Course Overview

This ten-week seminar introduces participants to a set of freely available online tools that allow researchers to examine crisis-affected areas through satellite imagery, displacement records, population data, and humanitarian maps, without any coding ability, GIS license, or prior technical experience. The seminar is designed for researchers from any discipline, including history, law, journalism, sociology, and human rights, who want to bring visual and spatial evidence into their work in a grounded and honest way.

What makes this kind of work genuinely powerful is the ability to bring different sources together: to read a satellite image of a neighborhood alongside population and demographic data, to explore displacement figures in light of humanitarian records, and to ask what multiple layers of evidence, taken together, reveal about a crisis that no single source could show on its own. Drawing on cases from Afghanistan, Sudan, Ethiopia, and other conflict-affected regions, the seminar connects these methods directly to broader questions of democratic governance, humanitarian accountability, and the visibility of ordinary people living through extraordinary circumstances.

Working with real images and real data, participants will learn to move between different sources and build a fuller picture of what is happening on the ground. Emphasis is placed not only on how to use these tools, but on how to read them critically, recognizing what the evidence shows, what it leaves out, and whose experiences risk disappearing from the record entirely. The tools introduced across the ten sessions include Sentinel Hub Playground, Google Earth Engine Timelapse, UNOSAT, the IDMC Displacement Viewer, HOT drone imagery, and the Global Human Settlement Layer, all free and accessible to anyone with an internet connection.

By the end, each participant will have produced a short Image Interpretation Memo based on a crisis case of their own choosing, a practical piece of work that draws on multiple sources and reflects the skills developed across the course. This seminar holds particular meaning at a moment when conflicts in Afghanistan, Sudan, Ethiopia, and many other parts of the world continue to displace communities, destroy infrastructure, and restrict access to independent research. It is designed precisely for scholars and researchers who are living and working closest to these realities, including those in exile, and who need practical, accessible tools to keep documenting, analyzing, and bearing witness to what is happening on the ground.