Instructor:  Dr. Zak Ratajczak

Instrutor websites: https://zaratajczak.wixsite.com/zak-ratajczak 

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ryNzl6QAAAAJ&hl=en

Office: 218 Bushnell Hall

Meeting time: will depend on doodle poll of class participants

Email: zarata@ksu.edu

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Course Description:

It can feel like we’re being bombarded by calls for more “resilience”:

• Government requires agencies to increase the resilience of banks, towns, forests and watersheds

• We praise businesses and workers for their resilience

• And concerns are growing that many species will not prove to resilient climate change, over-consumption, and pollution

This interest in resilience reflects our often-bewildering times, where technology, social norms, and environmental pressures all seem to be changing at a breakneck pace.

 

But what is resilience—just another buzz word or something we can understand, measure, and operationalize? Researchers and communities have developed a deep but growing understanding of resilience as the ability to cope with disturbances and other changing conditions, without undergoing a fundamental shift in identity and functionality. By the end of this course, you will develop a conceptual understanding of resilience, how to identify when the resilience of a system is more likely to fail, and mechanisms that make some systems more resilient than others. The examples and concepts in this course lean towards environmental science, but include material from economics, engineering, and social science. Students from any departments are encouraged to enroll. We all benefit from having a diverse set of perspectives. If you are interested but hesitant to enroll for any reason, please contact me (Zak Ratajczak; zarata@ksu.edu), chances are that you’re more qualified than you think.

 

Some of the examples we’ll explore are:

• Why are some coral reefs collapsing, while others are not?

• Why have some rangelands become deserts?

• Why does some population declines, from towns to fisheries, fail to reverse themselves?

 

Course format:

This 3-credit class is intended for graduate students of any level. We will meet twice per week for 1.25 hours. You can expect approximately one to two lecture’s worth of material per week, with other class meeting reserved for discussion and group activities. The planned format is in-person.

 

A large research project is the main assignment for this course, but those points will be broken into pieces where you can get feedback at each step. The first step of this project is to pick a study system that interests you, it can be individual place (such as a town or biology population) or a category (such as post-industrial cities, a type of business, or a type of ecosystem). Your task is to determine your system’s resilience to one or more types of external pressure, such as management or climate. You can use data, literature review, or a combination of both methods. Literature-based approaches may focus more on mechanisms that confer or undermine resilience. The format of the final project must follow products you would produce in the real world—either a research report similar to a manuscript for a peer-reviewed journal, a long-form magazine article, or a podcast (I’m open to other formats as well, just ask). This assignment can be done individual or in groups, with the expectation that groups will produce a product that is wider in scope. 

 

We’ll roughly follow this progression:

1. What is resilience at its core—how do we define it and how can we tell when resilience fails?

2. Mechanisms: how do feedbacks and competition make some systems more resilient?

3. Measuring resilience: using case studies and data to quantify resilience**

4. Mechanisms continued: effects of disturbances, diversity, and scale on resilience

5. Understanding resilience in more messy, variable scenarios. Mostly, this is tips on how not to get “tricked” by certain data, graphs, and stats

6. Emerging topics and critiques of resilience 

 

**I appreciate that many students do not have students a quantitative background and/or do not plan to go into a quantitative field. There are many ways of knowing beyond numbers. Therefore, alternative but still challenging alternative assignments will be available in lieu of quantitative assignments as needed.

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