Center News

Two Scholars Awarded Annual Paper Competition Prize

The Natural Hazards Center is excited to announce the winners of our annual Hazards and Disasters Student Paper Competition. Connie Yu and Jonathan Eaton will be recognized for their outstanding scholarship at this year’s Natural Hazards Workshop.

Connie Yu recently graduated with a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Mount Royal University. Her paper, Queering Japan: Ignored and Forgotten, An Analysis on the Tōhoku 2011 Disaster, LGBTQ+ People, and the Japanese Government, was chosen as this year’s undergraduate winner. Her work focuses on how the experience of LGBTQ+ people after Japan’s 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami was overlooked and erased by traditional emergency management. She found that the disaster forced queer survivors to grapple with impossible choices, like outing themselves to access emergency services, separating from same-sex partners in temporary housing, or enduring harassment in gender-segregated facilities. By outlining the unique barriers and hardships of LGBTQ+ people in this case study, Yu’s paper challenges the assumed neutrality of disaster planning and response systems in Japan.

Jonathan Eaton's paper, Disaster Times: Perspectives on Crisis Governance in Vancouver, Canada, considers the commitment to “soft” infrastructure like social programs and community connections for disaster mitigation and preparedness in Vancouver, Canada. Drawing on a year of ethnographic fieldwork amidst the COVID-19 pandemic and a series of climatic disasters that affected the city in 2021, Eaton’s paper contrasts so-called ‘hard’ infrastructural investments, such as sea walls and seismic retrofits, with sustained community-building activities and other social interventions for emergency preparedness and mitigation among Vancouver residents and city officials.

The research in this paper was adapted as an excerpt from Eaton’s doctoral dissertation Anticipating Disaster: Uncertainty, Heritage, and Place-Making in Vancouver, Canada.

Both students impressed the judges with their originality, writing quality, and knowledge of the topic. Yu and Eaton will each receive $250, publication on the Natural Hazards Center website, and free registration to the 2025 Natural Hazards Workshop.

The competition was established in 2004 as a way to recognize and promote the next generation of hazards and disaster researchers. Learn more about the competition and read previous winning papers on the competition web page.