Configuration Of Identity Research Articles

Multicultural identity integration and well-being: a qualitative exploration of variations in narrative coherence and multicultural identification

Understanding the experiences of multicultural individuals is vital in our diverse populations. Multicultural people often need to navigate the different norms and values associated with their multiple cultural identities. Recent research on multicultural identification has focused on how individuals with multiple cultural groups manage these different identities within the self, and how this process predicts well-being. The current study built on this research by using a qualitative method to examine the process of configuring one's identities within the self. The present study employed three of the four different multiple identity configurations in Amiot et al. (2007) cognitive-developmental model of social identity integration: categorization, where people identify with one of their cultural groups over others; compartmentalization, where individuals maintain multiple, separate identities within themselves; and integration, where people link their multiple cultural identities. Life narratives were used to investigate the relationship between each of these configurations and well-being, as indicated by narrative coherence. It was expected that individuals with integrated cultural identities would report greater narrative coherence than individuals who compartmentalized and categorized their cultural identities. For all twenty-two participants, identity integration was significantly and positively related to narrative coherence, while compartmentalization was significantly and negatively related to narrative coherence. ANOVAs revealed that integrated and categorized participants reported significantly greater narrative coherence than compartmentalized participants. These findings are discussed in light of previous research on multicultural identity integration.

Personal identity in Japan

This chapter explores characteristics of identity formation among Japanese adolescents and young adults living in a cultural context where individualism has been increasingly emphasized even while maintaining collectivism. We argue that, to develop a sense of identity in Japanese culture, adolescents and young adults carefully consider others' perspectives, resolve conflicts between self and others, and, in some cases, merge themselves into relationships and groups rather than pursuing their own uniqueness. However, at the same time, as Japanese society changes in various ways, such as the educational and employment systems, a traditional type of identity may gradually become less functional. A new identity configuration, individualistic collectivism, emerges. We also provide future directions for research toward a more global understanding of identity formation among Japanese adolescents and young adults.

QUAL O PREÇO DE SER MENINA? IMPLICAÇÕES DAS EXPECTATIVAS CORPORAIS

This paper, inspired by the field of gender studies, analyzes strategies directed towards the normalization and control of (sportive) body expressions of girls and boys. I have attempted to answer the following question: Who talks and what is said about “sportive” body expectations of girls and boys? The methodology employed has followed the Foucauldian analysis perspective. For this discussion, I have selected reports taken from Pais & Filhos magazine. I can highlight that the ways the mother guides how boys and girls are raised evidence the discursive process of identity configuration, which is oriented by quite traditional pedagogical models (such as ‘girls are not allowed to play’) and concepts that seem to spread a non-investment in sports feminization. Keywords: Body Practices. Gender. Family.

Gay hospitality as desiring labor: Contextualizing transnational sexual labor

This critical ethnographic research explores gay hospitality as a ‘testimony of desire’ by working-class and ‘gay’-identified Filipino sexual laborers who ‘work’ as companions for foreign tourists in a gentrifying tourism district, Malate, the Philippines. I analyze gay hospitality as informal sexual labor by applying the concept of identity work, which involves hosts’ construction and maintenance of their ‘gay’ identity and connection to urban place. I argue that their testimonies of desire are subaltern development discourses, which speak to significant lived experiences of work and place and, which offer alternative configurations of identity, relationships, and economic exchange.

La construcción y difusión del saber profesional del artista docente en las prácticas de formación superior: tensiones y prácticas de referencia de teatro en la formación de profesorado

Presentamos los resultados de una investigación en curso sobre la construcción de la identidad profesional de los docentes en educación superior, en el área de artes escénicas. Basados en el análisis en clínica didáctica, abordamos las relaciones entre prácticas socioprofesionales de referencia y prácticas didácticas en el estudio de dos secuencias sobre áreas típicas del saber teatral: cuerpo y voz. Los análisis demuestran que la variedad de las prácticas sociales de referencia produce efectos didácticos diferenciados y una construcción de gestos profesionales específicos al área.

Ressignificando identidades: um estudo antropológico sobre experiências migratórias dos estudantes africanos no Brasil

Partindo do pressuposto de que alteridade é um fenômeno universal e de que todos os grupos constroem categorias para classificar a si e ao outro, no presente artigo faz-se uma reflexão sobre a experiência singular de imigração estudantil no Brasil, a partir de uma perspectiva relacional que busca analisar as percepções e as configurações identitárias desses estudantes na sua relação com a população local que os classifica como africanos. Os dados analisados neste trabalho permitem refletir sobre a presença dos universitários africanos no Brasil, em geral, e em Porto Alegre, em particular, a partir de uma tríplice identidade: identidade nacional, identidade continental e identidade racial.

La formación pedagógica del profesor universitario. Un desafío para la reflexión y revisión de la práctica docente en el nivel superior

Since the late twentieth century, a series of social, cultural, political and economic changes have impacted university teaching. These changes have called for an in-depth review of teaching practices based on the transmission of information shifting towards a model that is focused on the training of professionals with a strong sense of social responsibility, and on the learning process of students. Reflecting upon teaching practices in the university classroom entails a long process of conceptual review and cultural restructuring. One must not ignore that some university professors may view the demands of teacher training as a didactic bureaucratization process derived from governmental policies on the improvement of educational quality. This cultural resistance is indicative of the individualism and curricular fragmentation prevailing in the practice of university teaching, and hinders a critical review of teaching practices in the light of current social needs. In this regard, the review calls for an analysis of the configuration of the professional identity of university professors, recovering their interests and needs in practicing the profession. Experience and vocation are not enough to exercise university teaching, systematic teacher training is required. This paper presents a proposal for the institutional development of teacher training of the university professor, and guidance for its implementation. The relevance of the proposal lies in the opportunity to improve the quality of education and conduct a critical review of the professional identity of university professors.

“By my fair one's side...”, music and identity

For the past twenty years, studies of music have more and more frequently made use of the notion of identity. Yet the meanings given to “identity” in these studies, and the functions ascribed to it, have not always been precisely defined. This paper tries to clarify the relationship between music and identity configurations. Based on studies dealing with the theory of identity and with musical identities, it suggests that the social significations of music – including signifiers of identity – must be understood as resulting from the intertwining of production, reception and the musical object itself. Music is not a language, but a symbolical system with an infinite number of interpreters; it can consequently generate many diverse interpretations, which vary according to the situation and what is at stake, and needs to be specifically fashioned to be put to political uses.

New individualist configurations and the social imaginary

The broad purpose of this article is to explore the theoretical conditions for understanding the new individualist configurations of imagination and identity in contemporary culture and critical discourse. The article begins with a sketch of recent debates in social theory on identity, individualization and new individualism, focusing on the work of Giddens, Beck, and Bauman, as well as Lemert and Elliott. The second part of the article turns to consider, in some detail, the path breaking contributions of Cornelius Castoriadis on the demise of the social imaginary in conditions of advanced capitalism or what he termed the spread of ‘generalized conformism’. Whilst making the argument that the notion of ‘generalized conformism’ is of key importance in grasping the subjective and cultural dynamics promoted by the global electronic economy, the article also underscores the limitations of Castoriadis’s psychoanalytic and political position. The third section of the article offers a pathway beyond such constraint by examining the recent social-theoretical contributions of Julia Kristeva on ‘new maladies of the soul’. Like Castoriadis, Kristeva focuses on the atrophy of imagination in contemporary times, but does so from a more complex psychoanalytic prism. The article concludes that the work of both Castoriadis and Kristeva are essential to grasping contemporary shifts in the new individualism.

Lipidomics of glycosphingolipids.

Glycosphingolipids (GSLs) contain one or more sugars that are attached to a sphingolipid moiety, usually to a ceramide, but in rare cases also to a sphingoid base. A large structural heterogeneity results from differences in number, identity, linkage, and anomeric configuration of the carbohydrate residues, and also from structural differences within the hydrophobic part. GSLs form complex cell-type specific patterns, which change with the species, the cellular differentiation state, viral transformation, ontogenesis, and oncogenesis. Although GSL structures can be assigned to only a few series with a common carbohydrate core, their structural variety and the complex pattern are challenges for their elucidation and quantification by mass spectrometric techniques. We present a general overview of the application of lipidomics for GSL determination. This includes analytical procedures and instrumentation together with recent correlations of GSL molecular species with human diseases. Difficulties such as the structural complexity and the lack of standard substances for complex GSLs are discussed.

Sexual Boundaries and Subcultural Discipline

The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate that the mechanisms of power around classifications of gender and sexuality are not always top-down or bottom-up. Instead, the weight of social discipline among members of sexual subcultures themselves helps to create these classifications, often reflecting the nomenclature of subjects and desires within sexual subcultures in a complex relationship to a dominant culture. Critically examining two benchmarks in the development of sexual nomenclature within queer subcultures, this paper finds its evidence in George Chauncey's little known analysis (1985) of a navy investigation of male homosexuality at the Newport Naval Training Station during the World War I era and in contemporary folksonomic classifi- cations of representations of queer desire within Xtube, a database of online pornography. Social discipline within these sexual sub- cultures occurs in the stabilization of nomenclature through socialization and through members' overt intervention into each oth- ers' self-understanding. Both the Newport and Xtube evidence also reveals a complex social and cultural structure among members of sexual subcultures by drawing our attention to the particularity of various modes of sexual being and the relationship between those modes and particular configurations of sexual identity. In the process, this paper allows us to reassess, first, a presupposition of folksonomies as free of discipline allowing for their emancipatory potential and, second, the prevailing binary understandings of authority in the development of sexual nomenclatures and classifications as either top-down or bottom-up.

¿Quién es Cressida? Fidelidad y drama en la identidad personal

Starting off of a passage of a work of Shakespeare, the roll of fidelity in the configuration of the personal identity will be reviewed. The article is centered in tow main tendencies in the conception of the same one, taken root in the narrative understanding of the self: the fidelity like permanence opposite to change and the fidelity like opening and advance towards what makes be, gives unity and make sense. But the self is discovered in both cases divided, needed to narrate for being, fighting with time, that can appears like threat as well as obstacle to be only one and a different one. The alternative that sets out here lies in a fidelity like return to the essential, where the being and the unity of self remain, whereas he open himself to the newness of that fundamental. This opening consist basically in a dialogue, in which the self receives and gives his own, playing its being in the dramatic space, thus actualizing every time the self, its unity and its sense.

Representations of White Creole Women: The Characterization of Aunt Cora in Wide Sargasso Sea

This article explores Jean Rhys‘ characterization of white creole women through a critical reading of Aunt Cora‘s role in the novel Wide Sargasso Sea. It argues that Aunt Cora plays an important role in Antoinette‘s identity configuration, both as a point of identification and divergence. By tracing the similarities and differences between Aunt Cora and Antoinette‘s identity positions, it illustrates how Rhys‘ characters resist facile categorization as white female creoles. It also examines the importance of Aunt Cora‘s resistance to English patriarchy in relation to the stereotypical representation of the ‗mad‘ creole, showing that although Aunt Cora is silenced by male dominance, she defies being driven mad by it. In this sense, Aunt Cora‘s characterization as a sane, although muted, white creole serves to counter colonial representations of the mad West Indian creole woman as portrayed in Charlotte Brontë‘s depiction of Bertha in Jane Eyre.

Correlates of Identity Configurations: Three Studies with Adolescent and Emerging Adult Cohorts

Adolescence and emerging adulthood are two core developmental periods in which individuals can develop a meaningful identity across domains. However, there is a lack of studies exploring correlates of different identity configurations. The purpose of this article was to fill this gap in examining correlates of configurations characterized by identity stability or instability in both ideological and relational domains or identity stability in one domain and instability in the other domain. Three studies were presented. In the first study, we investigated links between identity configurations and internalizing problem behaviors in early and middle adolescents (N=1,891; M (age) =14; 55% female); in the second study, we focused on associations between identity configurations and identity functions in late adolescents and early emerging adults (N=1,085; M (age) =19; 63% female); in the third study, we investigated relationships between identity configurations, sense of coherence, and basic psychological need satisfaction in emerging adults (N=489; M (age) =21; 71% female). Overall, findings highlighted that participants experiencing a condition of identity stability in both domains reported a better profile than their peers displaying a condition of instability in both realms. Further, individuals with identity stability only in one domain reported intermediate scores and the effect provided by each domain varied according to the correlate examined and the age group taken into account. Implications of these findings are discussed.

Evolución de los rasgos culturales del formato televisivo “operación triunfo” en España desde la perspectiva de la identidad de marca (2001-2011)

Although we usually consider the television formats as precise formulas and strict patterns that allow to reproduce a program in different markets, the true is that a format, after this appearance of inflexibility that unintentionally confer him -and that to some extent possesses-, can evolve along the years to adapt to new conditions of market and treat to guarantee his survival, of the same way that brands can vary slightly along his history some elements of his identity to adapt to the changes in the environment. The present article pretends to describe and analyse the evolution of the cultural appeals -understood from the perspective of the marketing- that take part in the configuration of the brand identity of the television format Operación Triunfo from his first broadcast in Spain, in 2001, until the edition of 2011.

Multimodally expressed humour shaping Scottishness in tourist postcards

This paper investigates multimodally expressed humour (MEH) in illustrated comic tourist postcards targeting Scottish weather, culture, tourism and people. After positioning postcards as a tourism text genre, it discusses the notions of stereotypes and of humour. Since modal shift activates a script shift in the cards, the key semantic process of humour de/codification, the paper suggests a specific method of analysis. The General Theory of Verbal Humor by Attardo and Raskin [Script theory revis(it)ed: Joke similarity and joke representation model. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research, 4(3–4), 293–347 (1991); Non-literalness and non-bona-fide in language: Approaches to formal and computational treatments of humor and irony. Cognition and Pragmatics, 2(1), 31–69 (1994)] is integrated with tools for the analysis of visual texts [Kress, G., & van Leeuwen, T. (2006). Reading images: The grammar of visual design (2nd ed.). London: Routledge] and of cross-modal interaction [Barthes, R. ([1964] 1977). Rhetoric of the image. In Image, music, text (pp. 32–51). London: Fontana Press; Barthes, R. (1967). Elements of semiology. New York, NY: Hill and Wang]. The paper is concerned with the communication dynamics enacted by stereotype-based MEH texts. MEH captures the readers' attention, engenders a suspension of disbelief and a pleasant psychological attitude, assists concentration, outlines the reading path, places emphasis and thus leaves a lasting mnestic trace. Rather than aggressive humour, MEH intertwines stereotyping and self-stereotyping, mockery and self-mockery to encode modes of perception of and response to the destination. The analysed postcards fulfil a promotional function, enhancing both the status of the destination and of the sender. Meanwhile, they allow us to develop self- and cultural awareness, since they overtly address stereotyped forms of identity and culture configuration.

S36-03 - Intercultural psychotherapy of depression in migrants of first and second generation

Intercultural psychotherapeutic treatment must involve the psychological integration of different cultures within an individual as an additional developmental dimension. The literature concerning acculturation and mental health yields heterogeneous results concerning strategies of adaptive acculturation. In intercultural psychotherapy the integration strategy is usually the strategy with the highest adaptability. It is still uncertain which theoretical assumptions might be applicable to a healthy acculturation process. However, it is assumed that increased acculturative stress may lead to higher risk and susceptibility for emotional distress and depression.Individual change during the course of migration towards a bicultural identity that includes aspects of both the culture of origin and of the host culture has often been viewed as a desirable adaptation, although the theoretical foundation of the concept of bicultural identity remains inadequate. The cultural-dynamic model presented here distinguishes between personal and social identity on the basis of the identity concept proposed by Mead (1988). We discuss implications for the intercultural psychotherapeutic process, for identity configuration in second-generation migrants, for different phases of the lifespan, and in acquiring the language of the host culture.

Place-Related Identities Through Texts: From Interdisciplinary Theory to Research Agenda

ABSTRACT The implications of the transdisciplinary spatial turn are attracting growing interest in a broad range of areas related to education. This paper draws on a methodology for interdisciplinary thinking in order to articulate a new theoretical configuration of place-related identity, and its implications for a research agenda. The new configuration is created through an analysis of place-related identities in narrative theory, texts and literacy processes. The emerging research agenda focuses on the ways children perceive and represent their place-related identities through reading and writing as inspired by and manifested in texts.

The Mobility of Sexual Identity and the Androgynous Vision in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando

The modern concept of identity implies fluid and dynamic relations between an individual and political, social, cultural and other specific backgrounds. As the boundaries tend to dissolve due to travel, nomadism, diaspora, cultural hybridity etc. the new configurations of identity take place. How do the “new geography of identity“, and gender as one of its constituents fit in the androgynous vision of Virginia Woolf, presented in her novel Orlando? The mobility of sexual identities of the characters in the novel and the vacillation between one sex and the other raise issues not only of the determinability of sexual difference and the relationship between masculine/feminine, but also of the reality of life itself.

Re-imagining migration: (im)mobility and the return to the sertão in Suely in the sky

The article aims to analyze how the Brazilian film Suely in the Sky (Karim Ainouz, 2006) tackles the issue of migration and (im)mobility in a contemporary context of dispersion and restlessness which seeks to emphasize the subjectivity of the main character rather than a migratory collective impulse. The film also represents a return to the sertao, which, in the 1960s, allegorized the nation in Brazilian cinema, and was nostalgically readdressed in the 1990’s. Contrary to these previous moments, however, the film opens for a transnational perspective, which suggests a tension between the nomadic, fluid idea of ‘becoming’, and the monadic, coagulated fixity of identity. The politics of displacement in this film helps us imag(in)e forms of life beyond normal/tized configurations of identity and belonging.