Master's Degree in Emergency Sciences

Read here present state of the proposal for the master's degree

Emergency sciences is a concept that allows and stimulates the liberty of scientific research and creation and the cooperation and dialogue between various disciplines and various epistemologies around the phenomena of emergencies (typical of risk societies) and the emergence of phenomena (typical of societies in change).

The curriculum is made up of a) a common section, b) basic course units of two disciplines chosen by the students, which represent the specific character of each variant available, c) optional course units, and d) a seminar and dissertation within the supervision of a single discipline.

In this second cycle of higher education, both the lecturers and students will benefit from the fact that the combination research/teaching is not only organised and intensified on the basis of the results achieved by each lecturer but is also anchored in the manner that the relationship between the lectures themselves and between the students and the study material is organised.

The master's degree course presented here reflects three obligatory interaction levels among the lectures (namely, they are individually responsible for leading and organising seminars and supervision in the 3rd and 4th semesters, in accordance with the research proposals to be planned with the students; they are responsible to their peers for the coordination of all the pedagogical, scientific, professional and social life related aspects of each master's degree variant, which, in turn, combines two scientific subjects, in a form that is simultaneously competitive and cooperative; and they are critical contributors to the programmes for the subjects in the common section.

The master's degree course obliges all students to trace out the track they will follow in emergency sciences. Initially, they select their two basic disciplines when they choose the variant. In the third semester, from the two seminars supporting the production of their dissertation, both specific to the variant chosen, they opt to expand their knowledge in one of the subjects, which may or may not correspond to their first-degree education.

Emergencies may be economic – e.g. capitalism and the economic growth that it drives, though without the same results at the level of happiness, as the theory of the economics of well-being underlines (see references). They may be socio-ecological – e.g. disasters (see references). They may also be as much urbanity (often confused and reified with modernity) as discourtesies (often stigmatised as abnormal, strange and foreign).

The problems that they raise are technological (instrumental capacity of human knowledge) and problems of sustainability (the ability to harmonise the form of human life and life on Earth). They are problems involving the organisation of time (history and priorities etc), space (town and country planning) and life (conservationism v. Utopia) – that may be addressed scientifically in different ways, depending on the discipline and the interpretation that each person makes of the projection of the disciplinary cognitive heritage towards the future.

The process has the approval of the lecturer-researchers taking part, who are typically responsible, individually, for the programmes of two course units (CUs) involving 24 hours of lectures for 6 ECTS credits in their subject area (an introduction to the subject in the first semester and the study of applications to emergencies in the second) and for a dissertation-support seminar on the subject in the third semester, with a view to co-operating in the broadband scientific training of emergency professionals (firefighters, police, armed forces personnel, social and cultural activity leaders, social volunteers, health and legal professionals, first-aid personnel, missionaries, local, regional and global development agents, security and social security professionals, etc).