Leadership within the scope of disaster and emergency management is vital for building community resilience and sustainability (Trainor and Velotti
2013). This section reviews the literature with respect to the development of disaster and emergency management within the tertiary education environment, including the significance of gender, age, and leadership, the three theoretical pillars that ground this article.
2.1 Top-Down and Bottom-Up Disaster and Emergency Management Leadership in the Context of Tertiary Education
Disaster and emergency management leadership has been discussed at both organizational and grassroots levels. At the organizational level, the main focus has been on professional disaster and emergency management organizations, such as the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (Karaca et al.
2013), the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR
2015), and other community-based agencies. This organizational leadership aims to coordinate various resources and improve policy and decision making domestically and internationally. Since disaster-related efforts are designed for local disaster survivors and these survivors are the real beneficiaries of disaster-related endeavors, a nascent field of grassroots leadership that took place throughout a full disaster cycle was investigated (Hou and Wu
2020). The grassroots leadership studied mainly concentrates on empowering and broadening the local residents’ diverse expertise to develop and strengthen resilience capacity at individual, family, and community levels (Arnold
2013).
The current COVID-19 pandemic has increasingly directed attention towards leadership within those institutions/organizations that include a high percentage of vulnerable populations, including schools (Harris and Jones
2020), hospitals (Allameh et al.
2020), and long-term care facilities (Brown
2020). In the context of post-secondary education, leadership usually is administered through a top-down approach, starting with the professional emergency managers, and moving down to the second-tier leaders, that is those who directly engage with students, faculty, and staff. This top-down emergency response strategy helps to prevent the loss of lives and reduce the short- and long-term physical, social, and economic impacts of disasters (for example, property damage, the elimination of educational programs and faculty positions, and the suspension and even the discontinuation of some critical ongoing research processes) (Ahmad
2007; CUNY
2021). Hence, decreasing these negative impacts could lead to the examination of the effectiveness of the organizational top-down disaster and emergency leadership arrangement.
Vulnerable and marginalized populations have been disproportionately affected by extreme events; the grassroots leadership, featured in bottom-up empowerment, highlights the various vulnerabilities of these underpresented groups, including women (UNISDR
2015), children and youth (Forbes-Genade and van Niekerk
2019), the elderly (Wu
2020), immigrants and refugees (Carlton
2015), and Indigenous communities (Mercer et al.
2010). Female university/college students feature a dual demographic-specific vulnerability associated with both gender and age (Holbein and Hillygus
2020). Furthermore, the out-of-province/state and international students are at even more risk of vulnerabilities than their peers due to lack of direct family support and local ties. All these vulnerabilities have, in the past and recently, pointed research toward observing young people as a vulnerable, passive, and dependent group, rather than addressing the diversity within this group, and addressing their strengths and leadership capabilities as well (Tanner and Doberstein
2015; Osofsky et al.
2018).
Although building disaster-specific leadership in the post-secondary education context requires the integration of both top-down and bottom-up strategies, specific research remains inadequate, especially with respect to students. University/college students, who have significantly engaged in post-disaster response, are situated in the life stage of keenly absorbing knowledge, learning skills, and obtaining cumulative experience (Nissen et al.
2021). Building their disaster and emergency-related leadership not only benefits their individual development, but also creates a bottom-up approach that strengthens on-campus communities’ disaster and emergency response capacity. This disaster-driven, student-specific leadership will, ultimately, characterize those who educate the next generation of young leaders to serve broader communities, and in the long run, enhance these communities’ resilience and achieve holistic, sustainable development.
2.2 Female Adolescent and Youth Leadership in Disaster Initiatives
The general public’s leadership associated with emergency response actions has been considered as one type of citizens’ “rights and obligations” (Johannisson and Olaison
2007, p. 72). In general, survivors, take on emergency response interventions, have been described as complementary, narrowing the gaps, and/or addressing the failures of official efforts (Majchrzak et al.
2007). Although the mainstreaming culture of disaster and emergency management leadership has been male-dominated (Wilson
1999), an increasing number of female leaders has been shifting this culture towards a more gender-equal perspective (Drolet et al.
2015). Female political leaders and medical officers world-wide have demonstrated their strong leadership in response to the COVID-19 pandemic (Funk
2020). Cvetkovic et al. (
2018) indicated that women’s traditional and natural caring characteristics enable them, when disaster hits, to take up leadership roles in support of their families’ safety, health, and well-being, and in helping their neighbors and other people affected by the disaster.
Recent studies have been comprehensively exploring young people’s engagement in the full disaster lifecycle of a variety of extreme events, including pandemics, hurricanes, explosions, and shootings (Peek et al.
2016). These studies have examined various vulnerabilities associated with young people, with the aim of strengthening their resilience capacities (Haynes and Tanner
2015) and improving their physical health, mental wellness, and overall well-being (Slone et al.
2013; Höfler
2014). The catastrophic influences of extreme events have motivated the younger generation’s leadership advocacy for environmental and social justice (Marris
2019). It is vital to design empirical approaches and collaborative networks to navigate different resources, and develop evidence-based strategies that motivate the younger generation’s leadership behaviors. This would not only help prepare the younger generation themselves, but also their families, communities, and societies for prospective extreme events (Ronan and Johnston
2005; UNICEF
2013).
The study of adolescent and youth leadership manifested in various disaster-related efforts has been identified through two major approaches: (1) by examining how youth leadership is developed through community participation and related training programs (Selby et al.
2020); and (2) by examining how extreme events give incentive to these groups to take on leadership (Nissen et al.
2021). Most existing endeavors follow the first path, by engaging young people in global agendas and local initiatives of climate change adaptation and disaster reduction, with the aim of creating effects, starting at the individual level, which then ripple through family, community, and eventually the le of society (Kerr et al.
2018). For example, when adolescents and youth were engaged in post-hurricane Katrina efforts in Louisiana, it enhanced their resilience-based leadership and advanced their “perceived ability to achieve goals fostering post-disaster resilience” (Osofsky et al.
2018, p.11). Gender-specific leadership programs have also been investigated. The South African Girls in Risk Reduction Leadership program concentrated on integrating adolescent girls into community-based decision-making processes, building their leadership in disaster risk reduction (Forbes-Genade and van Niekerk
2019). This second stream that relates to how extreme events stimulate young people to take on leadership has not gained enough attention.
University/college students’ leadership in disaster settings has been briefly discussed. Carlton and Mills (
2017) discovered that, after the Canterbury Earthquakes in New Zealand (2010−2011), the non-hierarchical organizational structure of community-based, non-profit disaster response agencies stimulated the leadership of their members, namely university student volunteers, to utilize their strengths and judgement in providing timely emergency assistance. However, most case studies relating to university/college students’ leadership have not elaborated on the influence of the gender factor. In recent years, university/college campus-based pre-disaster preparedness has been drawing the interest of scholars (Tkachuck
2016). Tanner and Doberstein (
2015) discovered that students from the University of Waterloo (Canada) were not equipped with the independent capacity to cope with the first 72 hours of extreme events, raising the awareness of the need to improve the university’s administrative support. Since most university students were still treated as passive victims rather than empowered stakeholders, their potential leadership was largely ignored.
The lack of the identification of gender-specific and disaster-driven leadership among university/college students in emergency evictions presents a significant gap in hazards and disaster research and practice. Research on the COVID-19-triggered, on-campus evictions provides a valuable opportunity to address this research deficit. In focusing on out-of-province/state and international university/college students from Canada and the United States, this pilot study aimed to develop a more profound understanding of these students’ challenges and solutions during the entire eviction process, in order to provide evidence-based strategies for the universities to improve their emergency response endeavors for potential extreme events. Gender and leadership are the two emerging dimensions from this study that directly contribute to this mission.