Beyond Survival: Lived Memory and Digital Ethnography of Typhoon Basyang’s Aftermath

Disasters in the Philippines are recurrent and deeply disruptive, yet their lessons often fade from collective consciousness once immediate recovery ends. Existing research has tended to emphasize logistical response and physical survival, leaving gaps in understanding how disaster experiences are remembered, narrated, and mediated as cultural and governance resources. This study addresses that gap by taking Typhoon Basyang in Iligan City as a critical case to examine how survival is framed through memory, solidarity, and digital mediation, and why these processes matter for resilience and policy. Guided by phenomenology, collective memory, and digital ethnography, the research employed a qualitative case study design integrating interviews, focus groups, GIS mapping, AI-assisted coding, and digital ethnographic analysis. Twenty purposively selected participants (S1–S20) provided narratives that anchored the inquiry in lived experience, substantiating theoretical insights with concrete accounts of trauma, solidarity, and resilience, while data saturation confirmed analytical robustness. Findings reveal that survival extended beyond physical endurance to processes of remembering, narrating, and embedding experiences into collective identity, highlighting the importance of memory as both archive and resource for preparedness. While the scope was limited to a single locality and one institutional actor, SMCII, this constraint provided depth of contextual analysis. In addressing the gap between logistical accounts and cultural memory, the study demonstrates how resilience is sustained through narrative, digital mediation, and institutional presence, and although grounded in Iligan City, its insights extend beyond local boundaries, reframing survival as lived memory and digitally mediated resilience in ways that contribute to global disaster scholarship and offering lessons on how communities worldwide can sustain vigilance and identity long after the recovery phase has ended.