Paper short abstract:

Italy has always suffered from earthquakes, causing severe injuries and deaths among the population affected by them. The anthropological artefacts produced after the disasters such as oral and written online accounts are traces of community resilience supporting the disaster management.

Paper long abstract:

Italy has historically been prone to earthquakes causing severe damage, injuries and deaths to the population affected by them.

Over the past decade the earthquakes in Umbria and Marche (1997), Molise (2002) and Abruzzo (2009) made the lack of emergency resilience and the need for inclusive and participative disaster management and response more evident.

From an anthropological perspective, resilience becomes a "relational" concept that is able to create traces and signs of community resilience in the face of disasters through oral and written online accounts.

Specifically, oral and written accounts, such as those from video interviews, monitoring units, and blogs are considered for resilient narratives of the disasters themselves.

This approach should not be considered a "virtual ethnography", rather a "narrative approach" aimed at studying the community resilience both on the virtual level and the real one.

The preliminary findings of these researches shows the importance of the traces and signs of the online community resilience and the impact that these virtual artefacts have on the real societal life, the disaster relief and the response.

For instance, during the aftermath of the Abruzzo and L'Aquila earthquake it was possible to identify two diverse but linked anthropological productions of knowledge: the online production of blogs and social movements criticizing the reconstruction process.

The identification of resilience as a relational and narrative concept allows the experts and the population to rethink the emergency management and the disaster response, considering the double anthropological insights of the virtual and real domains.