that "current June projections indicate the potential for continued higher-than-normal fire activity across most of the country throughout the 2023 wildland fire season."... More

Thursday, January 26, 2023

On Classroom Experiences

One of the really great things about being awarded funding by the Early Researcher Award program is that youth outreach is built into the granting parameters. Public outreach can’t be an afterthought or something that is tagged on, it has to be part of the work of the project.   For the Disaster Lab,... More

Wednesday, January 25, 2023

The Displacements

Recently, a colleague recommended the new novel by Bruce Holsinger, The Displacements, as material that might be of interest to the Disaster Lab project. Always on the lookout for inspiration, it was fascinating to sit with this novel about an upper class American family that is displaced from their home in Miami when the... More

Saturday, October 22, 2022

Media Coverage of Disasters at Home and Abroad

One of the aspects of the Disaster Lab research that has been most compelling has been the diversity around the term “disaster” itself. The Oxford English Dictionary describes a disaster as “An event or occurrence of a ruinous or very distressing nature; a calamity; esp. a sudden accident or natural catastrophe that causes great... More

Tuesday, September 6, 2022

On Defining Disasters

The Canadian Red Cross (CRC) is widely known for its response to large-scale natural disasters: whether it’s the Fort McMurray wildfires or tornadoes in Ottawa, Red Cross volunteers are comforting and familiar responders. In 2020, however, the CRC only responded to 2 large-scale disasters. In contrast, the institution assisted over 2800... More

Friday, January 28, 2022

“Summary of Disasters”: Introducing Disaster Lab Research on the Canadian Red Cross

What is a disaster? The answer, I always thought, was subjective. A disaster was, well, you know, a disaster. No additional thought required. However, when Laura Madokoro approached me about working on The Disaster Lab, I had never considered the multiple meanings of the term. My primary research involves discourse analysis and an examination of... More

Wednesday, January 5, 2022

Disaster Lab Update

I am writing this post on a morning when up to 50 centimetres of snow are forecast to fall over the city of Ottawa. I am also writing on a morning when the world continues to confront the deadly global Covid-19 pandemic, and where we are processing the news of a deadly tsunami in Tonga as... More

Monday, September 6, 2021

Annual Evacuations Are Already Happening

    Approaching the halfway point in the data that we harvested from the CDD, patterns are emerging. The recurrence of certain types of events and specific communities also means that pieces of a large puzzle are starting to fall into place. In the first seventy-or-so events, the most prominent geography was the Red... More

Monday, August 23, 2021

Disaster Does Not Discriminate

In the summer of 2008, my Aunt drove me from Purcells Cove down Herring Cove Road towards my house, which is just outside Halifax’s city limits. This is the longer way around, but we prefer to drive along the coastline. This is my favourite drive in the world. On one side of the road,... More

Sunday, August 22, 2021

It Is Hard To Feel Hopeful During A Disaster

Something I have thought a lot about while working my way through the Canadian Disaster Database (CDD) over the past few weeks is just how invisible Indigenous peoples are in the data, even though so many of the disasters I am reading about have impacted Indigenous communities the hardest. For example, I just wrote about the... More

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