Conference Agenda

On 6 February 2023, devastating earthquakes struck Turkey, resulting in 52, 000 casualties and 100.000, 000 injuries. It was referred to as the “Disaster of the Century”. Social media and news coverage inundated millions with unfiltered graphic images, stories, and videos. To date, no published studies have investigated people' s lived experiences of the disaster through media exposure. Using Reflexive Grounded Theory methodology, this qualitative doctoral study aims to explore people' s behavioural and emotional changes, processes, worldviews, and recovery through semi- structured interviews. Participants are recruited as Turkish adults who did not directly experience the earthquake, using a theoretical sample that allows for the development, refinement, and challenge of emerging themes. So far, preliminary findings from the first ten interviews indicate that media- exposed secondary mass trauma functions similarly to primary trauma, inducing significant emotional arousal. At the same time, already existing worldviews seem to be reinforced further, acting as anchors to guide resilience, behavioural, and emotional changes. Overall, changes function as a process of appraisal for survival, forcing populations to adapt to the new reality, both individually and collectively. Participants also exhibited behaviourally adaptive and maladaptive responses, indicating strategies to mitigate intense emotional arousal, alongside resilient and lasting changes. These changes emphasise safety against potential future exposure, as more than 70% of the Turkish population lives in first— and second-degree earthquake zones. The findings will have implications for news agencies and legislators, enabling them to understand the overall effects of media exposure and potentially develop strategies to inform and induce long-lasting change in people's lives. Additionally, the study will also provide a detailed model to explain people's responses to mass traumatic natural disasters, enabling counselling professionals to understand and develop effective treatment strategies, along with offering further evidence towards developing secondary media trauma literature.

I worked for the Canadian Red Cross on their Virtual, National Disaster Management team after completing my undergraduate degree. As a caseworker, I spoke directly with victims of natural disasters, completing assessments and providing financial and emotional support for their recovery. I was working on the 2017 British Columbia wildfire operation when an unusual call landed on my desk: a herd of horses had been spotted, in bad condition, near Canim Lake First Nation. The fires had ravaged through 100 Mile House and the horses had been separated from their natural range and their ancestral caretakers.

Care, under the efficient, procedural, and human-centered bureaucratics of disaster management didn’t leave much room for prioritizing animal rescue. There was space in the policy, however, for advocacy and something in the voicemail I had listened to, implicated me in an ethics of care that extended beyond formal mandates, drawing me into the more-than-human relational responsibility that the community had participated in for generations. From a province away, I had to locate food, water, safe pasture, and caretakers for the herd.

Using a reflexive autoethnographic approach, informed by phenomenology and Indigenous ways of knowing, I explore how this experience transformed my perspective, unsettling the assumption that crisis management need be efficient and transactional. The horses were more than animals caught in the crosshairs of disaster, they represented ancestral lineages of care and connection to land and history. Caring for them honoured Indigenous practices of stewardship and was a small but impactful reconciliatory act. In light of this years’ theme, “Global flows, relational connections, and collaborative practices in challenging times,” I put this small, but instructive story forward as an example of why taking time for participation, connection, attention, and advocacy is necessary, even in crises that seem to demand an acute response.

When disasters are remembered online, memory rarely appears as a seamless narrative. Testimonies freeze mid-sentence, images blur, audio collapses or videos abruptly end. These glitches, commonly seen as technical failures, become, in fact, vernacular signs of trauma. They fragment stories, echo the ruptures of catastrophe and embody the impossibility of total recollection.

This paper develops a “glitch ethnography” of disaster memory, focusing on digital traces left by survivors of floods and wildfires in Attica. So, the emphasis is mthodological: how do broken media fragments generate new modes of meaning? Drawing on online testimonies and user-generated archives, I explore how “error” itself acquires symbolic force, mirroring uncertainty, loss and the fractured temporality of survival.

Rather than dismissing glitches as noise, I argue that they open an alternative ethnographic lens. In silence, in pixelated screens, in truncated voices, memory insists, not as polished testimony but as disrupted truth. By placing Folklore Studies in dialogue with qualitative inquiry, the paper highlights how disasters challenge not only communities but also researchers, urging us to embrace rupture as a method of knowing.

This qualitative inquiry explores how individuals affected by the 2020 Beirut Port explosion navigated their recovery through the interplay of positive psychology practices and social support networks to foster resilience and enhance well-being. The study investigates how internally cultivated psychological strengths and externally anchored social ties supported the reconstruction of resilience and personal well-being in the aftermath of collective trauma. In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with six Lebanese participants aged 30 to 50 years old, and their narratives were analyzed using reflective thematic analysis to uncover noticeable patterns of meaning and response.

The findings reveal that positive psychology practices, in particularl mindfulness, gratitude, optimism, and spirituality, emerged as central strategies for emotional regulation and coping. These inner resources enabled participants to cultivate a mindset oriented toward recovery, restoring a sense of hope, autonomy, and agency amid widespread disruption. At the same time, the role of social connectedness was critical. Familial ties, community bonds, and collective acts of solidarity provided emotional support, reinforcing emotional resilience, meaning-making practices and enabling relational healing rooted in cultural belonging.

The study further highlights the importance of consistent routines and recovery practices that are sensitive to Lebanon’s sociocultural realities, offering supported, custom-made, and locally consequential tools for recovery and transformation Such culturally attuned, locally situated interventions offered practical, accessible tools for psychological and social transformation. The research underscores the value of integrating both individual and community-based approaches into post-trauma support systems.

This work contributes to a growing body of qualitative knowledge at the intersection of public health, psychology, and disaster recovery. It demonstrates how resilience is not merely an individual trait but is relationally co-constructed and contextually grounded. The study ultimately affirms the transformative potential of positive psychology and social support to facilitate integrated pathways toward healing, adaptation, and future preparedness for individuals and communities alike.

In the process of co-creating a harmonious civilisation, we are learning to embrace both entropic and syntropic forces of nature and to balance them. As individuals we are mastering the skill of directing our attention with conscious awareness, through which we are discovering our own nature (which is the nature of the world and of our reality). Conflict inevitably arises, because we have been conditioned to suppress and deny parts of ourselves. Political systems are a reflection of psychological dimensions of society, the personal is political and war is a political act. In order to substitute war with less destructive mechanisms, we are working towards understanding its adaptive role in evolution of consciousness and with it the importance of assuming individual responsibility. Being able to transition from a role of a disempowered victim or bystander is essential, because warfare originates on a subtler level. We cannot transcend war (same goes for patriarchy, destructiveness of capitalism or nationalism and other unsustainable ideologies), we must first embody it. The nature of our reality is fractal, therefore we encounter polarization at the level of particles, individuals, societies. However, polarity is only a matter of perception. On the level of the mind phenomena is defined in relation to its opposite, meanwhile the embodied properties lie on a spectrum. Photons exhibit wave-particle duality, we are never only feminine or masculine, only the self or the other, only the subject or the object, only operating from the mind or from our intuition, only the victim or the aggressor. Fearing polarization is like fearing fear itself. Existence is endlessly oscillating between perceived opposites, flowing, transforming. This is the nature of man, his power lies within accepting and allowing this nature. That is how he exists as a human.