Events

SCARP Speaker Series: Community social capital and post-disaster mental health

1:00pm - 2:30pm | WMAX 110

崖系列讲座的学生、教师、校友开云体育台球, planners, and friends near and far are all welcome! About the SCARP Speaker SeriesSCARP speaker series showcases innovative insights and perspectives in planning and any number of other fields, with insights from UBC, Vancouver, and beyond, to talk about challenges we face today and how our fields intersect to tackle them. Each talk has new insights and that intersect with the broad range of interests in community and regional planning, including climate resilience, community development, transportation, activism, community partnerships, and more. Our Speaker Series is a great reminder of how transdisciplinary the planning field truly is and must be.Join us to hear fresh perspectives, participate in rich discussions, and be in community with others passionate about building a livable urban future.About UBC SCARPSCARP stands by a cutting-edge approach to planning, nurturing innovation, challenging conventions, and keeping pace with a rapidly-changing world and the biggest challenges we face today. We believe in knowledge in action and planning in partnership.Each Speaker Series season has a theme and each talk has an expert insight from a new lens. With that, we proudly present our 2023/2024 season:Healthy Cities and CommunitiesCities get under our skin by shaping the hazards and stressors we’re exposed to, the care we have access to, our ability to meet one another’s basic needs, the injustices we experience, and the opportunities and freedoms we have to live together in ways we value. Planning has immense potential to improve our health, not only via transformations of the built environment, but also through community and economic development, the redistribution of power and resources, and investments in our collective capacity to prevent and recover from extreme events. SCARP’s 2023-2024 Healthy Cities and Communities speaker series will bring together leading researchers and practitioners from UBC, Vancouver, and beyond to explore challenges and opportunities for building healthy cities and communities through an interdisciplinary lens. Next up, we gladly introduce our next guest speaker: Dr. Ethan Raker, of UBC's Department of Sociology, presents:Community social capital and post-disaster mental health: the effect of networks on mental health and resource accessibilityCommunity-level social capital (our networks and relationships and what they afford us) has been theorized to shape population health, particularly in times of need. Pairing zip-code-level data on social capital from the Opportunity Atlas with survey data from the Health of Houston Survey, this talk examines how local social capital moderated the mental-health consequences of housing damage after Hurricane Harvey in Houston, Texas. After ensuring no pre-disaster differences in mental health across local levels of social capital, results from models using inverse probability of treatment weights and region fixed effects reveal that local levels of civic engagement and connectedness partially offset the adverse consequences of home damage for psychological distress and poor mental health. Among those with home damage, local social capital correlated positively with the probability of receiving disaster assistance. However, disaster assistance was not associated with mental health outcomes. Dr. Raker will conclude by discussing the broader implications for research on social capital, crises, and mental well-being. Image About Ethan RakerEthan J. Raker is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia working in the areas of social stratification, medical sociology, and environmental sociology. His scholarship brings together various sources of novel data to examine the relationship between climate change and inequalities in human health and community well-being. He holds a Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard University.More about Ethan Raker and his researchMore upcoming talks this season:January 24, 2024: Dr. Ethel Tungohan, York UniversityCare Activism in Comparative Perspective: Migrant Domestic Worker Activism in Manila, Hong Kong and SingaporeFebruary 28, 2024: Dr. Meghan Winters, SFU (MW) andDr. Victoria Barr, LevelUp Planning (VB)Details coming soon...More events to come!Event formatEach event will be open to the public. Light refreshments will be served. Speaker will present for 30 minutes, each followed by 15 minutes of Q&A and then an open session of networking and chat. While these events are exclusively in-person, presentations will be recorded and available online for those who can't attend personally.When you RSVP, let us know what ideas you have for future talks!

Happy Valley Races with the Dean

6:30pm

Nothing beats the excitement of mid-week horse racing under the lights at Happy Valley Racecourse. Join us for this opportunity to connect with Dean James Olson, fellow alumni and Applied Science faculty members over a buffet dinner while watching the races.