Configuration Of Self Research Articles

Opting out of the city: lifestyle migrations, alternative education, and the pursuit of happiness among Chinese middle‐class families

AbstractThis article responds to calls among anthropologists to attend to the aspirational qualities of life pursuits by respecting idealized life visions and acknowledging the suggestiveness of living otherwise. It follows a cohort of formerly urban middle‐class Chinese families that have chosen to ‘opt out’ of their successful city lives to pursue alternative lifestyles and education for their children in China's rural southwest. Drawing on literatures about voluntary lifestyle migrations and alternative parenting and education, I show how these families construct meaningful social worlds through class histories, family ideals, and presentist temporalities that deviate from Western class formation and neoliberal constructions of self defined by individualistic identity pursuits. Through analysing a configuration of self and sociality that emphasizes the family and routes parental self‐aspirations through children, the article deepens our understanding of child‐centredness as a key feature of Chinese lifestyle migrations. It shows how quests for ‘the good life’ take shape through diverse sociohistorical and familial contexts with their own temporal orientations and life politics.

Exploring the Future Social Identity of a PhD Student Dealing With Anxiety: A Psychotherapy Client Study

This psychotherapy case study examines the brief therapeutic journey of a young woman presenting with academic anxiety and the flexible person-centred approach adopted by her therapist, the author. Application during therapy sessions of concepts from humanistic therapy and beyond, such as configurations of self and imagining future possible selves, enabled the client to unravel her anxiety and eventually discover the underlying tension existing between her internal versus external locus of self-evaluation and self-worth, leading her to contemplate her overall social identity and future life choices. The study aimed to stimulate in the client open reflection about how an internal dialogue between parts of the self may reveal underlying internal tensions and how envisaging possible future selves can help identify how self-criticism may be socially and culturally conditioned. This study, being a single-client study, was tailored for the specific therapeutic goals and personality of the client, and thus the generalisability of this therapeutic approach is limited. However, the study aims to shed light on how we may better support through psychotherapy and counselling students at elite universities with a working-class background, who commonly struggle to “fit in” to this environment and make sense of their changing present and future social identity.

Narrative identity among people with disabilities in the United States during the Covid-19 pandemic: The interdependent self

This study examines narrative identity among a large, diverse sample of people with disabilities (PWDs) in the United States during the “second wave” of the Covid-19 pandemic (October-December 2020). The study relied on abductive analyses, combining a purely inductive phase of inquiry followed by two rounds of investigation that filtered inductive insights through three theoretical lenses: social-ecological theory, the theory of narrative identity, and perspectives from the interdisciplinary field of disability studies. The central result was the identification of a particular configuration of self, one that was demonstrably interdependent with both immediate interpersonal contexts and with broader cultural contexts. This interdependent self was interpreted in both positive and negative ways by PWDs. These findings invite future inquiry into commonplace conceptualizations of an independent self at the center of personality research and suggest that dominant conceptualizations of “the good life” may overly emphasize independence.

The impact of expanding the self on the ability to work at relational depth

Aim:Working at relational depth is considered to be one of the pillars of an effective intervention within person-centred approach. So far, the literature has been mainly focused on the description of the phenomenon. However, there has been little evidence explaining how the therapists can enhance their ability to work at depth. This paper seeks to add to a growing body of literature on the factors that can contribute to the development of the therapist’s ability to work at relational depth.Method and Analysis:The case study is based on a systematic analysis of the therapy sessions’ recordings, the client and supervision notes, and the researcher’s reflective diary. The analysis was aimed to track down the development process of relational depth. This was achieved by identifying critical incidents from the therapy sessions and matching these with the incidents from the therapist’s personal therapy and supervision.Findings:The findings from this case study suggest that the therapist’s ability to work at relational depth can be developed through the expansion of the therapist’s self. The more parts of the self the therapist is able to employ during a therapeutic encounter, the greater the potential they have of being able to work at relational depth with their clients.Discussion:The results point to the crucial role of the therapist’s growing self-awareness (expansion of self) and self-acceptance in the development of their ability to work at relational depth. The theory of configurations of self and accurate symbolisation is used to discuss these findings.

A Secure, Scalable and Elastic Autonomic Computing Systems Paradigm: Supporting Dynamic Adaptation of Self-* Services from an Autonomic Cloud

Autonomic computing embeds self-management features in software systems using external feedback control loops, i.e., autonomic managers. In existing models of autonomic computing, adaptive behaviors are defined at the design time, autonomic managers are statically configured, and the running system has a fixed set of self-* capabilities. An autonomic computing design should accommodate autonomic capability growth by allowing the dynamic configuration of self-* services, but this causes security and integrity issues. A secure, scalable and elastic autonomic computing system (SSE-ACS) paradigm is proposed to address the runtime inclusion of autonomic managers, ensuring secure communication between autonomic managers and managed resources. Applying the SSE-ACS concept, a layered approach for the dynamic adaptation of self-* services is presented with an online ‘Autonomic_Cloud’ working as the middleware between Autonomic Managers (offering the self-* services) and Autonomic Computing System (requiring the self-* services). A stock trading and forecasting system is used for simulation purposes. The security impact of the SSE-ACS paradigm is verified by testing possible attack cases over the autonomic computing system with single and multiple autonomic managers running on the same and different machines. The common vulnerability scoring system (CVSS metric) shows a decrease in the vulnerability severity score from high (8.8) for existing ACS to low (3.9) for SSE-ACS. Autonomic managers are introduced into the system at runtime from the Autonomic_Cloud to test the scalability and elasticity. With elastic AMs, the system optimizes the Central Processing Unit (CPU) share resulting in an improved execution time for business logic. For computing systems requiring the continuous support of self-management services, the proposed system achieves a significant improvement in security, scalability, elasticity, autonomic efficiency, and issue resolving time, compared to the state-of-the-art approaches.

Paper presentation: Reconfiguring objects, reconfiguring meanings

Abstract This project takes up the intersection of medium and content as a place where they can radically reconfigure one another. The entire process is a sort of unlearning; the habitual use of paper is disrupted. Physicality and meaning merge and emerge. Readers’ doings interact and transform both the meaning and background – the content (meaning) that traditionally would be simply re-presented via sheets of paper (background). Troubling just a small, habitual action leads to remarkably different modes of knowing and being. Action, object, meaning, reader and author (re)form tentative self-altering assemblages. These assemblages spiral out in new directions, moving beyond the confines of authorial intent. (Re)new(ed) configurations of self, meaning and object spring forth, opening themselves to different vectors. In order to explore these possibilities, I ask that you print out this article double-sided and cut/fold/etc. as instructed.

Getting it together: relational habitus in the emergence of digital literacies

Digital literacies have fast become indispensable for productive engagement, competency, and citizenship in a rapidly changing world. After-school programs represent an important venue where many young people can develop a mastery of digital literacies, encompassing both the creative and responsible use of a broad range of new media. This paper discusses relational habitus (the configuration of self, tools, tasks, and others in a specific activity) in the development of digital literacies among youth in a network of after-school programs called University-Community Links (UC Links). A collaborative effort among university and local community partners throughout California, UC Links provides informal learning activities that enable underserved K-12 youth to develop their digital literacies. After presenting UC Links' approach to informal learning after school, we offer a cognitive ethnography, describing how a distinctive relational habitus configures the links among self, tools, tasks, and others in informal digital activities at one UC Links site in Sacramento, CA. We suggest how this relational habitus informs collaborative activities among university and K-12 students to provide a cognitive platform for an agentive engagement with various new media tools.

Discrepancies between Implicit and Explicit Self–concepts of Intelligence Predict Performance on Tests of Intelligence

Three studies investigated the correspondence between implicit and explicit self–concepts of intelligence and how that correspondence is related to performance on different intelligence tests. Configurations of these two self–concepts were found to be consistently related to performance on intelligence tests in all three studies. For individuals who self–reported high intelligence (high explicit self–concept), a negative implicit self–concept (measured with the Implicit Association Test) led to a decrease in performance on intelligence tests. For participants whose self–report indicated a low self–concept of intelligence, positive automatic associations between the self and intelligence had a similar effect. In line with a stress hypothesis, the results indicate that any discrepant configuration of self–concepts will impair performance. Importantly, the prediction of performance on intelligence tests by the self–concept of intelligence was shown to be independent of self–esteem (Study 3). Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The changing configurations of self-(m)other dialogue in North Cyprus

This paper deals with issues of identity, nationalism, postcolonialism, and self-other relations with a focus on a period of transformative events in North Cyprus. It notes how nationalism has been the dominant means of identification for Cypriots in their modern history, and argues that unless weakened and supplanted by a radically pluralist democracy, nationalism imagines one's identity as an indivisible unity and has no place for different others within the nation. However, a pressing relationship with others and otherness is no stranger to Cypriots either, which makes it clear that the border that defines the ‘we’ of such nationalism is, at the same time, the line that divides the self intrinsically, indicating the otherness of the self or its alterity. Subjectivity involves subjection to the other.

Comment

Each of these rich essays is framed as the discussion of a specific emotion or emotional attitude—the “perception of emotional coldness” (Andrei Zorin), “fear” (Jan Plamper), “disgust” (OlgaMatich and Adi Kuntsman). But these authors offer us both much less and much more. Less, because individual emotions cannot really have their own history, independent of the kinds of self or emotional styles that emerge in given periods. More, because each essay opens u p to these broader, interdependent configurations of self and emotion, creating a window on a complex landscape of emotional change. Zorin's study of Andrei Turgenev provides a glimpse of the transition from an eighteenth- to an early nineteenth-century emotional regime. Plamper's examination of the emergence of military psychology traces the development of a late nineteenth-century social science of the “psyche.” Olga Matich explores the somatic anxieties of an early twentieth-century novelist, reminiscent of a whole strain of troubled and troubling early twentieth-century reflection. Adi Kuntsman probes the powerlessness of victims of Stalinist-era labor camps, whose sufferings resemble those of millions of others caught in modernist state projects aimed at administering mass emotions.

Love in a Confucian Climate: The Perils of Intimacy in Eighteenth-Century China

AbstractThis article explores what an eighteenth-century case of adultery in an elite family tells us about the status of Confucian marriage and challenges to it in the mid-Qing. The case illustrates the problematic nature of conjugal love in this period, which puts emotions in conflict with ritual propriety, the marital relationship in conflict with the interests of the patriline, and subjective desires in conflict with social duties. The case also offers insights into the emotional world of the period, providing intimate details of the emotional texture of three interwoven marital or quasi-marital relationships. Each represents a deviation from the ideal of Confucian marriage and presents a different configuration of self, sentiment and ritual propriety. Together they offer a rich picture of the intimate realm of family life and the forces that worked to destabilize it.

Grounding Ethical Mindfulness for/in Nature: Trees in Their Places

In this paper we examine attempts to reframe the ethics of nature–society relations. We trace a postmodern turn which reflects a distrust of overarching moral codes and narratives and points towards a more nuanced understanding of how personal moral impulses are embedded within, and inter-subjectively constituted by, contextual configurations of self and other. We also trace an ethical turn which reflects a critique of anthropocentrism and points towards moves to non-anthropocentric frames in which the othernesses and ethics of difference are shaped by an acknowledgement that human and non-human agency are relationally bound and assembled in networks and places. These turns suggest the need for a more sensitive ‘ethical mindfulness’ which is grounded in particular space–time contexts. Throughout the paper we draw on research we have conducted on the interconnections between trees and places, and in particular we describe three specific tree-places—an urban square, an urban cemetery and an orchard—which provide grounded contexts of encounter and potential for ethical mindedness. We conclude that notions of intrinsicality, otherness, enchantment and hybridity are helpful in configuring the search for grounded ethical mindfulness, both for and in nature.

Constructing the Self, Constructing America: A Cultural History of Psychotherapy

This is an ambitious book. It seeks to describe manner in which concept of has been defined and experienced in various historical eras in America, to explain how psychotherapy contributed to this concept, and finally to criticize psychotherapy's contributions and argue that it needs to change direction. The author is not completely successful in all these endeavors, but he does succeed in producing an interesting, contentious, and clearly written book. Cushman, a historian and practicing psychologist, lays out his major themes and biases in his first two chapters, which can be summarized by following passages: over last 150 years, American history has become a history of modern ills of isolation, uncertainty and doubt; the current configuration of self is empty self... characterized by a pervasive sense of personal emptiness and... committed to value of self liberation through consumption; There seems little

Ideology obscured: Political uses of the self in Daniel Stern's infant.

Daniel Stern's (1985) respected theory of infant development is critiqued from a social-constructionist perspective in order to demonstrate how decontextualized psychology theories inadvertantly perpetuate the political status quo. Self-invariants in the core-self phase are discussed as reflections of the current configuration of self rather than a discovery of universal elements of human development. The parental attunement response is reinterpreted as a way by which Western interiority and subjectivity are socially constructed. Language as the fundamental cause of alienation and dividedness is disputed. In Stern's theory, universal qualities of the self and the processes of language acquisition are responsible for several psychological ills characteristic of the 20th century. By exonerating political structures as causal factors, decontextualized theories legitimize, justify, and perpetuate current arrangements of power and privilege.

Why the self is empty: Toward a historically situated psychology.

This article presents a contextualized treatment of the current configuration of self, some of the pathologies that plague it, and the technologies that attempt to heal it. Of particular interest is the historical shift from the Victorian, sexually restricted self to the post-World War II empty self. The empty self is soothed and made cohesive by becoming "filled up" with food, consumer products, and celebrities. Its historical antecedents, economic constituents, and political consequences are the focus of this article. The two professions most responsible for healing the empty self, advertising and psychotherapy, find themselves in a bind: They must treat a psychological symptom without being able to address its historical causes. Both circumvent the bind by employing the life-style solution, a strategy that attempts to heal by covertly filling the empty self with the accoutrements, values, and mannerisms of idealized figures. This strategy solves an old problem but creates new ones, including an opportunity for abuse by exploitive therapists, cult leaders, and politicians. Psychology's role in constructing the empty self, and thus reproducing the current hierarchy of power and privilege, is examined.