Pathways to Resilience IV: Global South Perspectives

From Trauma to Resilience in the Global South

Abstract #234
Title: Psychological processes of continuous traumatic stress that facilitate adaptations to ongoing violence
Presenter: Sarah Crawford-Browne (University of Cape Town, South Africa)
Introduction: Living in a dangerous community is likely to affect a person’s cognitive-emotional functioning, influence reactions to violence, and diminish well-being. While the impact of living in a dangerous context with few systems of protection and multiple, ongoing, anticipated violent incidents is not described by post-traumatic stress; there is limited research.
Methods: Responses are shaped by cognitive-emotional constructions of the environment and of experiences for inclusion into life-narratives; affecting adaptation. Hence, this project asks: how do participants’ construct meaning of their context and experiences of violence, and how do these processes of meaning making affect their adaptations to their experiences of violence and their context?. Hanover Park, a neighbourhood of Cape Town, was selected as a community affected by structural violence, gangsterism, and related impunity. Twenty-one adult women were interviewed regarding their lives and experiences of violence. The transcripts were analysed using constructivist grounded theory guidelines and interpreted through constructivist psychological theory.
Findings/Implications: Recognising the psychological processes underlying meaning construction; an embryonic theory of continuous traumatic stress was developed. Most participants managed their fear of anticipated violence through shifting awareness of danger, constructing psychological safety, universal distrust, and claiming agency. Four styles of adaptation were identified including being overwhelmed, distant, controlling or conscious.

Abstract #27
Title: Indigenous cosmovisions: Between political resistance and sociocultural resilience in the war and peace of Guatamala and Colombia 
Presenter: Patricia Granada Echeverri (Universidad Tecnológica de Pereira, facultad ciencias de la Salud, Colombia)
Introduction: Colombia and Guatemala are countries united by geographical continuity which have similar processes of conquest and colony, with internal wars during the twentieth century that affected among others indigenous populations, that have in their recent history the search for peace in their common goals. Guatemala with agreements consolidated 20 years ago (1996) and Colombia (2016) currently in adjustment. Conflicts that bind indegenous peoples both in war and peace are crossed by their worldviews centered on life, territory and the protection of natural resources, which is why peace processes with current extractive market dynamics and practices maintain the original structural conflicts in force, adding new complexities.
Methods: Through documentary and narrative analysis, we examine the ways in which indigenous worldviews serve both as an immense legacy for their struggles of resistance to lived violences and as forms of resilience that emerge in the dynamics of a globalized world, between the need to protect their cultural legacy and the adaptations that it demands to them in order to inhabit the planet in the third millennium.
Findings/Implications: Ancestral knowledge keeps the key that humanity need to transcend towards a more just and equitable way of living.