Imagine this: you are a first-time residential advisor at a coastal university, and there is a hurricane forecast to make landfall in a few days. You’re worried about the 46 students you serve and the risks the storm could pose to your job, which you rely on to stay in school, and you also have epilepsy. You must decide what to do in the days leading up to the storm, and what to do when the hurricane makes landfall. Should you help evacuate the students, as your job requires, or head home, as your mother wants, to avoid an anxiety-induced seizure?
This scenario was created by MFA fiction student Lyz Duesterhoeft, who worked as part of a team of 11 scientists and students researching factors that “shape public perceptions of extreme weather risk” and how an understanding of those factors can help encourage preparedness. More than 150 U.S. college students participated in the study, which relied on two visualizations of data—"standard weather forecasting graphics versus 3D computer graphics visualization”—and a “narrative about a fictitious storm, role-play, and guided discussion of participants’ concerns,” according to the study “Risk Perception and Preparation for Storm Surge Flooding: A Virtual Workshop with Visualization and Stakeholder Interaction,” published in the July 2023 issue of Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
Duesterhoeft began working with the study team as an undergraduate at Mason for an OSCAR project through the Office of Student Creative Activities and Research as she pursued a degree in Environmental and Sustainability Studies. Two other members of the team have Mason ties as well: Julia Hathaway, PhD Communication ’19, now working in Communications and Outreach for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and Katherine Rowan, BA English ’72, now Emerita Faculty in the Department of Communication.
“There was a surprising range of disciplines in the team,” says Duesterhoeft, “from atmospheric scientists to a psychologist, to communication experts, and even another humanities person like myself, and everyone worked to ensure that all members of the team felt included and integral.”
In this project, Duesterhoeft oversaw the creation of a cast of characters who were placed into a fictitious scenario: a forecast hurricane, expected to cause storm surge flooding on a coastal college campus. The characters in the scenario spanned a range of different experiences and perspectives—from a student afraid to evacuate to his home because of his rough family life to the provost of the university, mostly concerned about a wife and a dog. Workshop participants listened to Duesterhoeft’s narrative, which she composed and read aloud to them, and then discussed each character’s need for wellbeing, autonomy, and justice as well as ways in which the forecast created problems for each. A discussion tool called the ethical matrix—defined in the BAMS article as a “collective decision-making tool that elicits diverse perspectives based on the lived experiences of diverse stakeholders”— was used to guide facilitated discussions of the characters’ dilemmas.
For Duesterhoeft, her inspiration for these complex characters drew largely from her experience as a Mason student.
“My time as a non-traditional undergraduate student at Mason helped inform some of the ways in which I designed the narrative for the study's workshop mostly by having been at Mason for a handful of years at that point and observing other students around me,” says Duesterhoeft. “Mason has a diverse student population, both in traditional and non-traditional students, so I used that as part of the inspiration for some of the characters. I also drew upon the relationships I had with some of the faculty for similar inspiration for some of the non-student characters in the narrative. I also held Mason's campus as a whole in my mind when writing about the physical space the study's fictional campus inhabited.”
While Duesterhoeft’s involvement in this project has been minimized to accommodate her enrollment in Mason’s MFA program, she is still actively working on the study.
“Communicating about severe weather risk in ways that encourage people to take care— of themselves and others—is important and challenging,” said Hathaway, one of the study’s authors. “Multidisciplinary research can yield innovation, especially when teams include individuals with diverse knowledge. Lyz’s narrative was so compelling that workshop participants were quoting lines from it in their feedback on the workshop. This is remarkable because these students were brought together online from across the nation and were working quickly to complete the workshop on deadline. Many did not know one another. Lyz’s narrative, and its characters with their compelling dilemmas gave them believable challenges to analyze. Her story-telling skills are helping us, as social scientists, explore the role of storytelling in a novel way, with real-world promise for building community resilience against the increasing risk of flooding in a warming world.”
July 08, 2024