Kathleen Watt, Rearranged: An Opera Singer’s Facial Cancer and Life Transposed

The idea of ‘identity politics’ has become quite prominent in news commentary. It has been referred to in explaining the 2016 US Presidential election result, the 2016 Brexit vote and a variety of other events in contemporary social life. The idea emerged under that title in the late twentieth century, and refers to political conflicts where groups unite and act on the basis of some shared identity. While the term initially referred to action by groups seeking to remedy past oppression, ‘identity politics’ may now refer to a wider range of cases where there is contestation based on recognition of some shared identity. Individuals’ identity is central to resurgent modern virtue ethics, but it has been suggested that virtue ethics is less relevant to political conflict than utilitarian views or theories of justice. However, an important distinction can be made between narrative identity, on the one hand, and social identity that emerges from individuals’ self-perceived group membership, on the other hand. It is narrative identity that figures in major accounts of virtue ethics. In many situations, narrative identity is importantly affected by group identity, but it is still only narrative identity that has intrinsic ethical weight. This suggests that virtue ethics has relevance to identity politics just because it urges attention to individuals’ narrative identity rather than to group identity.

This study looks into the politics of appearance in the retail sales labour market for women in Turkey and explores how norms of ‘being presentable and fashionable’ prevailing in different retail landscapes map onto intersections of class, status and the fault lines of Turkey’s identity politics. In an attempt to understand how such norms are constructed, this article employs the discussion on aesthetic labour and focuses on the aesthetic labour requirements in large-scale retailers selling or competing with global brands, small-scale retailers and tesettür retailers. The article relies on data derived from participant observation, in-depth interviews and focus groups conducted with saleswomen and employers in different retail landscapes in five cities of Turkey between 2009 and 2012. The study suggests that large-scale retailers and shopping malls require retail workers to convey an appearance and deportment that fits in with globally circulating images of what is taken to be ‘normal’, middle class and fashionable, leading to the exclusion of saleswomen with headscarves as they are perceived to manifest a particularity and deviation from a normalized middle-class identity. On the other hand, in tesettür chain stores competing in the area of global veiling fashion, the headscarf is usually a requirement as a part of the globally relevant, Islamic middle-class image that retail workers are expected to embody. The norms of aesthetic labour in both kinds of large-scale retailers differ sharply from small-scale retailers, where embodying local gendered norms, and the ability to manage relations in local marketplaces surface as the most salient requirements from retail saleswomen.

Despite growing scholarly interest in flash fiction, few studies have explored its role in negotiating narrative identity within intercultural encounters. This gap is particularly evident in relation to marginalized voices. This qualitative study examined “What Remains to Be Seen,” a flash fiction piece awarded the 2024 Kyoto City Mayoral Prize. The study examines how identity is constructed, disrupted, and renegotiated during brief encounters between a tourist and a local man in Kyoto, Japan. The study used a narrative inquiry design. It emphasizes how the story conveys experience and highlights the relational, dynamic nature of identity. Thematic narrative analysis identified patterns of meaning related to identity and representation. Close reading guided the analysis, with attention paid to the language, voice, and structure to generate codes and themes. Iterative cycles of reading, coding, and theme refinement produced four interrelated themes: (1) the projection of familiar roles and emplotment by the tourist-narrator, (2) the performativity and emotional burden of “niceness,” (3) narrative rupture reframing homelessness as existential ambiguity, and (4) transformation and reflexivity in the narrator’s identity. Together, these dynamics show how flash fiction unsettles cultural scripts, complicates the tourist gaze, and highlights ethical reflection on social invisibility. The study concludes that minimalist fiction provides a valuable perspective for examining identity negotiation and ethical representation. Implications include applying Narrative Identity Theory to short fiction and pursuing comparative research across flash narratives to clarify how brevity shapes identity and ethical encounter.

Changes of residence are common in contemporary Western societies. Traditional connections to birthplaces, towns and countries are broken as people relocate and migrate, yet where they live remains significant for their identity claims and stories of who they are. This book investigates the continuing importance of place for women’s identities, employing a theoretical and empirical approach based on previous work in narrative and discursive psychology. Through an analysis of women’s talk, the book examines how commonsense meanings shape and limit people’s identity work to establish a connection to place. It argues that talk about place, and especially place of residence, enables a complex positioning of self and others in which identities of gender, class and national identity intersect. It shows how a speaker’s multiple interpretations of where she lives remain central to her life narrative, and to her fragile and idealized definition of home as the place in which she may position herself positively. Narratives of Identity and Place presents a unique and valuable integration of the popular methods of narrative and discourse analysis, compellingly demonstrating the value of these approaches for research on identity.

Language teacher learning and professional identity can be understood as intertwined. Radical changes in practice entail changes in how teachers understand themselves. Thus, narratives of identity should be considered a significant concern of professional learning. Employing a narrative conception of identity, we argue that narrative identity work is a valuable channel for mediating and supporting teacher growth. We highlight how pedagogical coaching, a dialogic and longitudinal form of professional learning, can create a space for narrative identity work. Using a theoretical lens of narrative identity, we explore one pedagogical coach’s collaboration with two elementary ESL specialists over one school year. We consider how the coach employed identity work tactics to support teacher growth. In so doing, we posit two novel identity tactics: reflective articulation and narrative bricolage. This work highlights the potential of teacher narrative identity work in professional learning for ESL specialists particularly, and general education teachers broadly.

Individuals create narratives about the vocational domain of their lives, which represent their identity at work and encompass their remembered past, lived present and imagined future work lives. Grounded in the literature on narrative identity, we examine whether individual differences in features of narrative work identity prospectively predict resilience at work as an important vocational outcome. A sample of 125 teachers was interviewed about their work life stories and provided narratives about work life low points, work life turning points, and their main challenge at work. They completed two measures of resilience at both baseline and 6 months follow-up, as well as measures of control variables (work demands, social support, occupational self-efficacy, purpose of work, optimism and personality traits). Narratives were coded for redemption, contamination, agency and communion. Higher redemption predicted resilience after 6 months and was related to concurrent resilient behavior at work. More agency and less contamination correlated with resilience at baseline CONCLUSIONS: The results suggest that narrative work identity represents a promising construct in the study of work identity and work-related outcomes.

What identity narratives do those engaged in dangerous volunteering fabricate and how do they help satisfy their quest for meaningful lives? Based on a three-year ethnographic study of QuakeRescue, a UK-based voluntary, search and rescue charity, we show that volunteers worked on identity narratives as helpers, heroes and hurt. The primary contribution we make is to analyse how meaningfulness (the sense of personal purpose and fulfilment) that people attribute to their lives is both developed through and a resource for individuals’ narrative identity work. We show how organizationally-based actors attribute significance to their lives through authorship of desired identities that are sanctioned and supplied by societal (master) narratives embedded in and constitutive of local communities. In our case, the helper and hero identities dangerous volunteering offered members were seductive. However, their pursuit had ambiguous and sometimes, arguably, negative consequences for volunteers who had seen action overseas, and our study adds to understanding of how organizational members’ quest for meaningful identities may falter and sometimes fail.

This study examines the narrative identity construction of six self-identified lesbians born between 1945 and1950. This generation of women who are now in their sixties and seventies have lived through immense social change including the decriminalisation of homosexuality, the gay rights movement, civil partnership and gay marriage. They are the first generation to have the opportunity to live openly as lesbians. This study is interested in the impact of such significant social change on their identity construction. The study used semi-structured in-depth interviews to ask six participants how they had experienced living with a lesbian identity. All participants were white and UK born. All were educated to at least degree level and all were in or retired from professional employment. Data was analysed using narrative method grounded in a social constructionist epistemology. Four themes emerged: 1) Participants reported feeling marginalised as children, and unable or unwilling to fulfil the life trajectory expected of them; 2) Finding a community, usually a feminist or lesbian group enabled the development of a positive lesbian identity; 3) Lesbian identity was constructed as more than a sexual identity, rather as a political identity and a way of life; 4) Participants constructed an overall life-narrative of redemption, a narrative which progressed from struggle to satisfaction. The study examines the particular discourses used in identity construction. It is argued that participants are influenced by inversion model, feminist, queer and redemptive narrative discourses. The benefits of using a social constructionist approach for LGBT research are discussed in order to offer a critique of psychology’s role in constructing subjects as well as to gain a fuller picture of participants’ social and political worlds. The implications of this study’s findings for counselling psychology are discussed.

This chapter will provide a overview of the current literature on social media activism. It will show that so far scholars questioned and analysed the different ways in which political activists are appropriating and using social media technologies, to organize and partake into collective actions and mass protests (Gerbaudo, 2012; Cammaerts et al, 2013; Mattoni, 2012; Barassi and Trere, 2012; Barassi, 2015; Kavada, 2014; Castells, 2012; Dencik and Leistert, 2015; Wolfson, 2014; Postill, 2014). They also investigated the complex relationship between technological affordances and the emergence of new political repertoires of protest (Gerbaudo, 2015; Wolfson, 2014) and considered collective understandings of online political identity construction (Kavada, 2015; Milan, 2015). Yet, the chapter will argue that very little attention has been placed on a fundamental aspect of social media activism: the relationship between political self-construction, digital storytelling and identity narratives. Whilst some communication scholars in the past have considered the relationship between digital storytelling and ‘alternative’ publics (Toft and Bennett 2008; Couldry, 2008), within the current literature on social media activism the only example of work, which tackles the complex relationship between the self-construction of political activists, identity narratives and digital storytelling is the work of Vivienne (2016), which explores activists’ need to use digital technologies as tools for self construction through narratives. The chapter will thus try to overcome such gap in the field by introducing the concept of digital ‘political biography’. Drawing on an the findings of an ethnographic study of activists in Italy, the UK and Spain the chapter will argue that social media have become a platform where activists construct their political biographies with reference to both civic engagement and family life. The understanding of the interconnection between social media technologies and political biographies amongst activists is particularly important today, because it can enable us to ask questions about the tension between the creative elements of social media practices for political activists and the broader political economic implications activists data flows on the commercial Web.

BackgroundConfronting terminal illness and the prospect of death and dying can severely undermine an individual’s sense of identity, meaning and purpose in life, leading to existential suffering, increasing hopelessness, depressive symptoms, and death anxieties.ObjectivesThis study explored how narrative approaches can alleviate existential suffering, promote emotional healing, and consolidate identity for individuals confronted with death and dying. Specifically, the study aimed to (1) analyze dimensions of identity reflected in Dignity Therapy (DT) legacy documents from a randomized controlled trial, applying Ricoeur’s framework of selfhood and identity; (2) deepen the understanding of existential suffering in relation to identity and its potential transformation into meaningful adaptation; and (3) synthesize these findings into a conceptual Model of Narrative Identity at the End of Life.MethodsThirty-two DT interviews were analyzed using MAXQDA software for qualitative data analysis. An inductive category development approach was employed to construct a three-tiered coding system capturing key dimensions of identity. Drawing on Ricoeur’s framework of selfhood and identity, a hermeneutic and existential-phenomenological approach was employed to deepen understanding of the lived experiences and narrative reconstruction of self and identity in the context of vulnerability, suffering, loss, and the approaching end of life.ResultsThe identified dimensions of narrative identity included “origin”, “family”, “movement”, “societal”, “work”, “recreation”, “disruption”, “experience of the now”, “feelings”, “sense of self”, and “future”. Analysis of patients’ narratives yielded an in-depth understanding of existential suffering, as well as the contrasting experiences of authenticity, integrity, and wholeness at the end of life. Three core mechanisms emerged through which narrative work may mitigate existential suffering while reaffirming selfhood and identity: (1) cultivation healing connections and embracing hope; (2) the search for coherence and meaning-making; and (3) inner growth and transformation. These findings informed the development of a conceptual Model of Narrative Identity at the End of Life.ConclusionsConfronting death and dying is challenging, yet it may serve as a catalyst for increased self-awareness, self-growth, and transformation towards greater authenticity. Storytelling is a simple yet powerful tool for reclaiming narrative identity and alleviating existential suffering during a time marked by loss of control and powerlessness. Our Model of Narrative Identity at the End of Life illustrates how narrative work facilitates depth work, through which healing connections and hope can be embraced, enabling meaning-based adaptation to terminal illness, thereby empowering individuals to retain a sense of control, agency, and autonomy, even in the face of their own mortality.Trial registrationThis study was registered with Clinical Trial Registry (ClinicalTrials.gov – Protocol Record NCT02646527; date of registration: 04/01/2016).Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12904-025-01876-2.

According to Carr and Collingwood, all sources must be interrogated and ultimately recognised as works of narrative. In the case of comics, a factual record could be asserted in cases where contemporary data, now decipherable historical facts, have been accurately logged within the narrative of the comic book. In such works of narrative, character is all-important. In comics, character types need to be easily recognised and although unique identity tends not to be celebrated, characters can become metaphors, in the way that Haselden’s Colonel Dug-Out stood for the Home Front as a whole and formed part of the Mirror’s campaign for greater efficiency. Similarly Haselden’s personifications in ‘Sad Experiences Of Big and Little Willie’ became a metaphor for the discourse of the war, as the artist captured the humour of the British troops on leave from the front. His work, as an artefact of mass culture, contributed particularly to the British narrative of domestic British identity, and testified to the difficulties of a ‘normal life’ of work, leisure and consumerism in wartime. Allowing his reader to succinctly interpret many levels of meaning and representation within his work, Haselden’s use of cultural iconography in his comic strips clearly and concisely indicates nationality and various assumptions about national character.

This article presents case studies of two men who have a history of political activism on “women's” issues. The aim of my analysis is to describe the interpretive practice (Gubrium and Holstein 1994) through which the respondents construct individual political identities that make sense of their activism. The analysis treats identity as a narrative construction and also demonstrates that the context of this identity work is itself a construction. When respondents talk about their involvement in women's issues, they simultaneously construct an image of the political landscape, their own identities, and a relationship between the two.In their narratives, the two men constructed very different images of the political landscape and identities in relation to it. One man interpreted the autobiography he constructed in terms of socialization and social learning in an effort to demonstrate an ongoing engagement with feminist concerns. The other man invoked a folk theory, consistent with feminist standpoint epistemology (Harding 1990), that used his gender to “define him out” of activism on women's issues.I argue that these cases (1) demonstrate that narrative operates as a site at which men negotiate their relationship to gendered politics and women's issues and (2) represent a previously unrecognized dynamic of interpretive practice (Gubrium and Holstein 1995) in which actors assume discretion over the narrative construction of both their identities and the context in which that identity is to be understood.

This study aims to explore how identity politics was constructed, disseminated, and received by the public in the context of the 2020 Surabaya mayoral election through social media, particularly Instagram and X (formerly Twitter). The research focuses on how identity narratives were manipulated by candidates and their campaign teams as an electoral strategy, how the public responded to such campaigns, and the socio-political impact on the quality of local democracy. Using a qualitative approach and digital netnography methods, this study analyzes candidates' content, campaign hashtags, and public interactions. The findings reveal that social media became a highly contested arena for identity politics, where religious, regional, and moral narratives were used to shape candidate images and mobilize support. However, these practices also resulted in social polarization, minority exclusion, and limited deliberative space. This study contributes to the discourse on digital democracy and identity politics in the context of local elections in Indonesia.

Postbook: Working the Ruins of Feminist Ethnography

I argue that the study of narrative identity would benefit from more sustained and explicit attention to relationships among cultural, institutional, organizational, and personal narratives of identity. I review what is known about these different types of narrative identity and argue that these narratives are created for different purposes, do different types of work, and are evaluated by different criteria. After exploring the inherently reflexive relationships between and among these various narratives of identity, I conclude with demonstrating how examining these relationships would allow a more complete understanding of the mutual relevance of social problem construction and culture, of the work of social service organizations attempting to change clients' personal narratives, and the possibilities of social change. Exploring relationships between and among different types of narrative identity would yield a better understanding of how narratives work and the work narratives do.