*Humanitarian Geosciences: trends, movements, and transformations

Elizabeth Reddy

reddy@mines.edu

Jeffrey Schragge

jshragge@mines.edu

Using geosciences for humanitarian projects is a topic of increasing importance across diverse fields. While geo-ethics emerge as a field of scholarship, the American Geophysical Union (AGU) has organized sessions to discuss humanitarian work. The journal Geophysics from the Society of Exploration Geophysicists (SEG) is organizing a special issue to do the same. Participants in these spaces discuss using their expertise as part of participatory hazard mitigation, work to provide access to clean water, efforts to better understand and preserve cultural heritage, and more. Preliminary research leads us to define humanitarian geoscience as efforts to use geoscientific expertise to directly support the wellbeing of communities, often including multidisciplinary expertise and incorporating ways for the stakeholder communities to participate in shaping projects and assessing success. However, our initial research also indicates that the scientists and practitioners who are taking these challenges are not always in conversation. With this project, we seek to assess the state of the field and seek to understand who is taking part and how. We seek undergraduate student researchers to develop an understanding of key words and to perform a literature review on this theme that will contribute to our research and teaching activities and offer an excellent opportunity for student learning. We plan work in a series of three steps: First, the student(s) will design a short survey about key words and projects in the field with support from Drs. Reddy and Shragge. The team will circulate this survey through leaders and organizations who have been involved in humanitarian and related work through AGU, the Thriving Earth Exchange, the journal Geophysics, and other key sites of activity as suggested by colleagues, collaborators, and survey participants. Second, the student(s) will analyze findings and report them. These findings will help the team generate key search terms and identify key texts. With support from Drs. Reddy and Shragge, the student(s) will collect and categorize these texts to create a literature review which showcases trends, movements, and transformations in the field. Mentored by Drs. Reddy and Shragge, the student(s) will write up findings from this research for presentation at appropriate conferences. It is possible that the student(s) will participate in a publication, as well.

The team, including the student(s), Dr. Reddy, and Dr. Shragge will meet once every other week and other times at needed. The student(s) will have the opportunity to lead survey development, analysis, literature collection, and the development of a lit review, but the student(s) will undertake this activity with substantial guidance and feedback to make sure that research experience can be a creative learning activity.

Grand Challenge: Provide access to clean water

https://geophysics.mines.edu/humanitarian_geophysics/ https://seg.org/About-SEG/Geoscientists-Without-Borders https://thrivingearthexchange.org/ https://www.geoethics.org/definition

Dr. Elizabeth Reddy; reddy@mines.edu