Natural disasters:narration by rescuers

Eleonora Bordon
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Eleonora Bordon: University of Padova, Padova, Italy

Sociology and Social Work Review, 2019, vol. 3, issue 1, 48-58

Abstract: Postmodern man seems to generate a rift between Freudian instances. The ego seems to have had the upper hand and in everyday life the individual places himself as the only reference point to describe the world. Being part of a community, a family and/or association does not represent a group experience, but rather an attempt to assert its importance in social contexts and reduce loneliness. The proposed study is an exploratory survey on the representations and perceptions of the experiences of rescuers in a context of natural disaster. The spontaneous reports of a group of volunteers who participated in the operations of support to the population struck by the earthquakes that occurred in L'Aquila, in Emilia Romagna and the most recent one of the Central Italy of 2016 were analyzed. Their story, even after many years, explains their experience of volunteering and the reconstruction of the experience during that field intervention. Each story used in the analysis is structured in written form. Since the story represents an essential experience, an action aimed at organizing one's knowledge and re-elaborating specific themes, it seemed relevant to observe how the volunteers not only had the desire to stop their life in writing but also to share their work publicly, through the online distribution. Since the stories manifest the gnoseological and organizational categories of the individual, aimed at the attribution of meaning and to the reconstruction of sense of some aspects of one's life, it is interesting to understand how the volunteers, who are so committed to keeping the community alive and sharing, describe their experience in a public context. It is essential, therefore, to understand which are the dimensions of meaning within which the volunteers remember that event. It is important to understand the stories that are conveyed around this theme and whether the members of the group have shared not only in action, but also in the construction of meanings, a humanly demanding intervention since narration is an action that expresses a way of structuring the self and to create bonds with others.

Keywords: narration; earthquake; volunteers; communication; knowledge. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I0 I10 I30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:edr:sswrgl:v:3:y:2019:i:1:p:48-58

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