Fragmented Identities Research Articles

Identification of a newly emerging HIV-1 CRF111_01C comprising CRF01_AE and C in Yunnan, China: Genetic characterization and recombinant history.

New human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-1 circulating recombinant forms (CRFs) have recently emerged and disseminated rapidly in China; in total 38 CRFs have been identified thus far. Yunnan province shares its border with Myanmar, and is regarded as a "hotspot" for the occurrence of new HIV-1 recombinations; more than half of novel CRFs reported in China have been first documented in Yunnan province. In the present study, based on the information available on four existing near-full-length genome (NFLG) sequences, combined with data on four other closely related sequences obtained via Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) analysis, NFLG/subregion phylogenetic, bootscanning, and time to the most recent common ancestor (TMRCA) analyses were performed. Phylogenetic analysis revealed that the eight strains demonstrated the formation of a distinct monophyletic branch with a bootstrap value of 100%. Strains in this branch were distantly related to all known HIV-1 CRFs; it was temporarily named CRF111_01C. Bootscanning analysis revealed that CRF111_01C consisted of a CRF01_AE backbone and four inserted subtype C segments. Remarkably, CRF111_01C shared six mosaic fragment identities with the previously identified CRF100_01C. Furthermore, CRF111_01C may be deemed a potential second-generation CRF consisting of CRF100_01C and C. Coalescent Bayesian analyses revealed that the TMRCA of CRF111_01C was approximately the period 1999-2002. The emergence of such second-generation recombinants highlights that continuous molecular screening is necessary to carefully monitor the evolutionary dynamics of HIV-1 epidemics.

Discourse analysis of conception of masculinity among Chinese male sexual abuse survivors

This study aims to explore the conception of masculinity in organizing the help-seeking behavior of Chinese males in Hong Kong. Twelve informants, who had experienced being abused in various relationships, participated in the in-depth interviews. Discourse analysis drawn from the analytical process per James Paul Gee is applied to examine the data. Six discourse positions are highlighted, including placating masculinity, counter-masculinity, fragmented identity, masculinity through sex, identity through gender, and finally, non-normative sexual identity. The complicity of the concept of masculinity in Chinese culture and implications for social workers are further discussed.

"Teaching, my passion; publishing, my pain": unpacking academics' professional identity tensions through the lens of emotional resilience.

In the global competition of higher education, an increasing emphasis has been placed on university research excellence. Accordingly, academics have to engage in both research and teaching activities. The multiple and fragmented identities of academics can sometimes be contested, leading to identity tensions, and impeding their professional development. This raises the issue of how, and whether at all, academics integrate their professional identities in a culture of performativity. Against this backdrop, this qualitative study explored how a specific group of Chinese academics negotiate identity tensions as teachers and researchers through an emotional resilience lens. The narrative frames and interviews with 10 college English teachers yielded four types of identity negotiation in the continuum from identity conflicts to identity integration mediated by emotional resilience, including the disheartened performer, the miserable follower, the strenuous accommodator, and the fulfilled integrator. Emotional resilience as a mediator in professional identity tensions is discussed. Our findings offer a nuanced understanding of the complexity of academics developing an integrated professional identity. Policymakers should recognize the potential of emotional resilience in integrating academic professional identities and jointly support academics to cope with their identity tensions. However, if identity tensions are too complex for academics to solve, the policymakers should consider tensions as signals that the existing institutional policies may be counterproductive and need to be revised, rather than merely calling on academics’ resilience.

Dinner with Mock Faustus: Multilingual Cuisine Cooks the Identity

Phenomena related to gastronomy form an important part of both individual and collective identities. The gastronomical dimensions of literature can often be perceived as a commentary on the political, historical and societal, going beyond just the food. As cuisines are becoming more mixed globally, languages describing gastronomical scenes in literature are also becoming more multilingual.
 The novel Mock Faustus (1973), by the Latvian writer Marģers Zariņš, fuses the gastronomical and the multilingual to the extreme, producing a utopian linguistic hybrid of the Latvian language to which a mix of foreign languages and countless intertextual references are added. This is achieved by the gastronomical vocabulary and imagery omnipresent in the narrative of writing a fictional cookbook. The depiction of gastronomical phenomena allows Zariņš to indirectly comment on Latvian history from the 1930s to 1945 and the confused and fragmented identities of these times.

The ideological effect of pre COVID-19 metaphors on our perceptions of technology during the pandemic

AbstractThis study aims to establish ideological effects of the pre-pandemic metaphor use in the mainstream media on users’ perceptions of their relationship with technologies during the COVID-19 pandemic. To achieve that, 120 media articles from global mainstream media sources during the pre-pandemic period were collected and analysed at three levels: (1) metaphor identification; (2) deconstruction of conceptual source domains; (3) the coding of metaphorical expressions into psychological types of interpersonal relationships that are projected on technologies. The established metaphorical patterns were tested in an online survey with 100 young adults and adults from Lithuania during the COVID-19 pandemic period of 2019-2020. The research findings resulted in the ideological perceptions of Reversed Agentivity and Mechanised Action characterising our relationship with technology and pointing out to the loss of individual autonomy, a lack of personal growth and more fragmented personal identity during the pandemic.

Racial and cultural in-betweenness meet in the consulting room: the case of 'Anna'.

An upper-middle-class black woman, who grew up adapting to a white-dominated environment, entered the consulting room of a multicultural 'white-passing' analyst, and here unique emotional experiences were reflected in dream images of racial disorganization, internal racism, and identity confusion. While sorting through the analysand's internal dynamics, the external world erupted in May 2020 with the murder of George Floyd, catapulting both analysand and analyst (and the nation) into a transformative confrontation with their mutual, deep-seated woundings of American racial and cultural inequities. The analysand's racial complexity directly impacted the analyst's 'white-passing' privilege, bringing into question established classifications of American whiteness. Overlapping dynamics and experiences as 'in-betweeners' and 'outsiders' - a black woman subsumed by a white-dominated society and an immigrant refugee acculturated to American life - provided a common exilic ground for mutual understanding and mirroring. The analyst explores the racial and multicultural straddling that served as a lens into the analysand's fragmented racial identity during the eruption of American racial unrest.

Possessed by Postmemory: Thane Rosenbaum’s Elijah Visible

This paper analyses the short story cycle Elijah Visible by Thane Rosenbaum, who represents the second generation of American writers responding to the Holocaust. Rosenbaum focuses on what is termed the intergenerational transmission of trauma. The paper attempts to show how the fragmented identity of Adam Posner, the protagonist of the cycle, has been shaped by the legacy of his parents’ Holocaust experience. It draws on Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory and follows the author’s approach to his protagonist’s appropriation of the Holocaust which results in his obsession with cataclysmic wartime experiences. The paper also examines Rosenbaum’s attitude to the silence surrounding the Holocaust and its effects. It explores how the repression of the tragic family history as a defense mechanism leads to the alienation of children from their parents and profoundly complicates their mutual relationship. Furthermore, gaps and blanks in the knowledge of the past, together with the impossibility of fully grasping the original trauma, fuel the protagonist’s imagination. This imaginative investment also forms the main character’s postmemory and contributes to his feeling of being relocated in space and time—his “cattle car complex”, to quote the title of the initial story of Rosenbaum’s book.

Identity as a construct: reading blackness in Eugene O’neill’s the emperor jones.

This paper aims to explore how racialized identities are typified as a modernist construct in Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1920). To this end, the notion of whiteness is identified as a mediated construct and contextualized in the proliferation of American minstrel shows. This popular entertainment projected to white audiences the racial means of differentiation from black caricatures and clichés at the time of segregation. The echoes of minstrel shows and modernists’ instrumentalization of 1920s primitivism serve to initially address the characterization of blackness in Brutus Jones’ identity. Assessed through this in-between construction of symbolic borderlands in which the protagonist is both colonizer and colonized, his blackness becomes a metaphorical mask of otherness while his whiteness shapes the colonial performance of material whiteness. Although he envisions the white ideal in his systematic practices in the Caribbean island, his fragmented identity and his hybridity subject him to a primeval racialized past, to primitivism and atavism.

In Silico Analysis of Partial Fatty Acid Desaturase 2 cDNA From Reutealis trisperma (Blanco) Airy Shaw.

Reutealis trisperma oil is a new source for biodiesel production. The predominant fatty acids in this plant are stearic acid (9%), palmitic acid (10%), oleic acid (12%), linoleic acid (19%), and α-eleostearic acid (51%). The presence of polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs), linoleic acid, and α-eleostearic acid decreases the oxidation stability of R. trisperma biodiesel. Although several studies have suggested that the fatty acid desaturase 2 (FAD2) enzyme is involved in the regulation of fatty acid desaturation, little is known about the genetic information of FAD2 in R. trisperma. The objectives of this study were to isolate, characterize, and determine the relationship between the R. trisperma FAD2 fragment and other Euphorbiaceae plants. cDNA fragments were isolated using reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (PCR). The DNA sequence obtained by sequencing was used for further analysis. In silico analysis identified the fragment identity, subcellular localization, and phylogenetic construction of the R. trisperma FAD2 cDNA fragment and Euphorbiaceae. The results showed that a 923-bp partial sequence of R. trisperma FAD2 was successfully isolated. Based on in silico analysis, FAD2 was predicted to encode 260 amino acids, had a domain similarity with Omega-6 fatty acid desaturase, and was located in the endoplasmic reticulum membrane. The R. trisperma FAD2 fragment was more closely related to Vernicia fordii (HM755946.1).

Kendine Ait Bir Kimlik: Postmodern Feminist Bir Kurguda Akademik Kadının Feminist İdeolojisi ve Kimlik Krizi

Why academic women struggle to find an identity of their own in “the genderization of science” (Keller, 1984, 78)? Is it because they still “face stereotyping, gendered barriers, exclusion, mobbing, discounting and discrediting in the patriarchal domain of science”? (Buran, 2020). This paper close-reads the interface between feminist ideology and biology that Margaret Drabble develops in her The Millstone (1965), which tells the transition from traditional ideal women to women in crisis in Post-War Britain. This postmodern feminist fiction reconstructs an alternative woman protagonist, Rosamund Stacey, liberated in all facets of life for whom marriage is not the goal but her academic career, as she prefers to remain a single mother without depending on a husband. The aim of this article is to explore how Drabble portrays an academic woman’s self-journey towards a sense of fragmented identity crises of social, familial, professional, and maternal. This is achieved by exploring Rosamund’s quest to find her feminist ideology and true identity flying from body constraints and socially assigned female roles.

Feeling at Home: Notes of a Journey by a Roman Traveller in the 2nd Century Pergamon

Western Anatolia was one of the first regions to come under the rule of the Roman Empire. For the region, the 2nd century AD was marked by urban development that accelerated thanks to the ongoing period of peace under the Roman Empire around the Mediterranean. Without the burden of wars, cities concentrated all their efforts on trade and urbanization. While implementing a certain program envisaged by the empire, the ancient Greek cities of Anatolia preserved their identity and culture, while they welcomed the new elements of the Roman identity. Thus, the Roman cities of 2nd century AD in western Anatolia were not created from nothing but rather adapted from a Greek past to a Roman future. In this respect, becoming Roman was equivalent to the creation of a Mediterranean identity through integrating the fragmented identities of the pre-Roman world into a unity. This paper discusses the transformation of post-Hellenistic western Anatolia into the Roman Imperial period with the help of an imaginary journey based on historical facts. The discussion focuses on 2nd Century AD Pergamon to examine urbanization and architecture as transformation tools.

Ethno-cultural factors of Ukraine geopolitical positioning as an object of external influence

The article describes the descriptive characteristics of the doubling / fragmentation of regional identities and macroidentity of Ukraine as a factor in strengthening external influence. As a result of the study, it was determined that the fragmented and diffuse identity of different regions of Ukraine is related to changing the perceptions of their residents about the most acceptable vector of external (cultural and political) influence. This vector depends on the level of legitimacy of the current government and is in the spectrum of geopolitical orientations of the EU / NATO - Customs Union. Analysis of the data of empirical sociological research gives grounds to talk about the presence of an oscillating contour of moods, which determine the inclusion in the process of determining a particular external center of power from the western and central, on the one hand, and southern and eastern regions.It is emphasized that the minority of the population shares the position of limited influence on Ukraine of various alliances of states and preservation of neutral sovereignty. At the same time, the indicators of attitudes towards the EU and NATO, the Customs Union, still differ in the west and east of the country. The existence of correlative differences in foreign policy, electoral, ethno-cultural orientations, which are still recorded in empirical sociological research in the areas with the greatest commitment to the two models of ethno-social structure, state and society: national and civil territorial (Galicia and Donbass).It is noted that the instability of regional identity, as a rule, correlates with the common practices of empires in the past (feudal-monarchical and Soviet) on artificial ethno-cultural mixing and deportation of indigenous people to remote areas. It is stated that the vast majority of Ukrainians, having special cultural and linguistic characteristics, still do not have a clear political worldview, which depends on the situational situation of power and changes over time under the external influence of situational centers of power of other societies.It is emphasized that Ukraine as a society is characterized by pronounced regional and cultural differences, which were formed in connection with the special historical experience of the occupation of its various regions and their artificial territorial and political composition. The analysis showed that the idea of a common Ukrainian civic identity has partial support at the state level and is shared by the majority of Ukrainians.At the same time, it was stated that along with self-awareness as part of the Ukrainian state, for a significant part of Ukrainians, their ethnic, cultural and linguistic features are still important, which may be related to factors of belonging to a particular region. Based on this, it is concluded that the regional aspects of Ukrainian identity become a generalized determinant of the assumption of a particular center of external influence on Ukraine.

Negotiating Identities and Power

Introduction: despite universal efforts, child marriages still occur worldwide. However, not all child marriage unions last, and little is known about how such marriages end. Most critically, there is little information on what happens to young mothers when child marriage unions dissolve. This paper explores the experiences of adolescent mothers who were in child marriages in the cultural context of central Malawi.
 Methodology: using qualitative methods, data was collected in two districts in central Malawi. One focus group discussion (FGD) was conducted with key community members (n=14) and three FGD, guided by an unstandardized interview guide, were conducted with adolescent mothers aged 15-22 years (n=15). The FGD with adolescent mothers were conducted in three groups, ranging from three to nine participants per group. In addition to this, a key informant interview was conducted with a community leader who is traditionally recognized as paramount chief (n=1). The data was analysed using a content analysis. The study applied the concept of ‘doing gender’ by West and Zimmerman (1987) in the analysis.
 Results: what emerged from the data is that adolescent mothers embodied fragmented identities that are changing over time given the influence of life events. Amid different combinations of roles, several identities were observed: mother, wife, young, adolescent, girl, married, unmarried, victim of child marriage, survivor of child marriage, unemployed, employed, re-enrolled student, and school dropout. While these identities changed, gender did not, thus the changing identifications provided displays for ‘doing gender’ under a diverse set of subjectivities. Expressions of power at the micro-level were demonstrated by adolescent mothers through ‘resilience vs. perseverance’.
 Conclusions: the study highlights that cultural sensitivity and responsiveness by traditional leaders, such as the chief, play a role in the empowering revisions of one’s identity by championing liberating life events through the termination of child marriage or access to girls’ education regardless of resistance.

(Re) Examination of Psychological Identities in Selected Kenyan Youth Fiction

This paper examines the fragmented psychological identities among the youth in Kenyan youth fiction. It intends to find out whether psychological developmental stages play an important role in identity formation of an adolescent as portrayed in the selected texts. Identity means the way human being answers to the query that how are they. This question may be asked overtly or covertly. This question also may be asked at personal or at a collective level. Even this question is very applicable to be asked to oneself also. Obviously, it can be asked to others. Different schools of thoughts are present in the identity literature. It generally emphasized either personal or social contents. It also highlights psychological or social processes. This paper highlights that identities are inexorably both psychological and social. This paper also focuses on the process how they are formed, maintained, and changed over time. However, in this paper, I also intend to examine the extensive and interconnected nature of social identity and psychological identity content, and then consider the confluence of psychosexual developmental stages, relational and individual process by which psychological identities are formed, maintained, and change overtime. In order to discuss these issues effectively, the study deems it fit to begin by conceptualizing the notion of psychological identity in order to lay foundation for the debate.

A zero-knowledge-proof-based digital identity management scheme in blockchain

The traditional centralized digital identity management system (DIMS) has been subject to threats such as fragmented identity, single point of failure, internal attacks and privacy leakage. Emerging blockchain technology allows DIMSs to be deployed in it, which largely alleviates the problems caused by the centralized third party, but its inherent transparency and lack of privacy pose a huge challenge to DIMSs. In this regard, we leverage the smart contracts and zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) algorithms to improve the existing claim identity model in blockchain to realize the identity unlinkability, effectively avoiding the exposure of the ownership of attributes. Furthermore, we implement a system prototype named BZDIMS that includes a challenge-response protocol, which allows users to selectively disclose their ownership of attributes to service providers to protect users’ behavior privacy. Performance evaluation and security analysis show that our scheme achieves effective attribute privacy protection and a wider application scope compared with the prior model.

First report of Newly Identified Ornithodoros Species in the Republic of Korea.

Ticks and tick-borne diseases are important issues worldwide because of their effects on animal and human health. The genus Ornithodoros, which is included in the family Argasidae, is typically associated with wild animals, including seabirds. In this study, samples from the nests of seabirds and surrounding soil were collected to investigate Ornithodoros spp. from 9 uninhabited islands in the western, eastern, and southern parts of Korea from April 2017 to October 2018. The islands are known as the breeding places of migratory and resident birds. Ticks were collected from soil and nest material of seabirds using a Tullgren funnel and identified using 16S rRNA and the cytochrome c oxidase 1 gene (COI), and host animals of soft ticks were identified using the mitochondrial DNA cytochrome b gene by a polymerase chain reaction. In the sequence identity of the 16S rRNA gene fragment of Ornithodoros sp., Ornithodoros sawaii was identified as the closest homologous sequence, and the new Ornithodoros sp. was newly identified. We found that the newly identified Ornithodoros sp. in the Republic of Korea was located in uninhabited islands used as breeding places by the black-tailed gull, Larus crassirostris.

Identity formation and the political marketplace

ABSTRACT This article is an introduction to a special issue that focusses on the relationship between the political marketplace, identity politics and organised violence. The political marketplace refers to an extreme form of neo-liberalism in which political relations are monetised. The introduction makes the argument that political marketplaces are associated with fragmented exclusive transnational identities that are constructed through contemporary violence, and with what we call disassembled states, often mediated by the international community. It is a contradictory and turbulent form of association. The articles in the collection provide evidence for various aspects of the argument.

Review: The Sociology of Identity: The Dialectics of Consciousness, Deconstruction and Reconstruction, by Abdulghani Imad

Review: The Sociology of Identity: The Dialectics of Consciousness, Deconstruction and Reconstruction, by Abdulghani Imad

Workers’ Power in Resisting Precarity: Comparing Transport Workers in Buenos Aires and Dar es Salaam

The growing precariousness of employment across the world has radically altered the conditions upon which the representation of workers’ interests has traditionally been built, as it has posed challenges for established trade unions: individualized employment and fragmented identities have displaced the centrality of the workplace and the employee–employer relationship in framing collective issues of representation. In this article, we compare the processes of collective organization of two groups of precarious workers in the transport and delivery sector of Buenos Aires and Dar es Salaam. Through this comparison we investigate how existing trade union structures, industrial relations frameworks, socio-political contexts and labour processes interact with the processes of workers’ organization that take place even in the harsher conditions of informal work, critically engaging with the argument that the growing precariousness of work represents the end of trade unionism as we know it.

Through Madness and Back Again

This article traces my struggles with psychosis, arrest, psychiatric institutionalization, and recovery. Mobilizing a cathartic approach to autoethnography, I reveal my resistances, resiliencies, oppressions, nightmares, and recovery processes in the mental health system as I became entangled in another, darker reality and tried desperately to escape it. This work is a contribution to the emerging field of Mad Studies that seeks to privilege lived experiences with madness and the mental health system as a way of knowing. I found that doing an autoethnography of the mind helps recover the pieces of a fragmented identity and heals some of the visceral horrors that haunts us through and beyond experiences with mental illness.