Enactment Of Identity Research Articles

‘My mom says you’re not really a teacher’: Rhizomatic explorations of ever-shifting student teacher identities and experiences

Current teacher preparation programmes in the USA are required to report to state agencies on how their students are attaining professional preparation standards in order to fully become named as a ‘teacher’. As teacher educators immersed in these neo-liberal policies and expectations, the authors sought a way for their students to work through these expectations by having them write personal narratives of their experiences in university courses and early childhood practicums. The authors found the results from their initial analysis troubling and sought further meaning from the students’ and other texts. Only when the authors returned to literature that was closer to their own feminist, post-structural core did they find some (un)comfort. They had become distracted by institutionalized, modernist and neo-liberal notions of linear teacher development. They had nearly overlooked the majority of their data illustrating student teachers’ often clandestine classroom experiences, leading to a non-linear ‘messiness’ of constantly shifting, vacillating, variable and ever-flowing multiple identity enactments in the narratives. Drawing on student teachers’ narratives in order to challenge and rupture the neo-liberal truth(s) of linear teacher development, the authors argue that teachers’ identities are not built on the dissemination of discrete knowledges and specified skills and dispositions articulated in standards, but rather are under ever-evolving, messy, multifaceted, multilayered construction through their experiences with children, families and fellow teachers. Finally, the authors explore possible implications for teacher educators and teacher education.

Becoming a Bilingual Reader as Linguistic and Identity Enactments

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Sacred children and colonial subsidies: The missionary performance of racial separation in Belgian Congo, 1946–1959

While most Protestant missions in Belgian Congo gladly accepted the colonial state’s offer of educational subsidies in 1946, a strong emphasis on church–state separation led the American Mennonite Brethren Mission (AMBM) to initially reject these funds. In a surprising twist, however, the AMBM reversed its position in 1952. Through archival research, I demonstrate that a major factor that led the AMBM to accept subsidies was the creation and institutionalization of a racially separate ecclesial identity from that of Congolese Christians. Moreover, the development of this separate identity was closely intertwined with missionaries’ vision for a “white children’s school,” geographically separated from their work with Congolese. The enactment of white identity helped pave the way for the acceptance of subsidies, both by bringing the missionaries more strongly into the orbit of the colonial logic of domination, and by clarifying the heavy cost of failing to comply with the state’s expectations. Through this case study, I engage with the complexity of missionaries’ political role in a colonial African context by focusing on the everyday political choices by which missionaries set aside their children as sacred, by exploring how ideas about separateness were embedded into institutions, and by demonstrating how attention to the subtleties of identity performance can shed new light on major missionary decisions.

Becoming a researcher: Re-inventing writing spaces

This paper draws on a three-year study of postgraduate women writers pursuing research degrees at a UK university to explore how they develop identities as academic researchers and writers. Using extracts from written texts, talk-and-text interview transcripts, and writing journals from four postgraduate students in a range of disciplines, I explore the material conditions under which postgraduate women write and the significance of such spaces for the re-invention of themselves as academic writers and researchers. Foregrounding the notion of place and space (Agnew, 2011), I present extracts from four ‘writing tales’ (after Lather, 1991) to explore academic writing at postgraduate level. The tales include ‘visible’ and ‘occluded’ (Swales, 1996) written genres in academia and document the ways in which these facilitate the enactment of postgraduate academic identity. The use of ‘tales’ as an analytical unit and as a form of representation provides a mechanism through which multiple data sources are drawn together to illuminate a highly contextualised, and potentially gendered, dimension of postgraduate academic writing.

Alter Personalities in Dissociative Identity Disorder: Artefacts or Authentic Entities? Re-Evaluating the Available Evidence

An enduring debate has undoubtedly existed with respect to the legitimacy of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). While some contend that authentic dissociative experiences are supported by strong associations with a history of childhood abuse, others argue that the purported dissociative experiences are identity enactments sustained and reinforced by states of extreme suggestibility and fantasy proneness. However, the combination of theoretical speculation and empirical findings has thus far failed to provide unequivocal evidence for the existence of alters as either metaphors for different emotional states or truly autonomous entities that are capable of willful action. This article reviews the available evidence from a number of investigations examining the memory performance, behavioral manifestations, and physiological profiles of alters in DID. It concludes that neither memory studies nor psychobiological studies have delivered compelling evidence that alters of DID patients exist in a factual sense. It moreover demonstrates that some studies have suffered from methodological weaknesses, while findings from the overall body of literature are open to multiple interpretations. As such, they do not refute an interpretation of alters in terms of metaphors for disparate affective states. Recommendations for future studies aiming to investigate the phenomenon of alter are discussed.

A Critical Metaphor Analysis of Disability Identity and Ideology in the Thai Undergraduates’ Home for Children with Disabilities Website Project

This study examines how the Home for Children with Disabilities and disability identities were construed by Thai undergraduates in their website project through an analysis of metaphors. Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA) was the framework for analyzing the use of metaphors and the participants’ enactment of identity and social representation. The critical analysis revealed four dominant themes: ‘JOURNEY’, ‘FAMILY’, ‘OBJECT’ and ‘HOPE’ all utilized to reproduce the Home for Children with Disabilities identity as a ‘warm’, ‘effective’ and ‘altruistic’ organization that provides their children with forms of care and compassion. The analysis, in addition, showed the participants’ representation of disability identity as a non-static and changeable entity. Children with disabilities were seen as ‘capable of becoming self-supporting’. Additionally, the semi-structured interviews conducted with the participants indicated that social oppression was believed to be the cause of disability-related issues and that true understanding was needed to terminate social discrimination.

Armed activism as the enactment of a collective identity: the case of the Provisional IRA between 1969 and 1972

This paper argues that micro-mobilization into armed activism is strongly motivated by the enactment of an identity that people already have prior to their mobilization as a way to strongly assert and emphasize individual agency in the face of major changes in the political context. Empirically, it advocates that those who joined the Provisional IRA between 1969 and 1972 did so in order to respond to a need for action by a northern nationalist community that stemmed from a perceived, alleged or actual, sense of second-class citizenship. We suggest that the importance of identity rather than ideology can also help us to explain why IRA members and former members overwhelmingly accepted the compromise peace settlement of the 1990s despite the fact that core ideological goals had not been realized. We conclude by suggesting avenues for future research outside the Irish context.

A Process Model of Multiple Minority Identity Verification in the Workplace

Despite progress towards diverse and inclusive workplaces, challenges remain. We utilize identity theory and sensemaking literature to develop a theoretical model of multiple identity verification and enactment in the workplace that generates insight into why instance of covert discrimination may persist and what potential individual and organizational outcomes are. Our theoretical model challenge existing notions of diversity as a static concept and explicate the process underpinning multiple minority identity enactment in the workplace. In doing so, we introduce the concept of interpretational ambiguity, the failure to make sense of aversive and conflicting circumstances that individuals experience during identity disrupting acts, as a key missing ingredient in diversity and inclusion literature.

Discourse Analysis of Microteaching : Dynamic Identities and Situational Frames

Ryoo, Hye-Kyung. 2017. “Discourse Analysis of Microteaching: Dynamic Identities and Situational Frames”. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 25(2), 165~196. The present paper is based on a discourse analysis of Microteaching speech events of Korean pre-service training students taking a teacher training course in college. The purpose of this study is to look closely into what really is going on in the discourse of microteaching events in terms of the participants' identity enactment and framing of situations. Fifteen pre-service training students' microteaching lessons were video-taped and transcribed to examine detailed discourse features. The results of the qualitative analysis of the discourse revealed frequent dynamic shifting and enactments of identities in momentary situational frames. The participants in the present study were able to act on diverse situational frames by orienting to locally-managed situated identities.

Migrant Identities in a New Immigration Destination: Revealing the Limitations of the ‘Hard working’ Migrant Identity

AbstractMigrant labour has transformed local economies in many places, often helping to reverse long‐term decline. The emergence of new immigration destinations (NID) globally brings mixed opportunities for the individuals involved. This paper uses empirical evidence, focusing on the workplace, to show the performance, construction, and significance of migrant identity. By using social identity theory to examine what it means to be a ‘migrant’, it follows from Goffman's overarching concern with social interactions and his promotion of microanalysis as analytical lenses.The paper reveals the ambiguity of the label ‘migrant’. It shows how the external application or internal enactment of migrant identities bestows particular status that represents an asset or an obstacle to integration. It can mean ‘hard‐working’, ‘less deserving’, and ‘exploitable’, and it also denotes ‘lazy’ individuals. While some individuals assume the hard‐working and ‘exploitable’ migrant identity in certain circumstances because of the benefits that it brings, this status can also cause high levels of dissatisfaction and distress among migrants. The research shows how the creation of a migrant identity limits the structures and networks from which migrants may draw resources and in so doing curtails the possibilities for social change due to migration. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley &amp; Sons, Ltd.

Considering Alternate Sources of Role Identity: Childless Parents and Their Animal “Kids”

Identity theory posits that role identity is negotiated between human social actors and is based in broader cultural expectations about how particular statuses should be performed. I argue that the formation of role identity in actors can also occur in relationship to nonhuman actors, if they are perceived as minded. Depending on context and human perception, identity can be formed as a result of interaction and developing “theory of mind” with nonhuman animals, directly implicating the animal. Using in‐depth interviews of childless and childfree companion animal owners, I demonstrate the existence of a parent identity in childless participants that would not otherwise be present were it not for interaction with the animal “child.” This identity is confirmed in participant narratives describing substantial behavioral output aligned with the U.S. cultural ideal of “parent.” Likewise, I find that significant others provide external support for the enactment of this role identity, allowing participants to verify self‐in‐situation. Overall, my analysis emphasizes the importance of considering nonhuman sources as occupying counterstatus positions in the formation of role identity while highlighting how these relationships affect interaction in the childfree and childless home, thus expanding scholarly understanding about both identity formation and emerging family types.

‘Your care and concern are my burden!’

While the enactment of gendered identities has been a key focus in the field of sociolinguistics and im/politeness (e.g. Holmes, 1995; Lakoff, 1975; Mills, 2003), research specifically investigating females’ emic understanding in relation to im/politeness has not been paid much attention. Building on prior work on ‘attentiveness’ (Fukushima, 2004, 2009, 2011, 2013, 2015; Fukushima &amp; Haugh, 2014), this article aims to further examine the emic understandings and evaluations of ‘attentiveness’ and ‘empathy’ in relation to ‘im/politeness’ by female speakers of Mandarin Chinese. It is suggested that, although the concepts of attentiveness (zhoudao) and empathy (titie) are intrinsically polite, these two concepts are found to be discursively disputable through the emergence of the three folk notions, meddlesomeness (jipo), familiarity, and reciprocity in the course of metapragmatic interviews. These notions give rise to cultural nuances in the evaluations of im/politeness which are thus grounded in a particular language or culture.

Identity and power in co-produced activist research

Methodologies such as participatory, feminist, or co-produced research aim to democratise research practice. These kinds of methodologies are devised and embraced by activists as they work to shift the balance of power. Activists and researchers can be uneasy bedfellows, and trying to be both activist and researcher can lead to identity confusion and communication problems. Yet within democratic research practice, researchers and others are often required to enact multiple identities. This article will highlight some of the relationships between activism, research, identity and power. An account of an incident that occurred during a piece of co-produced activist evaluation research, which threatened to undermine that research, illustrates some of the relationships between the enactment of multiple identities and power imbalances in the practice of co-produced activist research. The theoretical work of Karen Barad is used as a lens to help elucidate the complexity of this phenomenon and identify what, and how, we can learn from such incidents.

Enactments of Identity in the New Zealand Short Story

New Zealand, as a nation, has been in existence for less than two centuries—whether one dates its assumption of sovereignty to the 1835 Declaration of Independence by the Confederation of United Tribes, the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi between Maori and the British Crown, or its attainment of Dominion status in 1907. The question of a separate cultural identity for this post-colonial, multi-cultural country has therefore always been a complex one, and one which has had a strong influence on much of our artistic expression to date: particularly, perhaps because of its inherent tendency towards the self-analysis only really possible within language, literature. The fact that our most famous locally born writer to date, Katherine Mansfield, specialised in the short story has certainly helped to establish that as a vital genre here. This paper accordingly takes four successive anthologies of local short fiction—Frank Sargeson’s Speaking for Ourselves (1945), Michael Morrissey’s The New Fiction (1985), Warwick Bennett and Patrick Hudson’s Rutherford’s Dreams (1995), and Tina Shaw and Jack Ross’s Myth of the twenty-firstCentury (2006)—and attempts to characterise their respective, overlapping visions of New Zealand identity by conducting a close reading of a representative story from each of them. The essay concludes with a call for a new anthology which might attempt to give expression to this series of gradual erosions of our initial cultural certainties into something more adequate to the realities of our place in the world, both geographically and culturally.

Conversations with otherness: Violence and womanhood in narratives of women imprisoned for violent crimes

Widely circulated cultural conceptions about women who have committed violence recurrently place them in positions of otherness in relation to what is considered as being normal, valuable womanhood. This article explores ways in which Finnish women imprisoned for violent crimes grapple with this troubled relation between womanhood and violence in their enactments of gendered identities. The analysis is based on a novel, discursive-affective approach to positioning that can accommodate complexity and context-specific variability in enactments of identities. Four different, recurring modes of positioning are discussed in the analysis: aligning with forcefulness, aligning with vulnerability, (dis)-aligning with demonization and aligning with motherhood. By shedding light not only on the complexity and fluidity of these gendered identity enactments but also on their affectively ambivalent dimensions, the analysis contributes to attempts at countering reductionist views about women who have committed violence and the gendered dichotomizations that they work to reproduce.

The unified model of vegetarian identity: A conceptual framework for understanding plant-based food choices

By departing from social norms regarding food behaviors, vegetarians acquire membership in a distinct social group and can develop a salient vegetarian identity. However, vegetarian identities are diverse, multidimensional, and unique to each individual. Much research has identified fundamental psychological aspects of vegetarianism, and an identity framework that unifies these findings into common constructs and conceptually defines variables is needed. Integrating psychological theories of identity with research on food choices and vegetarianism, this paper proposes a conceptual model for studying vegetarianism: The Unified Model of Vegetarian Identity (UMVI). The UMVI encompasses ten dimensions—organized into three levels (contextual, internalized, and externalized)—that capture the role of vegetarianism in an individual's self-concept. Contextual dimensions situate vegetarianism within contexts; internalized dimensions outline self-evaluations; and externalized dimensions describe enactments of identity through behavior. Together, these dimensions form a coherent vegetarian identity, characterizing one's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors regarding being vegetarian. By unifying dimensions that capture psychological constructs universally, the UMVI can prevent discrepancies in operationalization, capture the inherent diversity of vegetarian identities, and enable future research to generate greater insight into how people understand themselves and their food choices.

Identity Work: Enactment of Racial-Ethnic Identity in Everyday Life

ABSTRACTIn this theoretical analysis, we discuss the attributional and enactment approaches to identity and present a new ethnic-racial identity enactment model derived from extant theory and research. We highlight modes of identity work that provide (1) self-concept and self-esteem protection; (2) achievement and success during everyday encounters; (3) a sense of belonging and attachment to one’s ascriptive group; and (4) the relation between internalized oppression and internalized racism in everyday exchanges. We discuss the integration of self-concept mechanisms with mindsets and intentions specific to ethnic-racial identity dynamics. The article ends by highlighting a research procedure that fuses the attributional and enactment approaches to identity research.

Agency, Identity, and the Emergence of Ritual Experience

We draw from psychological research on meaningful activity to identify the conditions that promote ritual experience among individuals. Specifically, we ask whether feelings of agency and expressions of identity inform the extent to which individuals experience routinized parts of their lives as meaningful rituals. Interviews and a random factorial survey of U.S. citizens demonstrate that the three most significant factors productive of ritualized experience for our sample were a sense of purposiveness, the experience of autonomy, and identity enactment. Our findings resonate with the psychological literature on meaningful activities and suggest a new appreciation for the role of agency and identity in generating meaningful ritual experience for individuals.

‘There is no cure for this’

Professional identities as a concept, and identities ascribed to speech and language therapists (SLTs) by people who stutter are the focus of this paper. A descriptive model is presented, outlining aspects of the co-construction of professional identities. People who stutter attend speech and language therapy and co-construct their own identities and the professional identities of SLTs in the process. Data from interviews with people who stutter is analysed using a dialogic/performance analysis (Riessman, 2008). This form of narrative analysis facilitates attention to the dialogical enactment of identities. The data leads to a focus on the negotiation of therapists’ professional identities as being able to provide a ‘cure’ in stuttering therapy with value placed on fluency – or stutter-free speech – as opposed to considering the whole person and working on feelings and thoughts as well as speech. The concept of professional identities – as dynamic and plural – is discussed and the negotiation of power relations as a facet of identity is explored.

Travelling Spirits, Localizing Roots: Transnationalisms, Home and Generation among Portuguese-Canadians in British Columbia

The objective of this article is to address the relation between transnationalism and intergenerational transformations of the notions of home and belonging. While doing an ethnographic research in Vancouver, British Columbia, it was possible to pinpoint the existence of two discourses about Portuguese-Canadian ethnicity. The first one, centered on the Holy Ghost festivals, (re)produces an idea of ‘azoreanness’, albeit fragmented along the islands of origin, and is linked to specific social networks that go from Vancouver to the Azores. It is essentially fostered by the migrants that arrived in the region after the 1950s and to whom the festas are a constant reminder of the emotional, symbolic and social ties with these Atlantic Islands. The second discourse is fostered by the children of these migrants, which moved away from the Holy Ghost festas and the Portuguese Catholic Parish, and is centered on a notion of portugueseness. This enactment of a national identity has to be interpreted in the context of Canadian multicultural politics and specific diasporic politics developed by the Portuguese authorities in the region. Simultaneously, this second discourse is also part and parcel of an intergenerational social mobility process. Based on this ethnographic case study, this article has two main arguments: on one hand, I want to show how home and homeland are fields of struggle for hegemonic representation in the public domain and and on the other hand how such debates have to be interpreted in relation to local and transnational political contexts and subjectivities.