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The civil wars between North and South Sudan have created one of the largest populations of displaced people in the world. This chapter introduces an ethnographic study with South Sudanese men who have resettled in Adelaide, Australia as former refugees and critically evaluates how they conceptualize and respond to trauma to highlight their agency and capacities to recover from difficult circumstances. The participants often used the term “slowly slowly” as an expression of working through adverse experiences to reduce the risk of retraumatization and as an approach to integrate into a new society. This chapter unpacks this phrase to highlight the complexities of conducting research with refugee communities and reinforces the need to maintain reflexivity, build interpersonal relationships and incorporate reciprocity to further consider the contested perspectives on trauma, resettlement, and recovery.

David L. Altheide, Ph.D., is Emeritus Regents’ Professor of the Faculty of Justice and Social Inquiry in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University, where he taught for 36 years. His work has focused on the role of mass media and information technology in social control. His most recent books are Qualitative media analysis (2nd ed., Sage, 2012) and Terror post 9/11 and the media (Lang, 2009). Altheide received the Cooley Award three times, given to the outstanding book in symbolic interaction, from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction: In 2007 for Terrorism and the politics of fear (2006); in 2004 for Creating fear: News and the construction of crisis (2002); and in 1986 for Media power (1985). Altheide received the 2005 George Herbert Mead Award for lifetime contributions from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, and the society’s Mentor Achievement Award in 2007.

The purpose of this paper is to outline how refugees’ transnational networks and online relationships facilitated through social media provide access to timely and trusted translated information in disaster settings.

The study is a digital ethnography of resettled refugees’ practices of transnational care and support through social media that took place over 12 months. It involved conducting 50 semi-structured interviews and collecting 472 online social media diaries with 15 participants. Data analysis was conducted through constructivist grounded theory.

Transnational networks are increasingly part of refugees’ everyday lives that illustrate how social media platforms can provide forms of transnational care and access to trusted translated communications during times of crisis. The paper discusses the possibilities and cautions of such support.

The small number of participants limits the ability to make generalised claims about refugees and transnational possibilities for reducing disaster risk. However, the reality that social media effectively provide a bridge between “here” and “there” signals the importance of incorporating these considerations as a form of transnational disaster risk reduction.

The project highlights from policy and practice standpoints, how transnational networks and social media can be used to improve disaster communications and translation. This focus is achieved through examining the usability, accessibility and affordability of digital communication technologies for forced migrants.

Few studies focus on refugees and disaster risk reduction. This is particularly the case as it relates to the roles of transnational networks, which have increasing everyday interactions in countries that provide refugee resettlement programmes.

The purpose of this paper is to view the human experiences of the Canterbury earthquakes through a varied set of disciplinary lenses in order to give voice to those who experienced the trauma of the earthquakes, especially groups whose voices might not otherwise be heard.

The research designs represented in this special issue and discussed in this introductory paper cover the spectrum from open-ended qualitative approaches to quantitative survey design. Data gathering methods included video and audio interviews, observations, document analysis and questionnaires. Data were analysed using thematic, linguistic and statistical tools.

The themes discussed in this introductory paper highlight that the Canterbury response and recovery sequence follows similar phases established in other settings such as Hurricane Katrina and the Australian bushfires. The bonding role of community networks was shown to be important, as was the ability to adapt formal and informal leadership to manage crisis situations. Finally, the authors reinforce the important protocols to follow when researching in sensitive contexts.

The introductory paper only discusses the articles in this special issue but it is important to acknowledge that there are other groups whose stories were not shared due to logistical limitations.

This introductory paper sets the scene for the articles that follow by outlining the importance of the human stories of the Canterbury earthquakes, through the eyes of particular groups, for example, medical staff, schools, women, children and refugees. The approach of viewing the experience through different community voices and disciplinary lenses is novel and significant. The lessons that are shared will inform future disaster preparedness, response and recovery policy and planning.

This research project examined resettled refugees’ perspectives on the Canterbury Earthquakes to better understand the organisational implications for disaster preparedness and response with culturally and linguistically diverse groups.

The method of data collection for this exploratory pilot study involved conducting semi-structured focus group discussions during January 2012 with the Bhutanese, Afghani and Ethiopian communities. The project was conducted in partnership with Refugee Services Aotearoa which is New Zealand's primary refugee resettlement organisation.

The participant comments identify the importance of local ethnic community responses to a natural disaster. The need for a pre-established meeting centre(s) and community liaisons with key support organisations was highlighted as vital. Central to recovery is how organisations can work alongside refugee communities in disaster preparedness and response opportunities.

The paper offers insight into the additional considerations of disaster risk reduction strategies with refugee background communities – a group that is relatively under-researched in disaster contexts.

This study compared the dimensionality and possession of the bases of supervisory power and their relationships to compliance and satisfaction with supervision between the U.S. (n = 459) and S. Korean (n = 625) managers. Results indicate that the factor structure of the power bases in the S. Korean sample was remarkably similar to those found in the U.S. sample; but whereas the U.S. managers reported relatively more position than personal power base, S. Korean managers reported relatively more personal than position power base. Similarities in the relationships of coercive, legitimate, and referent power bases to compliance, satisfaction, and dissimilarities in the relationships of expert and reward power bases to the criterion variables in the two samples are noted.

In an experimental setting, we investigate the impact of religious social identity on whistle-blowing. We hypothesize and find that individuals are less likely to perceive others in their religious group as being behaving unethically. However, we find that once individuals perceive wrongdoing, they are incrementally more likely to whistle-blow when the perpetrator is a member of their religious group.

This study sought to gain a better understanding of the general life experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) newcomer youth, situated within the broader context of their lives post-migration. The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature of various forms of oppression experienced by LGBT newcomers and offers recommendations for transforming services to better serve the complex needs of this marginalized population.

The Teens Resisting Urban Trans/Homophobia (TRUTH) project was comprised of ten focus groups with 70 youth (aged 14-29) living in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). Another three focus groups were conducted with 13 GTA service providers and teachers working with LGBT youth, in addition to one key informant interview. For this paper, the authors drew from a subset of the data including four newcomer-specific focus groups in which there were 39 youth who identified as refugees or immigrants, as well as key informant interviews with four youth (three of whom also participated in focus groups) and one service provider. Participants were asked about “what homophobia and transphobia meant to them”, “where they experienced it”, “in what forms”, and “how it impacted their daily lives”.

The experiences of LGBT newcomer youth in this study involved a complex negotiation of multiple systems of oppression. Youth described experiences of homophobia and racism within interpersonal relationships, in the LGBT community, in their respective diasporic communities, in social service encounters and during the immigration/refugee process. Barriers for LGBT refugee youth included difficulties finding work and accessing health care, as well as the additional burden of proving their sexual orientation during refugee claimant hearings.

While the combination of focus groups and key informant interviews is a strength in this study, it also presents challenges for analysis. In focus groups, it is not always clear who is speaking; because of this, the authors were sometimes unable to differentiate between refugee and immigrant youth (or those without status) in our focus groups, making it often unclear which perspective or experience youth were speaking to. Another limitation was the dominance of the “cisgender gay male voice” in our conclusions. Lesbian and bisexual women were present in fewer numbers and the sample only included three trans youth.

The findings reveal systemic discrimination on the basis of race and sexual orientation that illuminate injustices within Canadian society and systems that can enhance the efforts of those working in policy and service environments. Focused anti-homophobia and anti-racism training, and the implementation of policies designed to enhance accessibility, could improve service provision for newcomer LGBT youth. Furthermore, in order to facilitate a more just settlement process, a broader understanding of sexual identity, gender identity, and gender expression is required of the refugee claimant system.

This study examines the experiences of youth in a large and complex, multicultural, and gay-friendly urban centre, thus providing timely and current data about the well-being of newcomer LGBT youth. As such, it is one of the first studies to offer some insights into the life issues and challenges post-migration of Canadian LGBT newcomer youth.

The purpose of this paper is to examine individual differences in people's resilience to changes in psychological distress following the 22 February 2011 Christchurch earthquake.

Data were based on a subsample of the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study (NZAVS) – an annual nation-wide longitudinal study of New Zealand adults that began in 2009. In both waves of the NZAVS examined here, participants completed measures of the Big-Five, psychological distress, and demographic covariates. As such, the analyses, which focus on participants who were living in the Canterbury region before the 2011 earthquake (n=325), use measures of personality collected in late October of 2010 (Time 1) to predict changes in psychological distress after the devastation that unfolded on 22 February 2011.

Time 1 levels of Emotional Stability were inversely associated with increases in psychological distress following the 2011 earthquake. Psychological distress assessed at Time 1, however, was uncorrelated with changes in Emotional Stability.

These results show that Emotional Stability protects people against decrements to mental health following a disaster. Thus, efforts to rebuild disaster-stricken communities should ensure that those who are particularly likely to experience increases in psychological distress (i.e. those who, before a disaster, are low on Emotional Stability) receive the help they need.

This study assesses a subsample of respondents from a longitudinally based national probability study to show that Emotional Stability exerts a cross-lagged effect on changes in psychological distress following a natural disaster. The access to such measures affords us the rare opportunity to explain how people cope in the wake of a catastrophic disaster.