CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, LONG BEACH Geography 640-01: Seminar in Physical Geography Focus: Hazards F/10 ticket # 7168 W 7-9:45 p.m. in LA4-204

Instructor Information:

Instructor: Dr. C.M. Rodrigue

E-mail: rodrigue@csulb.edu

Instructor's Home Page: http://www.csulb.edu/~rodrigue

Course Home Page: http://www.csulb.edu/~rodrigue/geog640/

Office: LA4-103W

Telephones: (526) 985-4895 or -8432

Mailbox: LA4-106

Office Hours: MWTh 4-4:50 p.m. and by appointment

Course Description:

Prerequisite: consent of instructor.

Physical/environmental issues and problems. May be repeated to a maximum of 6 units with consent of departmental advisor. Letter grade only (A-F).

Topic for Fall 2010: GEOG 640 will emphasize hazards this semester. Hazards is an interdisciplinary concern spanning the physical and biological sciences, engineering, social sciences, humanities, and the planning and emergency management fields. Within geography, the study of hazards includes every branch of physical and human geography and the geospatial techniques, so this seminar should be able to draw on the backgrounds of graduate students across geography (and neighboring disciplines).

Course Concerns:

Earthquakes, tsunami, wildfires, mudslides, floods, droughts, and other disasters continue to kill and injure, sometimes thousands of people at once and other times over an extended period of time. Economic losses have accelerated far beyond inflation, particularly in the developed world. For a variety of global environmental and social reasons, these losses are projected to increase at increasing rates into the foreseeable future. Hazards and the disasters they generate, thus, are inherently engaging subjects, especially for us in Southern California, which Mike Davis once famously charaterized as the "themepark of the Apocalypse."

Course Objectives:

Upon successful completion of this course, graduate students should be able to:

• understand the basic physical dynamics creating various natural hazards, particularly those in Southern California
• understand how human perception and behavior, shaped by culture, political economy, and technology, socially construct the hazardousness of place
• appreciate the value of spatial analysis, mapping, GIS, and remote sensing for risk assessment and real-time management of disasters and their effects
• understand specific ways that technological mitigations can both reduce and exacerbate hazards in different circumstances
• analyze different policy options for mitigating and preparing for disaster and managing emergency situations
• show professional research, analysis, writing, and presentation skills

Reading Materials:

Course Materials:

Readings (articles and web pages) will be assigned throughout the semester. You should be thoroughly familiar with the online-access options of our library for the majority of the readings.

Grading:

Grading is based on seminar participation, an annotated bibliography and crtical review essay on a topic of your choosing, moderating half an evening's seminar on that topic, and peer critiques.

The allocation of grade points is as follows:

20% = participation in seminar discussions
20% = the quality of your work as peer critic, as evaluated by your peers and me
40% = annotated bibliography and accompanying critical review
20% = the half-seminar you moderate

Tentative List of Topics:

• What are hazard, disaster, risk, vulnerability?
• Risk assessment science in inherently uncertain situations
• Risk management policy and "disaster by management"
• GIScience and hazards: Risk assessment and emergency management
• Case studies
  • Natural hazards
    • Earthquakes
    • Fires
    • Climate change and change in hazard magnitude and frequency
    • Student-selected topics
  • Technological and other sociogenic hazards
    • Chemical regulation
    • Terrorism
    • Student-selected topics

Online Logistics:

This is basically a face-to-face seminar discussion course. That said, there are online components.

• I will use e-mail to contact you, individually and through the BeachBoard listserver. I encourage you to work with one another, and this can be facilitated through e-mail or discussions online. It is, therefore, important that you check your e-mail a few times a week and that you check your MyCSULB settings to ensure that mail sent to your CSULB e-mail account will be routed to your favorite off-campus e-mail if you don't wish to check your http://webmail.csulb.edu account regularly. The easiest way to get hold of me is through e-mail. To make sure I know the message is from you (your e-mail logins aren't necessarily easy to interpret!), please put "GEOG 640" at the start of the subject line.
• It is important to check the course homepage (http://www.csulb.edu/~rodrigue/geog640/) regularly to know what the readings for the next week are and to access them and to keep current on deadlines.
• I make use of several BeachBoard functions, such as the e-mail listserver, group discussion functions, and, of course, the grading center, so be sure you are comfortable with that interface. I have provided a link to BeachBoard on our home page.
• Most of the class readings will be original articles in the refereed literature, which are available to you at the library. You could access them in the stacks, but it's much more convenient to access and save them as pdfs in the electronic collection, which is quite easy to use and allows you to "visit" the library from home or one of our labs. To do this, you will need to set up online access and a separate password at http://www.csulb.edu/library/access.html.

Makeup Policy:

Makeups aren't quite meaningful in a graduate seminar of this type. An absence or late completion of an assignment are the nearest analogues. Makeups in these situations are possible in the event of a documented unexpected emergency in a student's life or through prior arrangement with the instructor when the student has advance knowledge of a conflict in schedule, including jury duty or other governmental obligation; death, injury, or serious illness/caretaking responsibilities in the household or family; work-related issues; certain University sanctioned activities; or religious obligations and observances. Makeups under these circumstances will not be penalized with prior notice or documentation. Scheduling a plane flight before the seminar ends is not a compelling conflict in schedule and will be penalized. All other makeup requests, especially those requested after the fact or unsupported by documentation, are subject to denial or serious penalty.

Withdrawal Policy:

It is the student's responsibility to withdraw from classes. Instructors have no obligation to withdraw students who do not attend classes and, because of the bureaucratic difficulty involved, generally choose not to do so. This often catches students new to CSULB by surprise, because some institutions require instructors to drop non-attending students and provide easy and routine mechanisms for them to do so. If you've been "spoiled" by that system, please be aware that it doesn't work that way here.

The deadline to withdraw from a class without a "W" showing up on your transcript is 13 September. You can withdraw until 10 p.m. that night through My CSULB. You can withdraw later, until 19 November, but you'll have a "W" show up on your transcript. From 19 November to 10 December, you can only withdraw for a documented serious and compelling emergency, with the approval of the dean's office, which expects that you are dropping all of your classes because of the seriousness of the emergency. Here are the various deadlines for Fall 2010: http://www.csulb.edu/depts/enrollment/dates/registration_fall.html.

Accessibility:

It is the student's responsibility to let me know at the beginning of the semester if s/he has a disability that may require accommodation. I am personally committed to making my classes accessible and providing accommodations that will help everyone have the same chance at success. I need to know about the issue at the beginning of the semester, though, so that we can work out a mutually reasonable and satisfying accommodation. For more information on campus support services for disabled students, please check out http://www.csulb.edu/divisions/students2/dss.

Related to accessibility, this course will be set up on BeachBoard to enable convenient contact. You will need to have a CSULB e-mail account to use BeachBoard, however. Announcements and messages from me to the class may come by e-mail. If you do not check your CSULB e-mail account regularly but use another account instead, please set your CSULB account so that it will automatically forward messages to your other account. Alternatively, you can use web-mail to check your CSULB e-mail, the way many of you use Hotmail, Yahoo, or G-mail. The web page is https://webmail.csulb.edu. The CSULB Technology Help Desk is available for students, by the way. The URL for the Help Desk is http://helpdesk.csulb.edu. Their telephone number is (562) 985-4959.

Policy on Cheating and Plagiarism:

Work that you hand in is assumed to be original unless your source material is documented appropriately. Using the ideas or words of another person, even a peer, or a web site, as if it were your own, is plagiarism. Simply changing the wording around so that it's not a direct quotation is still plagiarism if you don't give credit to the source of the ideas. If you use the exact wording of your source, enclose the statement in quotation marks or (with longer quotations) indent and single space it and then cite the source and page. When in doubt, cite. Cheating and plagiarism are serious academic offenses: They represent intellectual theft. Students should read the section on cheating and plagiarism in the CSULB catalogue, which can be accessed at http://www.csulb.edu/divisions/aa/catalog/2010-2011/academic_information/cheating_plagiarism.html.

Furthermore, students should be aware that faculty members have a range of academic actions available to them in cases of cheating and plagiarism. As graduate students, you can reasonably be expected to understand what plagiarism and cheating are and their gravity. I will, accordingly, fail a student in the course. I also may then refer the student to Judicial Affairs for possible probation, suspension, or dismissal. When in doubt, please ask me if you think you're getting into a grey area, and I'll try to help you find the right way to handle it. .

General Policies and Regulations:

Students are encouraged to familiarize themselves with the general policies and regulations of the University. These are available in the catalogue and may be accessed here: http://www.csulb.edu/divisions/aa/catalog/2010-2011/general_policies/index.html. .

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Last revision: 08/24/10