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- Convenors:
-
Renata Jambresic Kirin
(Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research)
Mojca Ramšak (University of Ljubljana)
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Short Abstract
This panel examines the narrative practices that emerge during and after catastrophic events, from natural disasters to epidemics; how they are disseminated through various media and embedded in the collective consciousness; how communities redefine the "natural" and "normal" in times of crisis.
Long Abstract
This panel explores narrative practices as crucial tools for understanding survival, conceptualizing the "natural" and redefining the "normal" during catastrophic events in historical and contemporary contexts. From natural disasters – earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods, droughts, hailstorms, and extreme weather events – to epidemics, pandemics, and other large-scale crises, communities have repeatedly resorted to storytelling to process, understand, and ultimately survive catastrophic experiences.
This panel focuses on narratives that emerge during and after catastrophic events and explores how these stories are transmitted through different media, change and become embedded in the collective consciousness. We examine stories, narrative fragments and various verbal and non-verbal memories that show how urban and rural communities redefine "normal" life and reshape their understanding of the "natural" world. These narratives often embrace the constant presence of death and uncertainty, transforming the disaster from an exceptional event into a lived reality with its own cultural logic and sensory landscape.
Starting from the assumption that catastrophic events are deeply embedded in social structures and community actions, the panel explores how communities develop narrative strategies to deal with recurring disasters. From oral testimonies to digital narratives about natural disasters, from medieval plague chronicles to contemporary pandemic accounts, folklorists engage with narrative knowledge, memory and imagination to examine the intricate connections between human and non-human life in times of crisis. The panel explores how collective memory shapes preparation for and response to crisis, and how storytelling is both survival mechanism and a form of cultural transmission across generations and media platforms.
Accepted papers
Session 1 Saturday 13 June, 2026, -Paper short abstract
Medieval Cadwallon tales reframe catastrophic invasion as a spiritual battle fought with magic. The contest between enemy sorcery and local resistance validates enduring British identity by asserting its inherent magical power transcends military crisis.
Paper long abstract
This paper explores narrative strategies emerging from the catastrophic event of the Anglo-Saxon conquest of Britain, specifically drawing on traditions surrounding King Cadwallon. Rooted in the period following the razing of cities and churches, this narrative frames the military and cultural crisis through the lens of hostile magic and non-human agency.
Medieval English tradition casts the enemy, King Edwin, as employing a Spanish magician named Pellitus, who constructs a "magic mirror" using morbid components (martyrs’ swords, widows’ tears) to observe Cadwallon’s movements. Crucially, this magic is maintained by three witches who "baked and boiled and brewed" to conjure frightful tempests, scattering and sinking Cadwallon’s fleets. This intricate connection between human sorcery and catastrophic natural disaster perfectly exemplifies how these narratives redefine the "natural" world in times of crisis.
The narrative details the Britons’ strategy for survival, relying on counter-intelligence and the wisdom of the legendary Merlin. Merlin advises Cadwallon to assume the guise of a redefined "normal" life — to "hunt, and play bowls, and eat and drink and royster" — thereby fooling the magical surveillance and breaking the enemy’s enchantment. This storytelling tradition functions as a crucial communal psychological and strategic survival mechanism, transmitting knowledge of resistance across generations and affirming the persistence of native cultural power in the face of annihilation
Paper short abstract
This paper explores how Uzbek folklore about floods, droughts, and epidemics can be used in language classrooms to foster resilience, intercultural awareness, and critical thinking, showing how traditional narratives of catastrophe remain relevant in times of global crisis.
Paper long abstract
In Uzbek oral tradition, stories of natural catastrophe have long served as cultural tools for survival. Legends of rivers flooding entire valleys, proverbs born from drought years, and village accounts of epidemic loss not only explain disaster but also transmit moral lessons about resilience, solidarity, and human dependence on nature. Such narratives redefine what is “normal” in a crisis and embed the “natural” world within social memory.
This paper examines how these folkloric texts can be integrated into language education, particularly in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) classrooms. For example, when students work with a proverb such as “The thirsty land teaches patience” or an epic passage describing famine migrations, they not only learn vocabulary and narrative structure but also reflect on the cultural strategies of coping with scarcity and uncertainty. Similarly, stories of epidemic outbreaks—often framed as trials of faith—become entry points for classroom discussions about vulnerability, adaptation, and community care.
Drawing on seven years of teaching practice, I argue that folklore-inspired pedagogy bridges cultural heritage with modern educational needs. It creates space for students to connect local histories of catastrophe with contemporary global crises, from climate change to pandemics. By engaging with disaster narratives, learners gain both linguistic skills and a deeper awareness of how storytelling sustains resilience. Ultimately, teaching such texts reminds us that narratives of catastrophe are not only about loss, but about the human capacity to endure and reimagine the future.
Paper short abstract
This paper explores what normality means when a catastrophic event triggers the outbreak of an unprecedented epidemic and exacerbates a long-standing endemic phenomenon. Grounded in ethnography, it describes where local people draw the line of normality and talk about the “new natural”.
Paper long abstract
In 2018, the storm Vaia hit Comelico, in Northeastern Italy, and crashed fifteen million trees to the ground. After the initial shock, weeks of emotional talking and intense doing followed. Then, the still ongoing phase of “long Vaia” started, when locals had to decide what to do with/in the forest. Restoring it to the same, vast and disorderly extension it had when Vaia hit, which was the result of the post-1950s abandonment of agriculture, husbandry and forestry? Or restoring it with intensive forestry as a priority, as before the 1950s? Or letting nature restore it? In 2022, the slow return to normality was interrupted by the bark beetle, a wood-eating insect that had long been present in the area but that, after Vaia, benefited from the overabundance of dead red spruces (the insect’s favourite and the most hit by Vaia) and global warming to expand its population and attack live trees. It is in this wounded context that, in 2023, I arrived in Comelico to continue the ethnography on ticks and humans I had been conducting in other parts of the Belluno province. Locals had no doubt that, like bark beetles, ticks too increased after Vaia, for reasons not fully understood yet but likely connected to how forests have been managed in the “normality” before Vaia and, after it, in the reconstruction of a nature that seems too much – too abnormal – to describe, discuss and handle. This paper explores local discourses and newspaper articles about this ongoing crisis.
Paper short abstract
This paper explores how locals in Wyoming County, WV use narrative practices, sensory experiences, health anecdotes, and digital media platforms to document water pollution, address injustice in zones of extraction and sacrifice, and redefine extraction-related water pollution as a form of violence.
Paper long abstract
In April 2025, a risk analysis study revealed what residents of Wyoming County, West Virginia have long known to be true: their drinking water is unsafe, and locals are experiencing water injustice at higher-than-average levels in the US. According to the study, Wyoming County experienced the highest amount of reported water violations by a single-water system in the nation*. Before this study, however, locals had long used narrative practices, sensory experiences, health anecdotes, and digital media platforms to both document this disaster and to raise awareness about the water injustices that many rural, marginalized, and/or low-income communities often face. In West Virginia, intense natural resource extraction (and its associated environmental effects) has been normalized for over a century, often because coal mining has a historic economic and heritage hold on the region. In a political climate where deregulation is on the rise and environmental health and safety policies are declining, what cultural strategies are available to people who live in constant catastrophe, especially when institutions fail to intervene in moments of crisis? This paper examines how Wyoming County locals use oral testimony and experiential encounters with (compromised) nature to redefine extraction-related water pollution as a form of socio-environmental violence. I explore what a cultural focus might offer us in the long battle for water justice in zones of both extraction and sacrifice.
*Cohen, et al. “Mapping risks of water injustice and perceptions of privatized drinking water in the United States: A mixed methods approach.” Risk Analysis, 2025, pp. 1-17.
Paper short abstract
Interpreting K. Kassabova’s Balkan tetralogy, I focus on the concept of ‘deep implicacy’, the claim that humans are intertwined with the landscape, plants and animals, as well as on the narrative's ability to transform the earthly into a personal experience and the local into a cosmic one.
Paper long abstract
The paper interprets the Balkan tetralogy (Border, To the Lake, Elixir and Anima) by author Kapka Kassabova through the lens of the concept of “deep implicacy” by philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva and Amy Shuman's insights on storytelling as a means of reshaping collective memory and challenging anthropocentric knowledge.
Kassabova's writing blends ethnographic and literary elements, merging travelogues with existential dramas. Her rewritten stories, told in various languages, are always overshadowed by the themes of war and peace, reflecting the global experiences of marginalized regions and minority communities. She is both a researcher and an insider rooted in the region and in the global migrant flows, while illuminating the fragile coexistence of different peoples, languages, and religions. Recounting embodied knowledge of seasonal rhythms and societal changes, Kassabova discovers the intersections of human and natural history, successful examples of adaptations and violent interventions, mutations and mimicry.
The significance of her writing lies in how she relates the fears and hopes of Balkan villagers to the global human condition, transforming a paradigmatic European periphery, “a forested Berlin Wall,” into a center. The scattered highland communities are positioned at this center not through mass migration to European cities but by their precious knowledge of resilience and ability to survive in the most difficult circumstances and conditions. As true advocates of green philosophy and as practitioners of self-healing, they offer lessons on how to restore our human essence, encouraging “close encounters with the living that exist within us and all around us.”
Paper short abstract
During the recent global corona crisis, or rather the implementation of measures in an effort to suppress the spread of the threatening COVID-19 virus, the phrase "new normal" became popular in many countries, as well as in Croatia. It captured the temporary routine of numerous "normalized" changes.
Paper long abstract
During the recent global corona crisis, or rather the implementation of measures in an effort to suppress the spread of the threatening COVID-19 virus, the phrase "new normal" became popular in many countries, as well as in Croatia. It captured and highlighted the temporary establishedness and necessity of changing behavior, habits, interactions between people, movement, education, socializing, meeting, greetings, etc. In addition to the necessity of changes that in various ways affected everyone's everyday life, the phrase also arose from the imminent end of the implementation of numerous measures to protect public health. The protracted new changes, after the initially announced two "crucial" weeks, ultimately stretched out over several years. With varying intensity, depending on the countries and their political leaders, they "normalized" the new everyday life for a while, but also provoked different reactions.
The changes that affected the “new normal” were initiated as a necessary medical measure. However, the acceptance or non-acceptance of the changes it contained raised legal, social, and especially political issues and turned, among other things, into ideological positions of a divided society. The divided positions have persisted to this day, when the “new normal” is no longer normal and when all measures to prevent the spread of the virus have been lifted, despite its continued survival and circulation among the population. By monitoring media content and numerous comments from social media users, I will, among other things, try to detect the echoes of the recent “new normal” in the Croatian general public.
Paper short abstract
This presentation highlights the resiliency of the New Orleans Mardi Gras Indian culture through their use of collective memory, storytelling, and artistic expression to survive the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and the Covid-19 pandemic.
Paper long abstract
he Mardi Gras (or Black Masking) Indians are an African American parading culture in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. For over a century they have designed and sewn beaded, feathered suits each year that they don to lead the community on improvised parade routes through their neighborhoods on Carnival Day. This cultural practice is deeply rooted in African traditions of art, dance, music, and spirituality, and pays tributes to Native Americans who assisted enslaved Africans’ escape from slavery. Formalized in response to Jim Crow discrimination and exclusion from Mardi Gras Day parades, it has evolved into a celebration of Black art, perseverance, joy, history, and hope, representing the fullness of Black expressive culture.
Drawing on interviews that we, and our students, conducted over 10 years with these culture-bearers, our presentation demonstrates the power of this grassroots tradition – grounded in mutual aid, solidarity, and Black expressive culture – that has helped Black New Orleanians, and the city itself, survive catastrophe. Specifically, we will discuss how the Indians used storytelling, orally and through their suits, to respond to Hurricane Katrina and the Covid-19 pandemic. Both events were catastrophic for New Orleanians, but especially so for Black New Orleanians, for whom legacies of segregation, racial discrimination, and racialized poverty dramatically exacerbated the devastating consequences. Building upon a foundation of artistic and cultural African survivalisms, the Indians used collective memory and artistic expression to survive the ravages of a natural disaster and a pandemic, strengthening their community and city in the process.
Paper short abstract
The paper analyzes plague representations across European visual and literary traditions from medieval to modern periods, examining how multisensory experiences shaped collective memory of catastrophic death. It reveals how communities normalized recurring epidemics through narrative.
Paper long abstract
The paper examines how plague narratives across European visual and literary media transformed catastrophic experience into cultural knowledge through multisensory description, with particular emphasis on olfactory dimensions. From medieval chronicles through modern novels, alongside visual representations from Renaissance paintings to baroque altarpieces, communities developed narrative strategies for comprehending recurring epidemics.
The analysis demonstrates consistency in sensory descriptions across centuries, geographical regions, and media. Literary accounts document the pestilential stench of decomposing bodies, the acrid smoke of purification fires, and protective aromatic measures like vinegar-soaked cloths and herbal pomanders. Visual traditions depict figures covering their noses against miasmic air, smoke rising from burning infected materials, and naked bodies awaiting burial—encoding practical survival knowledge while representing plague as a complete sensory catastrophe.
Both visual and textual sources reveal how smell functioned as warning system, disease vector (through miasma theory), and psychological trigger. The overwhelming odors of decay, infected bodies, rodents, and fumigation rituals created an inescapable atmosphere that shaped behavior and belief. Historical accounts and diaries provide firsthand testimony of this olfactory landscape, while artistic representations offer complementary visual narratives.
By examining these representations together, the paper reveals how communities developed shared multisensory language for catastrophe, making the extraordinary "normal" through repeated narrative engagement. This sensory knowledge—transmitted through art, literature, and collective memory—transformed recurring plague from exceptional disaster into lived reality with its own cultural logic and survival protocols embedded in European cultural consciousness.
Paper short abstract
On March 22, 2020, as Zagreb was adjusting to COVID-19 lockdown, an earthquake struck the city. Drawing on rapid ethnography and on recent research conducted within the Sonar-Cities project, the paper examines how individuals generate and circulate stories that impose coherence on chaos.
Paper long abstract
On March 22, 2020, as Zagreb and the rest of Croatia were adjusting to a near-total Covid-19 lockdown, a 5.5 magnitude earthquake—the strongest in 140 years—struck the city. In a single morning, citizens faced two overlapping disasters: the invisible threat of viral contagion and the immediate danger of collapsing buildings.
Drawing on rapid ethnography conducted immediately after the fact and on more recent research conducted within the Sonar-Cities participatory research-action project (Horizon Europe, Disaster-Resilient Societies), this paper examines how individuals generate and circulate stories that impose coherence on chaos, transforming catastrophe into a meaningful narrative within broader cultural logics. Narratives, it argues, function as active survival strategies, shaping reasoning, guiding action, and embedding crisis into collective memory.
Namely, at the height of the quake, pandemic-related concerns vanished as survival instincts, embodied practices, and fragments of remembered advice dictated immediate responses. Yet as people gathered outside in the cold morning snow, the “familiar” Covid-19 framework quickly resurfaced: mask-wearing, distancing, and anxieties about contagion revealed how narratives of crisis become layered and internalized. Misinformation added further complexity. Rumors of a stronger, imminent quake spread rapidly across social media, prompting many to abandon homes that lockdown regulations had marked as the only safe places.
This case study situates Zagreb’s earthquake-pandemic convergence within the wider comparative framework of disaster narratives. By drawing on oral accounts and testimonies, it explores the narrative and normative reasoning people employed to make sense of the unimaginable collision of catastrophes.