Collective Identity Formation Research Articles

Metini / Fort Ross. Russians in California – beginnings

The article presents the functioning of the heritage of the Russian colonization of northern California in the cultural memory of the inhabitants of these and surrounding areas of the state that belonged to Russia in the 19th century. The research concerns a specific location, the settlement known as Fort Ross, located in northern California. Today it has the status of the State Historic Park. The non-governmental organization Fort Ross Conservancy operates there, and this activity was analyzed using a case study research method. The characteristic elements of the cultural memory of the inhabitants of this territory were researched, such as: important historical figures, the most important events associated with for the formation of collective identity, institutions and organizations acting as memory guardians, as well as material and immaterial cultural heritage. These elements were analyzed in terms of the differentiation of their functioning in local cultural memory depending on a specific group (ethnic, cultural, religious) or specific subjects of cultural memory.

The Emergent Self: A Psychosocial Study of Identity, Memory, and Trauma in The Kite Runner

This study aims at examining the impact of trauma from a psycho-social perspective, with a specific focus on the issues of psychological violence leading to social oppression, identity formation, and disenfranchisement of characters in Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner. The purpose of the psychosocial approach is to "express the recognition that there is always a close, ongoing circular interaction between an individual's psychological state and his or her social environment" (Agger 2001:307). Most of the research catering the "Afghan" problem has been from the political viewpoint, with little or no insight into psycho-social perspective dealing with identity, ethnicity, memory and gender.Since trauma is rooted in individual as well as collective forms of identity, it may affect the process of both collective and personal identity formation. This research will explore the common themes of trauma and suffering with respect to episodes of fear and violence in the book.

‘Fight pandemics with protective masks or gender?’ Emerging collective identities and anti-gender movements on Twitter during the COVID-19 crisis in Sweden

ABSTRACT The focus of this article is the formation of collective identities and mobilization of grassroots anti-gender movement in Sweden in connection to the intensification of activities on Twitter during the initial period of the COVID-19 pandemic in spring 2020. This loosely connected network understands itself as being outside of what is described as a dominant gender order in Sweden, where feminists, gender perspectives and work for LGBTQ-rights supposedly undermine the power of the state and its ability to protect the people during the pandemic. The network is also against Islam. The network does not necessarily have an ambition to come together and organize manifestations. Instead, an imagined collective identity has been formed through an interpellation of the state to implement the “core tasks” and not be governed by feminists. A political will is articulated, which threatens the centrality of equality and social justice for democracies. We found the performativity of digital technology to be of importance for how these network and identities come into being. Crisis periods produce a context of intensification of affects and emotions that, supposedly, have been there for a long time and mobilizes desire for an authoritarian state.

Solidarity in diversity: online petitions and collective identity in Hong Kong's Anti-Extradition Bill Movement

AbstractCollective identity is a key catalyst of protest mobilization. How does collective identity come into existence among strangers with diverse backgrounds, especially in movements without a centralized leadership? Although collective identity is often seen as something constructed by movement organizations or out of established networks, we describe a more bottom-up and decentralized process in which movement collective identity is created through the horizontal mobilization of intermediate identities, which leverage pre-existing social identifications to induce commitment among individuals. Focusing on Hong Kong's Anti-Extradition Bill Movement of 2019, we argue that online petitions against the controversial bill created intermediate group identities among myriad social groups, such as alumni, professions, hobby groups, and residential communities. These intermediate identities provided rich discursive resources for previously disconnected individuals to collectively perceive the threat of the bill and see the obligation to act, which, in turn, shaped a strong collective identity early on in the protests. Our findings may help contribute to a more nuanced understanding of collective identity formation in contemporary leaderless movements.

Editorial

This issue is—in many ways—united by a common theme: revisiting the past and rethinking the problems it poses. Beginning with a renewed test of the biographical availability hypothesis, moving through a reassessment of the dynamics of collective identity formation, and stopping at a re-evaluation of the legacies of the 2011 protest wave, this issue begs that we reconsider that which we thought we already knew and open our minds to novel nuance and differential dynamics. It is thus fitting that it closes with a reflection on the life's work of William Gamson, whose work prompted a great many scholars of social movements and contentious politics to reassess and re-evaluate much that we had assumed to know over the years.

Understanding Collective Identity in Virtual Spaces: A Study of the Youth Climate Movement

How does collective identity form in virtual spaces and what role do hashtags play? This paper takes advantage of a unique dataset that includes surveys from activists who organized the nationally coordinated climate strikes in the US that began in spring 2019 to answer these questions. Building on the research about collective identity formation online and the role that hashtags play, we employ social network analysis to assess how collective identity forms online over three waves of protests. In particular, we analyze how activists involved in the youth climate movement used hashtags to project their collective identities and create collective narratives. Our findings show how hashtags use varied over the period of our study, in some cases indicating the formation of a thin collective identity. They also show that there are patterns in the ways hashtags are employed by activists in the movement that suggest the formation of subaltern narratives among those affiliated with youth-led groups. Our paper concludes by considering how this finding helps us understand collective identity in virtual spaces and the role that hashtags play more specifically within social movements.

Footnotes to Guamán Poma: Transtemporal Encounters in Nacha Vollenweider's Notas al pie

The graphic memoir Notas al pie (2017) written by Argentinian Nacha Vollenweider includes an illustration which reinterprets an image from the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno, a colonial document written by Quechua nobleman Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala around 1615, when Peru was under Spanish rule. This article argues that if Guamán Poma's image portrays a critique of Western colonial power, Vollenweider's reappropriation follows its aftermath, and targets the structures of coloniality that underpin the formation of both individual and collective identity.

“Hey! Mr Prime Minister!”: The Simpsons Against the Liberals, Anti-fandom and the “Politics of Against”

Memes and popular culture have become central to our understanding of contemporary politics. Recent fan scholarship has shown how popular culture encourages audiences into discussion, participation, creativity, intervention, and evaluation in politics. In this article, we build on existing scholarship analysing political meme creation and distribution, which to date has primarily focused primarily on American politics. Using a case study of the Facebook group The Simpsons Against the Liberals (the conservative ruling party in Australia), we examine how the anti-fannish behaviors of appropriating and remixing content, affective investment, and community collective identity formation is activated through othering or a “politics of against” (Sandvoss, 2019). The Simpsons Against the Liberals page features memes which insert current Australian political issues, scandals, and controversies into the fictional world of The Simpsons. As we argue, the community is bound by its anti-fandom of the Australian Liberal party, rather than a specific unifying feature. While anti-fandom is driven from hate and dislike, this case study demonstrates that a form of anti-fandom exists in which pleasure is derived from the use of humor to perform acts of citizenship and imagined community. Specifically, this article will examine the flurry of creative production during the 2019/20 Australian bushfire crisis—centered around the controversial behavior of Prime Minister Scott Morrison—as a form of contemporary civic action and activism rooted in anti-fan practices.

Structuring multi-dimensional collective identity in clusters

The paper explores the discursive formation of supra-organizational collective identities. Adopting a field-level approach, we expound how the meaning-making activity on collective identities is embedded in a broader discourse and is in turn articulated on a number of different dimensions. Additionally, we analyze how different field actors have a specific role in structuring each of these dimensions. Empirically, the paper is built upon textual data regarding the Brazilian wine-making cluster of the “Serra Gaúcha” region that offers a convenient setting to explore the formation of a collective identity, which is there perceived as a hot issue at stake by different field actors. Our main contribution is that the collective identity of fields and industries can emerge as the result of a distributed discourse, and not just as an interplay between identity promoters (internal field actors) and identity validators (external audiences). In this more complex discursive interplay between multiple actors, professional associations may assume a pivotal role thanks to their interest in boundary demarcation that results in efforts to formalize the collective identity.

Emotions and embodiment as feminist practice in the free abortion movement in France (1972–1984)

This article explores the critical role of emotions and bodies in the individual dynamics of engagement as well as the construction of collective identities and action in women’s groups in the 1970s in France. Much literature on emotion work in feminist organizations has tended to discuss emotions stemming from women’s dominant socialization processes as, above all, alienating, thereby as barriers to their activism. The Movement for the liberty of abortion and birth control offers essential insights into how gendered dispositions can be primary determinants of feminist collective identity formation, and even spur innovative protest practices. With their specific organizational settings and action, some ‘dissident MLACs’ in Aix-en-Provence, Lille, Lyon and Paris – those which continued to practice abortion despite its legalization and in defiance of the 1975 law which forbade them to do so – mobilized reciprocal emotions and bodily experiences to sustain engagement and serve a political project. Drawing on a wide array of biographical interviews and archival sources centred on abortion practices, the article examines the distinctive emotion culture these groups constructed. Its anchoring in bodies, commitment to emotions like tenderness and compassion, but also domestic and relational skills consecrated a gendered repertoire of action which therefore notably appealed to women whose social properties did not predispose them to collective action.

Art Museums and Exclusionary Visions of Nationhood: The Possibilities for Docent Training

ABSTRACT Art museums around the world play an integral role in the formation and preservation of collective identity and national belonging. As part of wider efforts for social change, these institutions are being challenged to decolonize and confront racism with renewed and sustained focus. As such, they are thinking more deeply about how they engage visitors with their collections. Within this context, this article considers how docents are uniquely positioned in the collective response to these calls for action. Drawing on strategies used in museum and teacher education pedagogy, it offers a renewed approach that emphasizes docent training’s capacity to create meaningful experiences that dismantle exclusionary national narratives operating within collections and exhibitions. This article responds to calls for art museums to multiply voices and become spaces for decolonization, and will resonate with other museums, galleries, and heritage institutions invested in ongoing critical learning amongst volunteer and professional educators alike.

Use of Meta-narrative Review to Integrate Perspectives on Identity Formation in the Cameroonian and Swedish-Kurdish Diasporas.

Post-colonial Cameroonian identities have emerged from a combination of systems involving indigenous knowledges, transnational, socio-political, and economic influences, contributing to back-and-forth identity formation in the diaspora and country-of-origin. Kin and kith bonds, social validation, and the maintenance of traditional values between members of the diaspora and relatives in Cameroon influence both individual and collective identity formation in diasporic communities. I argue that the affective communicative properties of socio-culturally and nostalgically relevant music may facilitate not only individual identity formation in the Cameroonian diaspora, but also collective identity formations between members of the Cameroonian diaspora and Cameroon itself through the mechanism of empathy. To accomplish this, I employ the use of meta-narrative review to integrate discussions from cultural studies, social anthropology, sociology, musicology, neuroscience and psychology. Cameroonian diasporic communities discussed in this paper include the Norwegian-Cameroonian and German-Cameroonian diasporas, with comparative discussion offered from the perspective of the Swedish-Kurdish diaspora. This study is intended to exemplify an exploration of how transdisciplinary integration can highlight the value of the affective communicative properties of socio-culturally and nostalgically relevant music as means to facilitate identity formation within and across diasporic communities through the mechanism of empathy.

Ideological Identifying as a Determiner of the Polish People Political Collective Identity

The aim of the article is to examine whether and to what extent a socio-political division into left- and right-wing is a factor that significantly influences the formation of the Polish political collective identity. The author of the article attempted to present the leftist and rightist identities in relation to defining characteristics of collective identity. Then, a theoretical model was empirically verified based on the findings of the author’s own research conducted in 2019.

State identity narratives and threat construction in the Horn of Africa: revisiting Ethiopia's 2006 intervention in Somalia

ABSTRACT The Ethiopian military intervention to remove the Union of Islamic Courts from Mogadishu in December 2006 has been interpreted in overlapping narratives of historical-religious conflict between Ethiopia and Somalia, proxy war with Eritrea, and counter-terrorism. This article adds another: the Ethiopian government's own dominant narrative of danger at the time. Based on a discourse analysis of materials generated during a year of fieldwork in Addis Ababa, the article explores how Ethiopia's political leadership constructed developments in Somalia as an existential threat to the Ethiopian state. It argues that the language and actions of specific actors were presented as threatening the idea of the post-1991 Ethiopian state and, more specifically, the foundational narrative with which the EPRDF-led Ethiopian government sought ontological security for Ethiopia as a distinct political community and international actor. By focusing on the relationship between processes of collective identity formation and perceptions of (in)security, this article highlights the role of state identity narratives for understanding evolving threat perceptions and their political implications in the Horn of Africa.

Religion, Conflict and Identity: Islam, Pakistani identity and the conflict in Swat

Other than an identity in itself, religion plays a central role in other forms of collective identities, like ethnic and national. Moreover, as the constructivist theoretical position argues that identities are fluid and can be impacted by different factors, we propose that conflict and violence have repercussions for religion and the associated identities. Extending the constructivist theoretical position, we contend that conflicts do not ‘soften’ or ‘harden’ identities, rather its impacts are complex, multiple and significant. In the backdrop of recent conflict and violence in Pukhtun region of Swat, Islam is substantial due to its centrality to Pakistani national identity (represented and promoted by the Pakistani state) and Pukhtun ethnic identity (represented by the Pukhtuns in Swat) and militant discourse in the region. This study argues that, amidst the conflict in Swat, three forms and positions of Islam have emerged, including the Islam adopted by Pukhtuns as marker of their identity, Islam used by Pakistan for framing a national identity and the one promoted, rather imposed, by the militants. Pukhtuns in Swat try to detach and distance their ‘form’ of Islam (having both symbolic and practical aspects) from that of the Pakistani state and the militants. Moreover, Pukhtun’s form of Islam is considered closer to that of the state with a sharp distance from that of the militants. Pakistani state, religious clergy and militants are blamed and criticized for using Islam for their interests. Militant’s Islam is termed ‘violent’ and only based on their form of justice and is thus rejected. Pakistani state’s Islam is considered least practiced and more symbolic and thus disowned. Islam adopted and practiced by Pukhtuns, majority, in Swat is considered as peaceful and in practice and thus assumed to be better than the other contesting forms of Islam. Thus, the conflict in Swat, involving militants and Pakistani state, has complicated the divisive role of Islam in relation to its unifying role as a component and marker of Pakistani national identity. This has repercussions for Pakistani national identity. The study is based on 45 open-ended in-depth interviews and five focus group discussions in diverse parts of Swat, coupled with ethnographic observation.

Коллективная память молодёжи в эпоху коммемораций

The lack of consensus in society on the most important problems of history negatively affects the formation of the collective memory of the younger generation. The socialization of millennials (in the terms of N. Howe and W. Strauss) has specific features that become the main tool for the formation of a new collective identity. The purpose of this article is to reveal the features of the collective memory of student youth on the example of the perception of the events of the Great Patriotic War (WWII) in the conditions of a super-tolerant postmodern society. The following concepts were chosen as the methodological basis of the research: social construction (P. Berger, T. Luckmann), the concept of collective memory (M. Halbwachs, P. Nora, A. Assman), as well as the poststructuralist direction of postmodernism (Z. Bauman, J. Baudrillard). The empirical base of the study was formed by the results of a large-scale research project of the Russian Society of Sociologists "Russian Students on the Great Patriotic War". To study the peculiarities of young people's perception of the events of the war years, problematic issues, actualized by modern socio-political processes, were selected. The novelty of the results was predetermined by the identification of young people's opinions about controversial issues of history and about the modern portrait of a patriot. The results obtained during the research may be of interest to researchers studying youth problems.

Power and ‘Sacral Rulers’ in Pre-Christian Scandinavia: Top-Down and Bottom-Up Dynamics

This paper considers the intricate relationship between religious and political power in pre-Christian Scandinavia. Drawing on power theory and aspects of power legitimation in cultural memory theory, it identifies and discusses a blind spot in the current research debate on the religious aspects of rulership. It argues that the ‘top-down’ perspective that currently dominates research on this topic needs a complementary ‘bottom-up’ perspective. Only then can we reach a more nuanced understanding of the power mechanisms surrounding the religious aspects of rulership. With a theoretical discussion of the social and ontological bases of political power, this paper argues that the religious dimensions of rulership were rooted in underlying (socially constructed) assumptions about the nature of reality, which were shared by rulers and subjects. On this basis, this paper proceeds to discuss the figure of the ruler in the context of the community’s formation of collective identity. It proposes that the ruler served as a focal point for the community’s cultivation of a shared past, a process that underpinned a sense of a collective self and of the community’s durability across generations. Ruler genealogies are highlighted as instrumental to this process, and a new, tentative reading of Ynglingatal is proposed.

A review paper on women empowerment in professional and domestic life

Feminism has grown considerably as a transdisciplinary voice in support of change, as well as a discipline of science and philosophy, during the last 40 years. Advocacy and philosophy seem to have dominated the development of theory. Proposals are made to further feminist thinking. This book presents a feminist public relations theory, as well as an explanation and agenda for changing bias towards female public relations practitioners. This research emphasizes the importance of the social, historical, and political context from the viewpoint of women's empowerment theory as a cyclical rather than a linear process in components of women's empowerment. It proposes that empowerment-driven feminist social work practice be guided by an awareness of positionalities, conscientization, and social changes, integrating key concepts in feminist thought and empowerment theory. In this study, the key characteristics of women's equality in general and in the workplace are addressed. Feminist and empowerment philosophy has a lot in common with the development and identification of professional identity and social work in general. Individual and collective identity formation are both emphasized in social and gender inequality and prejudice. Empowerment is a big part of feminist social work's theory and practice, particularly when it comes to dominance and subordination.

From Clubs to Concert Halls: The Influence of Performance Venue on Collective Identity Formation in Jazz

From Clubs to Concert Halls: The Influence of Performance Venue on Collective Identity Formation in Jazz

¿“Ellos” o “nosotros”? prejuicios y estereotipos sobre los musulmanes en el alumnado preadolescente

The objectives of this work are to analyse the presence of prejudices and stereotypes about Muslims in a group of 6th grade primary school students and to reflect on the importance of detecting, thinking about and combating them, due to their influence on the formation of personal and collective identity from the perspective of the teaching of history. Using a mixed research methodology, the attitudes and opinions of a sample of 107 students, both Muslim and non-Muslim, from two schools in the Canary Islands are collected. The research instrument, developed for this investigation, is a questionnaire with 11 items with a Likert-type assessment scale, which have been analysed with Excel, and an open question which has been categorised and allowed for triangulation The results show a relative presence of prejudices and negative stereotypes among this student body, perhaps due to the historical and social context associated with the sample. These are linked to the generalisation and confusion of terms and meanings, which are present and transmitted by the media and historical education, intervening in the shaping of personal and collective identity.