Discourses Of Identity Research Articles

Rediscovering Identity: Autobiographical Memory and Media Discourses of Russian-Germans in Germany and Russia

This paper compares the processes of rediscovering identity in autobiographical memory and media discourses of Russian-Germans living in Germany and in Russia. According to R. Brubaker, the Russian-Germans are viewed as a transnational group with a specific “hybrid identity”, whose identification varies depending on the cultural project, which they are involved in. In Germany and Russia, the boundaries of this identification are the politics of memory of the host society and the dominant narratives regarding this group as repatriates (Germany) and as a diaspora with its own culture (Russia). Our analysis, which was based on the methodology of the critical discourse analysis by S. Jäger, revealed that such a dominant narrative in Germany is the “narrative of return”. In Russia, however, there are two discursive threads: the image of Russian-Germans as a repressed group and the narrative about the outstanding role of Russian-Germans in the history of Russia. The curves of autobiographical and family narratives of the three generations of Russian-Germans in Russia and Germany were analyzed and compared according to the biographical method of F. Schütze. People aged 30–50 were the most open to the influence of collective “standardized” narratives both in Germany and in Russia. Despite the fact of living in Russia, those respondents who were preparing to repatriate to Germany actively reproduced the “return narrative” and used international mnemonic frameworks to structure their autobiographical and family story. Our study showed that the influence of the discursive media environment on the autobiographical and family memory of Russian-Germans living in Germany and Russia depends on the respondent’s individual life experience (the curve of their biography), age, and some peculiarities of their family history.

Affect, ethnic boundaries and social mobility: transforming identities in the acculturation of Ashkenazi immigrants in Israel

This study investigates how affects – uncontrollable feelings that tacitly influence humans – transform, rather than reify, intergroup relations. Taking immigrant families as a case in point, we explore the role of circulating identity-affects in shaping ethnoclass identifications and boundaries over time. Proceeding from the prevailing (Jewish-sector) identity discourse in Israel, where ethnic categories (Ashkenazi vs. Mizrahi) still frame a major culture-class divide, we analyse the affects produced by those who are regarded as the mainstream – the Ashkenazim. Given the common identification of Ashkenazi immigrants, including those of lower and lower-middle class, with the Israeli ruling class, their gradual acculturation experience and social ascent have been under-researched. Addressing this lacuna, we examine these families’ changing emotion discourse from an intergenerational perspective, to uncover phases of their integration. The analysis is based on 53 interviews with individuals in three generations of Ashkenazi families (the first generation arrived after the Second World War). Using nuanced discourse and conversation analysis, we trace changing affective patterns in these individuals’ emotion talk, corresponding with their upward mobility. Two conflicting affects shape Ashkenazi identities from the second generation onwards: counteracting the first generation’s tacit racism, coupled with intensifying class elitism towards the Mizrahim. Ethnoclass boundaries persist, yet not as a static, seemingly ‘natural’ inter-ethnic animosity. Rather, they are constructed and reconstructed through the interplay between transforming affects, conducive to the different generations’ identity and status formation as native Israelis and middle-class members.

Who Says What? The Role of the Actor’s Political Position in Ideograph Construction

Previous studies have shown the relationship between ideology and narrative discourse between ideology and narrative discourse in political debates in parliament, protest movements, or discourse in the media that posit ideology and discourse as a single domination relationship but not in network relations. Consequently, the role of political actors in discourse becomes unattractive and is replaced by media studies. It was discovered that ideographs, and word artefacts, link socio-political cognition and political discourse in practice. They also narrate the ideology of political actors in their daily speeches and quotes in different media outlets, with the meanings presented in vast interpretations. However, these interpretative meanings rely on political function and are embedded in the political position. It is assumed that an ideograph serves as an ideological identity in public discourse while the political organisation of the actors determines the interpretative meaning. Therefore, two prominent ideographs in the Omnibus Law discourse on Job Creation, "welfare" and "democracy," were explored to show the "anchored meaning" and describe how ideological identity leads to the creation of ideographic meaning. We analyse the network of the two ideographs using Discourse Network Analysis (DNA) by Philip Leified and Ideographic Analysis (IA). The findings showed that the functional meaning of "welfare" and "democracy" depends on the use of actors in specific discourse. We concluded that the political position of actors in ideographic narratives plays a more dominant role in the relationship between ideology and narratives. Keywords: Actor’s political position, discourse network analysis, ideograph, ideology, ideographic analysis.

Human Nature in Self-Identity Construct: A Meta-ethnography Study

The development of identity theories in psychology tends to be partial and incoherent, and are followed by various problems. This study uses meta-ethnography to deconstruct theories of self-identity in order to find common threads and relation between theories, including main theories on identity (Erikson’s; Marcia’s), and other related theories (Berzonsky’s, Grotevant’s, Waterman’s, McAdams’s), This study uses Hofstede's (2001) view on identity theories, and formulates a fundamental and comprehensive conceptualization of identity theory. This study formulates a model of the layers of identity which includes the identity of (1) human nature, (2) personal, and (3) social. This study also explains the dynamics of the self as ‘I’ and ‘Me’ in the formation of identity. This study discusses human nature in the discourse of identity and this provides further implications in the field of developmental psychology and educational psychology.

Touria Nakkouch: A Moroccan Vociferous Poetess Spelling Out her Gendered Voice Anew

Few are those Arab poetesses whose voices have made an outreach beyond their locale. Touria Nakkouch, an outspoken Moroccan poetess from the city of Agadir, and a university professor of comparative literature, is one of them. In her maiden collection of poems entitled The Dance of the Moon, published in Casablanca in 2009, professor Nakkouch braves the traditional, worn-out Establishment of Morocco and the Arab World by initiating a disquieting feminist monologue in search of a constructive dialogue with the other gender in a world punctuated by masculine hegemony. She redefines her own gender and feminist identity in a reluctant discourse embedded in an internal monologue which seems to transmit various messages addressed to the powerful other. This paper looks at the discursive features of one of her poems entitled “Musings Before Birth”, in which she ascribes to herself the voice of a stubborn fetus resisting to be born into a world a female newborn is almost unwelcome as a guest. To this effect, the paper uses a discourse analysis approach, informed by positioning theory, to uncover the multi-layered feminist message implied in the text to create a gender-focused understanding of the audience. Keywords: Nakkouch, establishment, discourse, positioning, dialogue, monologue, feminist

American telephone voice: Socio-phonetic features of identity in professional and non-professional discourse

American telephone voice: Socio-phonetic features of identity in professional and non-professional discourse

Divided Self in Jean Rhys’ Voyage in the Dark

This paper discusses the problems of identity, time and place in Jean Rhys’ 1934 novel, Voyage in the Dark. It analyses Rhys’ aesthetics concerns in the creation of a subjective construction of the imperial metropole and the colonial space. In doing, this paper suggests how Rhys builds a bridge between contemporary modernist narrative techniques and a preceding Post-colonial perspective. The constant juxtaposition of time and place makes of Rhys’ protagonist, Anna Morgan, an elusive self. By means of this fragmented self, the author aims to reformulate colonial power relations and raise crucial questions about discourses of gender and national identity. As a result, this paper engages in a Post-colonial thought, arguing how issues about gender and race issues are articulated in Rhys’ novel. Rhys creates the subjectivity of a marginalized woman showing the effects of colonization and creating a metropolitan female identity based on fragmented and juxtaposed memories.

The motherland’s suffocating embrace: schooling and public discourse on Hong Kong identity under the National Security Law

ABSTRACT While ‘national education’ has regularly been invoked by post-1997 Hong Kong administrations, its pursuit has acquired new force and urgency since the introduction in 2020 of a National Security Law. Investigating the role of schooling in this reinvigorated project of thought reform, this article asks how far recent initiatives have merely amplified official identity discourse or marked a qualitative change. It does so primarily by analysing the official curriculum and textbooks for Citizenship and Social Development (CSD), introduced in 2022 to replace Liberal Studies, a subject widely blamed by nationalists for fomenting sedition. Following a comparative overview of the new and old curricula, there is a discussion of changes to the textbook treatment of: the historical framing of identity; the ‘One Country, Two Systems’ model; culture’s significance for Hong Kong’s place in China; and civil, legal and constitutional rights and duties. The analysis concludes with reflections on what these changes imply both for China’s efforts to re-educate its unruly Hong Kong subjects, and for scholarly efforts to understand and explain such processes.

Ukrainian Discourses on NATO: Securitization, Otherness, and Their Effects on Russo-Ukrainian Relations

Abstract Ukraine’s aspirations for NATO membership have been a source of contention between Russia and Ukraine for decades. At the same time, domestic debates in Ukraine on relations with NATO have also been a divisive issue for Ukraine’s ruling political elites. These conflicts culminated in 2022, when Russia launched a military offensive against Ukraine claiming that its movement towards NATO was an existential threat to the Russian state. This paper summarizes some of the results of my longitudinal research of ruling elite discourse on NATO in Ukraine between 1997 and 2018. It focuses on the changes in national identity discourse and contestation, pinpointing their constitutive role for Ukrainian foreign policy.

Editorial Introduction

The theme for this issue is foregrounded in Kevin Quashie’s (2012) concept of “the quiet”, a term he coined to capture the limitations of blackness as a public discourse that privileges resistant expressiveness as a singular framework. Grounded in African American culture, Quashie asks, “is it possible to engage in public discourse of black identity beyond the imperative of resistance?” (p. 27) With this, Quashie offers us another way of reading Black life beyond defiance and un-livability that welcomes the whimsy of the interior—describing a space of personal inwardness, aliveness, that allows for the unexpected to be possible.

DISCURSIVE OPPORTUNITIES AND THE MOTIVATIONAL FRAMING OF HUMAN-RIGHTS ACTIVISM FOR EAST TIMOR: A CROSSNATIONAL ANALYSIS

Drawing from previously untapped archival data, our research undertakes a crossnational analysis to understand how critical organizations within the global solidarity movement for East Timor in Canada, the United States, and Australia adapted their human-rights claims and rhetorical interventions to their specific national contexts to produce politically and culturally resonant motivational frames aligned with their states’ discourses of national identity and foreign policy to support humanitarian intervention in East Timor. We identify crossnational differences in the framing of their political discourse: (1) Canadian groups mobilized a humanitarian-peacekeeping frame, (2) U.S. solidarity groups tapped into a democratic-exceptionalist frame, and (3) Australian activists drew from a remembrance-moral debt frame. We conclude by underscoring the importance of discursive opportunities and national historical contexts for studying the mobilization of human rights and crossnational variations in motivational framing.

Refashioning Muslim femininity: YouTube as the facilitator of entrepreneurial motherhood

This article analyses YouTube channels of two Muslim women from Kerala – Silu Talks Salha and Zehera & Samseer – which have created a virtual space of sorority among Muslim women users of internet and smartphones, by way of a discourse of contemporary modernity embedded in the everyday domestic space. I engage critically with the ways in which these channels generate a discourse of entrepreneurial identity in negotiating with one’s lived realities. This discourse simultaneously makes appeal to be dutiful to conventional domestic roles, while being innovative and enterprising in them. Such modes of self-expression, which platforms such as YouTube enable, present conceptual challenges with regard to the categories of the individual and community. Arguing that the videos on these channels complicate the figure of the ‘conventional Muslim woman’ through their constant invocations of modernism and entrepreneurialism, this article illustrates how they produce an Islamic ‘mother community’ virtually. I show how these channels transform into a public yet intimate space, providing an online platform for Muslim women from Kerala to be seen and heard.

Transformation of the identity of the Buryat children's literature at the turn of the 1980s–1990s.

The article is devoted to the changes that took place in the Buryat children's literature at the turn of the Soviet and post-Soviet eras in the context of sociocultural transformations caused by the collapse of the USSR and the formation of new identities in the post-Soviet space. The discourses of identity found in the children's literature of this period, their interaction and dynamics are investigated. The purpose of the study is to determine the specifics of the transformation of the identity of the Buryat children's literature in this transitional period. The material of the study is Buryat children's magazines and plays published in the period from 1985 to 1995. The study is based on a diachronic approach. The main research methods are cultural-historical and discourse analysis methods. As a result, it was established that as a result of the crisis of Soviet culture and the formation of the discourse of national revival in Buryat children's literature, there was a gradual replacement of Soviet identity with a new national identity. Prior to this transformation, Buryat children's literature was aimed at the formation of a Soviet identity associated with the communist ideology, the party and the pioneer movement, the idea of the unity of the Soviet nations, the events of the general Soviet history, such as the October Revolution and the Great Patriotic War. After the changes that took place, Buryat children's literature began to focus primarily on the formation of a national identity based on familiarization with the traditions of Buddhism, the culture of the Mongolian peoples, and the history of the Buryats, out of touch with the Soviet statehood.

CONTEMPORARY UNDERSTANDING OF THE PARADIGMS OF MULTICULTURALISM

The concept of multicultural citizenship is increasingly the subject of philosophical reflections and political debates. No doubt it is the ubiquity of discourses of identity, otherness and difference—and the proliferation of legal claims. On this topic, it is interesting to note that postmodern authors have described the way in which the discourse on alterity dominates the new zeitgeist and thus confirms the dominant place occupied by the paradigm of difference in contemporary thinking about identity: "Ah the others!" That's all some loaded intellectuals have in their mouths! Diversity, otherness, multiculturalism, it grew into a hobby. According to one of the leading analysts in this domain, Jean-Francois Lyotard, in certain cases the topic of multiculturalism grew into cultural business, conferences, interviews, seminars. Today, three leading authorities in the field of multiculturalism are Charles Taylor, Michael Walzer and Will Kymlicka. Their opinion is of great importance for the theoretical directions of multiculturalism and therefore we will try to make some comparative analysis between their notions of this contemporary paradigm.

공공가치는 행정(학)의 정체성 위기 해결에 기여할 수 있는가?

This study is to explore the potential of public value theory in solving the identity crisis of public administration which was adopted as an alternative paradigm to new public management. Although the historical necessity of separating administration from politics in consequence helped to form public administration as a distinct field of study, unfortunately the politics-administration dichotomy has perverted the legitimacy and identity of public administration and has narrowed the scope of public administration discourse. Though the preceding similar and related concepts and theories to public value such as the public, publicness, administrative value, public service value, administrative ideologies and so on have played a leading role in identity discourse, they are limited in more fuller explication of public values. Now public value not only can integrate and look at those old concepts and theories in a new perspective, but also can expand the multi-disciplinary approach to public administration theory and practice. Lastly, reflective thoughts on the ligitimacy and status of public administration and future research agendas are suggested.

(Re)Mediating Narratives of Identity in US Civil Rights Discourse: CMDA as a Pedagogic Tool

(Re)Mediating Narratives of Identity in US Civil Rights Discourse: CMDA as a Pedagogic Tool

Truth with a Z: disinformation, war in Ukraine, and Russia’s contradictory discourse of imperial identity

ABSTRACT This article offers a qualitative analysis of how, by adopting identity-related discourses whose meanings resonate within a given culture, Russian state propaganda strives to bolster “the truth status” of its Ukraine war claims. These discourses, we argue, have long historical lineages and thus are expected to be familiar to audiences. We identify three such discourses common in many contexts but with specific resonances in Russia, those of colonialism/decolonization, imperialism, and the imaginary West. The article demonstrates that these same discourses also inform war-related coverage in Russophone oppositional media. Russian state-affiliated and oppositional actors further share “floating signifiers,” particularly “the Russian people,” “historical Russia,” “the Russian world,” “Ukraine,” “fascism/Nazism,” and “genocide,” while according them radically different meanings. Overall, our findings highlight the importance of studying how state propaganda works at the level of discourses, and the acutely dialogical processes by which disinformation and counter-disinformation efforts are produced and consumed.

Constituting institutional identity in political discourse: The use of the first-person plural pronoun in China's press conferences

AbstractThe discursive construction of institutional identity concerns how speakers, through their verbal conduct, perform actions as incumbents of particular institutional roles. This can be accomplished through the first-person plural pronoun, a salient marker of the ongoing displays, expressions, and constructions of institutional identity. Drawing on the Chinese premier's press conferences, this study investigates how politicians, journalists, and interpreters constitute their institutional identities through their use of the first-person plural pronoun (English we; Mandarin 我们 wǒmen). Relying on qualitative analysis and bivariate analysis, this study shows that Chinese journalists and interpreters tend to constitute their identities as aligned with the Chinese authority. This stands in contrast to patterns identified in independent press systems, in which journalists confront politicians, and interpreters serve as impartial facilitators. The findings illustrate the bounded fluidity of identities in political discourse and provide insight into the workings of the political communication system in an authoritarian context. (Political discourse, identity, personal pronoun, press conference, journalistic norm, mass communication, interpreter-mediated interaction, China, authoritarianism)*

Comparing Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre in Foucault's Perspective to Interpret "The Madwoman in the Attic"

Charlotte Bronte portrayed a marginal character in Jane Eyre, Bertha Mason, the madwoman in the attic. Many readers thought she was insane, ugly, and silent at the same time. She emerges from the attic later to recount her forgotten background in Wide Sargasso Sea when Jane Rhys investigates her family history. Whether it is the postmodern writing style or the psychological exploration of the heroine in the novel, it has the artistic research value of various interpretations. The study of Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre mainly focuses on postcolonial discourse and identity discourse. It is rare to analyze Bertha from the perspective of Foucault's discourse power theory. This essay interprets Bertha and Antoinette's characterizations in terms of the interrelationships of discourse, power, and knowledge based on Foucault's theory of discursive power. It examines the lack of women's discourse and its reconstruction, broadens the viewpoints of Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre, and deepens our comprehension of The Madwoman in the Attic.

Writing the Hong Kong self: fiction, artifacts and the making of history in Dung Kai-cheung’s Works and Creation: Vivid and Lifelike

ABSTRACT Hong Kong’s tumultuous political history over the last decade has continuously shed some light on the city’s complicated relationship with the Chinese mainland. At its core, this relationship is manifested in a nexus of power struggles between three contending ideologies—localism, Chinese nationalism and Western imperialism—that has prevailed all through Hong Kong’s colonial rule. This paper attempts to offer an alternative conceptual framework under which Hong Kong’s coloniality and its connection to the mainland are viewed with more nuances. Centering on the Hong Kong native writer Dung Kai-cheung’s 2005 novel Works and Creation: Vivid and Lifelike, this paper examines the ways in which Works interrogates the shifting paradigms of knowledge production on Hong Kong identity alongside the historical development of the city. In particular, my analysis focuses on how the narrator purposefully sets up a parallel between the creation of self and that of modern artifacts, leading eventually to a parallel between fiction writing and existing discourses of history and identity. Such a way of presenting Hong Kong’s history draws attention not only to the deficiencies in existing discourses on identity as embedded in the above-mentioned power structure, but also to the danger of imagining Hong Kong’s future in a perpetually dichotomized manner. Despite being written in the opening years of the twenty-first century, Works proves to be an insightful contribution—as this paper ultimately seeks to demonstrate—to Hong Kong’s ongoing political struggles.