William Slocum

I am an Army veteran with a background in logistics and strategic planning. I began the Georgetown Emergency & Disaster Management Masters program in Winter, 2018. My passions are research, making sense of the genesis and status of big (wicked) problems and clear communication. Georgetown's EDM program and library services provided fantastic tools and services that allowed me to apply critical and creative thinking to my research projects. My capstone project was inspired by the United States government's incoherent and politically driven response to the Corona-19 pandemic which ultimately resulted in a national failure to prepare for and respond effectively to the pandemic. My project was also inspired by the observation that across the EDM field, there is resistance to acknowledging that disasters are political. This has resulted in the politics of disaster being understudied in disaster literature and reduced the ability of emergency managers to mitigate against politically-driven disaster preparation, response, recovery and mitigation.