Collective Identity Work Research Articles

Funny climate activism? A collaborative storied analysis of young climate advocates’ digital activisms

Young people involved in climate justice activism engage in a range of tactics across entangled ‘online’ and ‘offline’ spaces. This article explores the affordances and ambivalences of humour in digital modes of contention for young people (aged 12–30) involved in climate justice activism. Four of the authors are 19–22 years old and involved in climate justice activist organising, and one author is a university-based researcher in her early 40s. Through a collaborative, intergenerational analysis of stories of hybrid digital climate activisms, we ask: what is the role of humour in young people’s varied activist repertoires? Thinking with the conceptual resources of adrienne maree brown’s Pleasure Activism, we pose three analytic provocations: (i) humour can amplify generational tensions; (ii) humour is entwined with individual and collective identity-work; and (iii) sometimes humour is ‘just a thing’ (that can also help with burnout). We collaboratively analyse how young people use humour to dissent, through lampooning hierarchical power structures and profit-driven systems, drawing attention to intersectional injustices, and joyfully expressing affinity and solidarity. At the same time, humour may exclude, offend, and reinforce existing divisions and injustices. Humour is an underappreciated feature of organising towards a more just world, even as the pleasurable and just outcomes of humour are not guaranteed. We argue for further attention to young people’s multimodal repertoires across hybrid spaces, and the multiplicity of feelings that accompany climate justice activisms.

Destigmatizing The Occupation: Role of Occupational Branding and Collective Identity Work

By questioning the fundamental nature of the occupation and targeting the occupational members as 'dirty' and 'immoral,' occupational stigma is a big concern still plaguing our employment landscape worldwide. It threatens employees' identity, develops the feeling of being unvalued, and lowers their dignity. However, by focusing only on coping rather than stigma removal, existing studies fall short of offering a solution to the issue. In the current study, we address this gap by proposing how destigmatization of the occupation can be achieved by changing the existing societal narratives about occupation and by building occupational branding. We empirically explore our idea by conducting a qualitative study on the Indian beauty occupation to understand how they have achieved the destigmatization of their occpation. We employ the method of critical discourse analysis (CDA) as it helps understand the discourses of social wrong and unravels various means of eliminating the social wrong. Accordingly, we propose that by using collective identitiy work, occupational members brand 3Ps of the occupation i.e. people, process and purpose to achieve destigmatization. Our study contributes by exploring how the prominent discourses of stigma on the professions get modified into stigma-free legitimate discourses with the help of occupational branding.

Collective Identity Work in Institutional pluralism

Collective Identity Work in Institutional pluralism

Collective identities and formal ideologies in the Irish grassroots pro-asylum seeker movement

This article examines the relationship between formal ideologies and processes of collective identity construction across two key waves of mobilisation of pro-asylum-seeker groups in Ireland, namely radical anti-racism and the multicultural support group. In each period, a formal ideological stance delimited the scope of actions available to members. In examining the interplay between collective identity and ideology, the actions and trajectories of individual social movement organisations (SMOs) and the movement at large can be better understood. Processes of collective identity construction facilitated SMO members in creating conditional senses of ‘weness’. In instances, these challenged formal ideologies with differing results. In the case of radical anti-racism, it created a reformist/radical division among members. In the multicultural support group, it created a reformist/non-reformist division. These cleavages are crucial to understanding how the movement progressed over time. Collective identity work is understood as a means through which individuals can challenge or reinforce formal ideologies, thus playing a crucial role in the trajectories of the SMOs examined and their repertoire of actions.

Credibility lost: attempting to reclaim an expert identity in an HR professional context

Professional insecurity is a long‐standing concern within HR, with claims to expertise seen as critical to credibility. Considering HR as an epistemic community and drawing on the identity work literature, we examine an identity threat to, and subsequent response by, a training and development (T&D) team. Based on ethnographic exposure to their practice, we explore how team members experience the threat and follow their attempts to re‐establish their position in the local epistemic community, the HR department. We examine both individual and collective identity work, considering how both the identity threat and subsequent responses are embedded within T&D and HR practice more broadly. Through this analysis, we offer academic insight on the nature of HR practice and the construction of claims to expertise.

Identity Dilemmas: Toward a More Situated Understanding

When are identity dilemmas—when people possess identities that conflict with one another and both are potentially stigmatizing—most likely to occur? Are they the result of generic social processes? A review of some of the extant research on “identity work” suggests that historical “misalignments” of culture and stratification, which we refer to as “lag,” create the greatest potential for stigma and the reproduction of inequalities. Lag is exacerbated by complex, intersecting axes of hierarchy, and amplified as symbolic environments globalize and subcultures multiply. Articulating culture and structure reveals how power plays out in interaction, and highlights the omnipresence of struggles for treatment as “fully human.” We consider whether “alignment” is even possible when multiple dimensions of social location intertwine, compete, and collide. Following Schwalbe and Mason‐Schrock (1996), we argue that “subcultural” or collective identity work that brings new meanings into dominant cultural narratives may offer the greatest hope, but in the interim all coping strategies are costly.

Engaging Girls’ Sociohistorical Identities in Science

What does it mean for ethnic minority girls, who have historically been marginalized by schools, to “see themselves” in science? Schools fail to create spaces for students to engage their identity resources in the learning of science or to negotiate and enact new science-related identities. This study investigates relationships among identity, engagement, and science discourse and provides a conceptual argument for how and why underserved ethnic minority girls engage in collective identity work, with science learning as a valued byproduct. The primary context for the study was Lunchtime Science, a 4-week lunchtime intervention for girls failing their science courses. There were 4 distinct ways the girls engaged in learning during Lunchtime Science: gleaning content for outside worlds, supporting the group, negotiating stories across worlds, and critiquing science. Each pattern had a signature profile with variations in the sociohistorical narratives used as resources, the positioning of one another as competent learners, and the type of science story critiqued and constructed. These findings indicate that when the girls were given opportunities to engage their personal narratives, and when science was open to critique, ethnic minority girls leveraged common historical narratives to build science narratives. Moreover, the girls’ identity work problematizes the commonplace instructional notion of “bridging” students’ everyday stories with science stories, which often privileges the science story and the composing of “science” identities. It also challenges researchers to investigate how the construction of narratives is broader than 1 community of practice, broader than 1 individual, and broader than 1 generation.

Creating a Godless Community: The Collective Identity Work of Contemporary American Atheists

Based on 45 in‐depth interviews, textual analysis, and participant observation with seven different atheist organizations, this article investigates the collective identity work of atheists in the United States. It explores the social psychological and interactional dynamics of atheist organizations as well as how they contribute to the construction and maintenance of atheist identities. I discuss the various strategies atheists employ as they collectively manage a stigmatized identity and negotiate the meaning of their atheism with one another and with the nonatheist public. This is accomplished in part through an analysis of the identity politics and minority discourse contemporary atheists currently engage. In addition, and more broadly, this study explores the relationship between collective identity and social action through an analysis and description of contemporary atheist activism.

Hülya's Migration to Germany as Self-Sacrifice Undergone and Suffered in Love for her Parents, and her Later Biographical Individualisation. Biographical Problems and Biographical Work of Marginalisation and Individualisation of a Young Turkish Woman in Germany

This article is divided in two parts; the second part (consisting of Sections 3, 4 and 5) will be published in the next issue of FQS. After asking what is typical or general in the life history of Hulya as a migrant worker in Germany and what is exceptional or unique (Section 1) the biographical processes of her life history up to the most central episodes of her conventional and estranging pre-arranged marriage and her way out of it through divorce after having stayed in Ger- many for several years will be delineated (Section 2). Before reaching this turning point Hulya not only undergoes the common type trajectory of a migrant worker—the trajectory of being a cultural stranger, of being void of language, of being exploited by hardest sorts of work—, but, in addition, her personal biographical development is retarded by the exceptional, but probably not totally untypical experience of being trapped within a situation of compulsory labour (resembling slave labour). For a long time she also feels obliged to remain in her trajectory position of an isolated migrant worker, since originally she had mainly meant to go to Germany in order to support her poverty stricken family back in Turkey with her earnings. Partly based on the fear that she will get self-alienated and petrified like the older women with whom she dwells and works together Hulya accepts a pre-arranged marriage (probably mainly negotiated by her mother) as the only way out of her predicament. But willy-nilly Hulya must learn that she—already embarked on her way to an individualized and emancipated existence—cannot live in such a superimposed arrangement, and therefore she distances herself from her husband through the biographical escape action schemes first of returning to Germany alone and then of pushing ahead her divorce. Hulya's way of rendering her life history (which Section 3 will focus on) is quite straightforward in most parts of her narrative. But it is obvious that she is ashamed to tell about her estranging marriage and her disreputable divorce. Dealing with this emotionally difficult turning point in her life history Hulya tends to report in a quite laconic and evasive way. But in doing so she realizes that her story line would get implausible if she continued narrating like this. Therefore she inserts a number of background constructions and argumentative explanations in her laconic line of narration. Part of the article is focussed on this disorderly kind of rendering. Then the 4th part of the article resumes the reconstruction of the biographical processes of Hulya's life up to the presence of the interview situation in 1986. Here the focus is on (a) Hulya's medical problems seen as a typical transformation of the migrant worker's trajectory of exploitation and self-alienation and (b) her processes of learning and metamorphosis in reaching the present biographical and social state of a highly individualized and emancipated woman. Part of Hulya's emancipation process is her disguised self-distancing from the ways of feeling and thinking of her late beloved mother and her expec- tations towards the life course of her daughter Hulya. (This is biographical work hidden even to her- self.) The 5th section of the interview deals with Hulya's blend of biographical work and of collective identity work in existing as a marginal personality according to the early Chicago Sociologists'

Learning to Speak Out in an Abstinence Based Sex Education Group: Gender and Race Work in an Urban Magnet School

This article explores race and gender work done under the auspices of an abstinence based sex education program in an urban magnet school. While it is generally acknowledged that there is not nearly enough sexuality education in schools, that which does exist leaves much to be desired. In these curricula young men are painted as biologically programmed sexual aggressors while women are scripted as passive victims whose only subject position is that of not provoking easily sexually aroused males. In addition, research shows that compulsory heterosexuality is inscribed throughout the school curriculum. Here the author enters as a participant in one such sexuality program and works ethnographically with a voluntarily constituted girls group in an urban magnet school. As part of a larger look at “sites of hope” in urban America, the author focuses specifically on the ways in which this group offers a space within which personal and collective identity work takes place and assesses the extent to which such a space offers a “home” within which social stereotypes are contested and new identities tried on. The implications of such spaces for far reaching social change are explored.

Learning to Speak Out in an Abstinence Based Sex Education Group: Gender and Race Work in an Urban Magnet School

This article explores race and gender work done under the auspices of an abstinence based sex education program in an urban magnet school. While it is generally acknowledged that there is not nearly enough sexuality education in schools, that which does exist leaves much to be desired. In these curricula young men are painted as biologically programmed sexual aggressors while women are scripted as passive victims whose only subject position is that of not provoking easily sexually aroused males. In addition, research shows that compulsory heterosexuality is inscribed throughout the school curriculum. Here the author enters as a participant in one such sexuality program and works ethnographically with a voluntarily constituted girls group in an urban magnet school. As part of a larger look at “sites of hope” in urban America, the author focuses specifically on the ways in which this group offers a space within which personal and collective identity work takes place and assesses the extent to which such a space offers a “home” within which social stereotypes are contested and new identities tried on. The implications of such spaces for far reaching social change are explored.