Conference Agenda

"Mad Literature" represents a digital subculture that has emerged among educated young Chinese. It is characterized by the creation and reiteration of "nonsensible" memes and cultural artifacts that mimic mad actions. Such artifacts include illogical emojis, insider jokes, bizarre music, and short videos, all of which are widely disseminated across Chinese social media platforms like TikTok, Weibo, and Zhihu. We introduce the term “resonance to nonsense” to conceptualize the process where contemporary Chinese youth seek connections to each other and the world not through shared meaning, but rather through “non-sense.” We ask: How do young Chinese create and experience resonance through the making and circulation of “Mad Literature”? What is the nature of this resonance?

To address these questions, the research employs a combination of digital ethnography and discourse analysis, focusing on the most popular examples of “Mad Literature”. Findings indicate that young Chinese initially resonate unconsciously with certain memes, a process facilitated and amplified by algorithmic recommendation systems. Over time, this resonance evolves into a more conscious and strategic practice, as individuals collectively reiterate these memes in their everyday lives. The shared experience at the heart of this resonance is a sense of alienation, described following Hartmut Rosa as acting voluntarily against one's true desires. For instance, young people may participate in relentless academic competition while simultaneously recognizing that such competition serves to discipline them.

The study argues that the "resonance to nonsense" cultivated through “Mad Literature” operates as a form of cultural counter-conduct against the disciplinary power that alienates youth. By intuitively adopting a mad guise, which ensures that their critique remains largely invisible to governmental censorship mechanisms, young Chinese are able to satirize and subtly subvert a world they perceive as politically delirious but also depoliticize their critique to allow for survival.

It is well known that psychological inquiry largely follows naturalistic methods, while, on the opposite camp, some critical researchers argue that greater attention be given to qualitative inquiry and to the psychological humanities (art, history, STS studies, etc.). That debate has been around since the beginning of psychological science, with Wundt (and others like Harvey Carr) maintaining that Völkerpsychologie should be used to research the higher psychological functions that cannot be studied by experimentation. In this presentation, I follow this tradition and argue that the psychological humanities can act as a hermeneutical way of understanding higher psychological functions, lived experience and human behavior. This understanding (Dilthey's Verstehen) should not be taken to be a representationalist and foundationalist knowledge, a final epistemological ground that has a static knowable object. Instead, the psychological humanities facilitate a dynamic form of knowing that focuses on an intersubjective and intrasubjective understanding (as opposed to a naturalistic third-person abstraction) and views "knowledge" as a discourse among others (that of the painter, next to the philosopher, next to the historian, next to the positivist scientist). I examine the example of first-person literature and especially the works of Faulkner and Bret Easton Ellis. These works focus on human subjectivity as is expressed by the narrator's first-person narrative and give us insights that cannot be attained by a quantitative methodology or third-person abstractions. It is argued that literature (and psychological humanities in general) should not be viewed as simply an alternative to mainstream psychological inquiry, but, instead, naturalistic inquiry should be viewed as just another form of discourse next to the psychological humanities, with no claim to epistemological primacy. In short, causal naturalistic explanation should be seen as part of a larger from of understanding, understanding that can be also achieved by qualitative methods and reading great literature.

The novel Magnificat by Sonia Aggio takes place against a backdrop of a fertile land emerged from the waters, framed by the complex relationship between humans and nature. A relationship that in the historical context of the Polesine flood in 1951 contains weak flood prevention from the institutions. Ecofeminism and ecological criticism of literature, subversive rewriting and female Gothic serve for the analysis to demonstrate that the novel is a subversive rewriting of the Polesine flood that makes voices heard that have not yet been heard. In this way it helps to fill the archive of women and non-human perspectives of the catastrophe. First, the Gothic elements present in Magnificat are ecological anxiety, monstrosity in the non-human element of the “Lady of the River”, and the focus on the bodies of women. Second, by focusing on the archetypes of the missing woman and the entrapped woman, it discusses the ways in which these Gothic elements constitute a rewriting of the relationships between women, and of non-human and non-androcentric perspectives. Third, it discusses how Magnificat reflects on the ecological crisis in the way that the novel is non-anthropocentric and non-androcentric, and that is shown through ecological anxiety, monstrosity, and the bodies of women. Further, it discusses environmental risk as a contemporary version of the ancient literary theme of the apocalypse. The analysis shows the ways in which Magnificat offers an alternative to anthropocentric and androcentric narratives since it narrates the flood from the point of view of women and nature. The flood was caused by a series of linked events whose significance cannot be understood only by hydrological explanations but is also to be traced in human responsibilities and actions, since nature is not only a “natural” matter.

The present study explores the socio-psychological mechanisms through which social subjects interpret deviant behavior and construct psychological stigma, as represented in classical literature. Focusing on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, the research investigates how psychologization, internal attributions, and the fundamental attribution error shape perceptions of criminality and mental illness. Using a qualitative content analysis framework, the study combines Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) with lexical correspondence analysis via the software IRaMuTeQ. The text was coded and analyzed to identify dominant thematic axes and recurring semantic patterns that reflect the psychological and social representations embedded in the novel. The analysis revealed four major thematic clusters concerning: (a) the socio-psychological reality of the characters, (b) interpersonal relationships and social environment, (c) the phenomenology of mental suffering, and (d) the symbolic and moral dimensions of guilt and isolation. The findings suggest that deviant behavior in literature is often psychologized—interpreted as stemming from inner pathology rather than contextual conditions—thus reinforcing essentialist stereotypes that stigmatize mental illness. Moreover, social exclusion and lack of psychiatric care appear as central metaphors for the deterioration of mental health and agency. The study highlights the potential of literary texts as qualitative data for examining social representations of mental illness, stigma, and moral responsibility. By integrating phenomenological interpretation with computational lexical analysis, it bridges humanistic and psychological inquiry, illustrating how classical literature mirrors, reproduces, and sometimes challenges dominant narratives of deviance and normality.

The present study investigates the evolution of qualitative research within the Social Sciences and the Arts & Humanities through a large-scale bibliometric analysis, drawing on a dataset of 79,672 documents retrieved from Scopus between the years 2015–2026. The research systematically maps the scope, methodologies, and impact of qualitative and mixed-method approaches, while contrasting them with quantitative traditions. Findings reveal that qualitative research has steadily increased over the last ten years, with a particularly notable rise in Arts & Humanities fields, where narrative inquiry, discourse analysis, and ethnography are dominant. In contrast, Social Sciences present a more balanced interplay between qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods approaches, with case studies and interview-based research being most common. Document type analysis confirms the prevalence of journal articles (over 85% of the corpus), while language distribution shows a clear dominance of English, followed by Spanish and Portuguese. Country-level patterns indicate leadership from the United States and United Kingdom, but also a strong presence from Australia, Canada, and increasingly from emerging research hubs in Latin America (Brazil, Spain) and Asia (Indonesia, Malaysia, China). The comparative dimension highlights that qualitative research in the Arts & Humanities is more deeply embedded in interpretive and constructivist paradigms, whereas in the Social Sciences, its application often complements or challenges quantitative models. Citation analysis demonstrates that qualitative and mixed-method publications attract significant scholarly attention, particularly when addressing complex educational, cultural, or policy-related issues. Overall, the study underscores the critical role of qualitative inquiry in advancing nuanced understanding of human experience and knowledge production. It further contributes by mapping disciplinary and regional landscapes, offering evidence of both convergence and divergence across Social Sciences and Humanities, and outlining future opportunities for integrative methodological frameworks.