Dr Graham Dwyer completed his PhD in 2017, examining how organisations understand and learn from bushfires and how emergency management organisations implement recommendations emanating from public inquiries, as well as the role that sensemaking plays in this. Through this research, Graham highlighted the role of both positive and negative emotions and how they influence the sensemaking process associated with implementing recommendations. A key finding from his thesis showed that we now know enough about bushfire behaviour and how our community and emergency services react, that the money, time, energy and political attention devoted to royal commissions would be better spent planning for the future.
Graham is now lecturing at Swinburne University of Technology’s Centre for Social Impact and is Course Director and Discipline Leader of the Master of Social Impact. He has been published in The Conversation and speaks to the media about learning from disasters.
Graham is currently working on an ARC Discovery Grant project tackling the challenges that coordinated collective action faces in situations of complex crisis.
His thesis is available here.
