Professor Daniel Aldrich Awarded Grant for Disasters and Recovery Dialogue

BOSTON, Massachusetts, Tuesday, April 16, 2019 (Northeastern University Global Experience Office)—– GEO would like to extend our warmest congratulations to Northeastern faculty member and Dialogue of Civilizations leader, Daniel Aldrich!

Professor Aldrich has been selected to receive a grant from the Center for Global Partnership in association with the Japan Foundation which will help to fund his Disasters and Recovery Dialogue to Japan this summer. The funds from this grant come to support grassroots and intellectual exchanges between the US and Japan and will help reduce the overall cost of the Dialogue for participating students.

For students, this funding will help to make the program more accessible for a wider number of students by providing some financial relief. In an email interview, Aldrich noted “all of the money is going to reduce student fees for our trip,” something which can be a barrier to access for some students.

“The Japan Foundation has sought to expose more North Americans to Japanese culture,” said Aldrich, “they indicated that our Dialogue of Civilizations [program] was a way to bring more students into contact with residents, NGOs, and decision makers in Japan.”

Disasters and Recovery aims to educate college students based in North America the ways in which societies encounter shocks, and then are able to use resources to recover. “[The students] speak with survivors of [various] events in Japanese history,” Aldrich added on how they would be able to expose the students to real-life examples.

These discussions will give students real-life examples of how a society is able to recover through first-hand accounts from survivors, “including [survivors of] the 1945 Hiroshima atomic bombing, the 1995 Kobe earthquake, and the 2011 triple disasters.”

Disasters and Recovery is a month-long experience through a non-traditional “classroom in the field.” Students will travel with a Northeastern University faculty member, in this case Professor Aldrich, as well as graduate student program assistants, to learn about these phenomena through literature as well as real-world experience.

“Through visits to the sites of disasters and crises and conversations with individuals who survived and helped respond to [these crises], the trip provides an experiential learning [opportunity] that is impossible to mimic in the classroom.”