Situated Identity Research Articles

War-talk: an urban youth language of siege in Nairobi

ABSTRACT In this article, I detail how youth in poor urban settlements in Nairobi use a vernacular that I term war-talk. This is a speech, anchored in the Swahili derived urban slang language Sheng, which includes words that reference combat situations. If Sheng, as has been argued, is a generational articulation of unequal spatialized relations in Nairobi, war-talk further indexes the siege that those who live within the margins of the city experience every day, and that appears to be worsening. In addition, I put forward that war-talk is shaped by specific situated identities taken up in the East of Nairobi, subjectivities that chronicle what are seen as ongoing violations of the poor, particularly by the police. At the same time, while it bears witness to “war,” war-talk does not position its speakers solely as victims, and is performed as a language that offers deft situated escapes that portend vernacular and material agency for those who continue to be its progenitors in the margins of this city.

DYNAMICS OF THE PERSONAL IDENTITY CRISIS UNDER CONDITIONS OF SOCIAL INSTABILITY

The article considers the issue of the personality identity crisis in the situation of social instability and discusses the topicality of the phenomenon. It is shown that crises constantly occur at certain stages of development of a person, group, society as a whole or in different spheres of a social life, but at the same time they have their own uniqueness and significance. The crisis is considered as a problem that cannot be avoided, but also cannot be resolved with the available means. Personal identity is understood as an internal, self-created, dynamic organization of needs, abilities, beliefs and individual history. In modern conditions of uncertainty and instability, contradictions that exist in the image of the world by the people are intensified to the maximum and have a destabilizing effect on their emotional state and physical well-being. The uniqueness of the situation is that the scale of the threat is equal to the total population of the globe, the threat is inevitable and extraordinary in its consequences. Humanity has never faced such a situation in its history. The author notes that for all scientific approaches in the frame of which the problem is studied, the common thing is that in the process of identity formation, a person discovers himself / herself and his /her place in the world, its main function is to maintain stability, certainty, continuity, and the integrity of the personality. The article identifies and examines the causes of the modern identity crisis that accompanies globalization processes in the world, describes the types, stages, features of a person's situational reactions to the crisis, psychological features of the manifestations of identity in crisis situations at the emotional, cognitive, and behavioral levels. It is concluded that, to a significant extent, the identity crisis, its dynamics, the scale in which it is presented in the modern world is a consequence of globalization processes leading to the disintegration of traditional social ties, which were the basis of stability in previous conditions. Today the task of choosing a “life project” for oneself, constructing and adapting an identity is becoming urgent.

Possessive and non-identity relations in Turkic switch-reference

AbstractThis paper provides an overview of non-canonical patterns of switch-reference involving the converb in-(V)pin selected Turkic languages. This converb is usually described as a same-subject converb, but we show that it can conform toMcKenzie’s (2012)extended definition of “same-subject” as expressing the identity of topic situations, rather than subject referents. In addition to tracking cross-clausal subject identity,-(V)pcan be used when the possessor of the subject of one clause corefers with the subject of another clause and when the events expressed by the two clauses are in a close temporal and/or causal relationship. Based onStirling (1993)andBárány & Nikolaeva (2019), we argue that the role of possessors in Turkic switch-reference is captured by lexically specified conditions licensing the use of-(V)pwhen two subjects are in a possessive relation. Finally, we suggest that both types of non-canonical switch-reference can be seen as ensuring discourse continuity.

The identity-frame model: A framework to describe situated identity negotiation for adolescent youth participating in an informal engineering education program

ABSTRACT Background: STEM identity has emerged as an important research topic and a predictor of how youth engage with STEM inside and outside of school. Although there is a growing body of literature in this area, less work has been done specific to engineering, especially in out-of-school learning contexts. Methods: To address this need, we conducted a qualitative investigation of five adolescent youth participating in a four-month afterschool engineering program. The study focused on how participants negotiated engineering-related identities through ongoing interactions with activities, peers, and adults, and the patterns of identity negotiation that emerged across program sessions. Findings: Through the investigation, we developed an Identity-Frame Model, positing that identity negotiation is an ongoing process of performance and definition work by an individual and recognition and positioning work by other adults and peers that creates emergent, context-specific identities and activity frames that are made particularly salient during critical identity moments. We also categorized model elements that appeared to be specific to engineering, such as situated identities and activity frames related to failure, collaboration, and competition. Contribution: The study advances the understanding of identity negotiation related to engineering and provides a new framework for investigating situated identity in informal STEM learning contexts.

A Study of East Loloan Communities’ Ritual Activities Spoken in Balinese Malay Language

The purpose of this study was to examine the discourse of Balinese Malay-language rituals activities which includes (a) the structure of discourse, (b) cohesion, (c) metalinguistic analysis, and (d) cultural context; and the dynamics of traditional discourse and Balinese Malay-language culture in the community. This study applied the theory of discourse analysis that viewed the language used in context, which means that people can communicate because they understand discourse (text), context, and patterns or structure. The choice of the informants was by applying the purposive sampling method with certain criteria. The data was obtained through semi-structured interviews. The research location was in East Loloan, as the center of Balinese Malay language speakers. The research findings showed that the discourse of traditional activities and Balinese Malay-language culture used language (microstructure) which was classified as the barrel of an oral language, so that the speech style was clearly visible, both in the structure of discourse, the use of cohesion, and its metalinguistic elements. Meanwhile, in the language (macro structure) it was seen that the use of language for the disclosure of Malay culture that was closely related to Islam/Moslem religion. This could be seen in the co-text of the use of the terms silaturahmi, ngangini, and the context of the use of cultural symbols such as penyingset as a symbol of the men paying attention to and respecting women in traditional customs. Furthermore, in the dynamics of cultural discourse, there appeared to be an attraction between the retention of identity and accommodation in situations and conditions that lead to be changed by the time.

Towards Semantic Brain Mapping Methodology Based on a Multidimensional Markup of Continuous Russian-Language Texts: an Attempt at Validation and Development.

In the present study, we combine linguistic annotation of oral texts in Russian with the registration of BOLD signal in functional MRI experiments to determine how and where semantic categories are represented in the human brain. Using the same stimuli material, we also analyze the differences in cortical activation in three thematic domains: description of nature, description of working principles of technical devices and more self-referential texts, addressing the question of human identity in conflict situations. We discuss methodological problems within the two approaches (microanalysis and macroanalysis) to study brain activation in natural conditions, i.e. under a continuous speech flow. Within the thematic domain studies, only minimally significant differences in brain activation were registered during the listening to texts from the three thematic groups. This outcome leads to the conclusion that the approach of thematic group contrasts (cognitive subtraction methodology) is not sufficient to study the mechanisms of text comprehension, and should be replaced by the modeling of multidimensional representations of semantic categories in time. Within the semantic category approach, we describe the neurolinguistic process of text understanding as the activation of 15 clusters responsible for semantic categories (e.g. “Conflict”, “Mental”, “Social”). Our data demonstrate that the clusters are widely distributed across the human brain. In contrast to the previous studies, we suggest that deep subcortical structures are involved in the processing of certain categories as well. The observed lateralization of category processing underlines the involvement of the right hemisphere in the processing of meaning.

Eugene O'neill and the Tragic Tension

Eugene O'neill and the Tragic Tension

Sharing innovative methods, data and knowledge across sociophonetics and forensic speech science

AbstractForensic speech science is the application of speech analysis methods to forensic recordings; in many jurisdictions this is predominantly the application of sociophonetics. Sociophonetics and forensic speech science have developed as independent research areas with their own aims, methodologies and identities, and the gap between the fields has arguably grown bigger in recent years. Yet, there is much to be gained for both fields from closer collaboration through sharing methods, data, and knowledge. We will argue that this is more important now given the increasing demands on forensic science to more rigorously and empirically test and validate methods, and current trends in sociophonetics towards understanding how different linguistic variables are used by speakers to enact different identities in different situations. In this paper, we review the relationship between sociophonetics and forensic speech science. We also outline how developments in both fields can, and do, directly contribute to improving the quality of forensic voice evidence, as well as informing theoretical and practical aspects of sociophonetics.

From stance to identity: Stancetaking in contemporary English risk discourse

The study focuses on stancetaking – an intersubjective and context-bound discursive activity that unites micro- and micro-properties of discursive interaction. The purpose of this work consists in discovering discursive ways of situational identities construction in contemporary English risk discourse as a result of stancetaking on risk. The theoretical background for this research comprises post-structuralist and socio-constructionist approaches to discourse analysis, establishing a new, socio-cognitive, direction in discourse studies. Contemporary English risk discourse serves a situational environment for investigating stancetaking in this work. It is approached as a discursive phenomenon of two types – a risk discourse proper (communicative situation of risk) and a discourse about risk (metacommunicative situation of risk). Discursive framework of communicative situation of risk reveals cognitive, pragmatic, and interactional dynamics of stancetaking in the conditions of in situ discussion of eventual stances (decisions) on risks. The inquiry resulted in determining the stance-takers’ situational identities, ranging from risk-averse to risk-taking subjects. Investigation of conversational patterns and discursive dynamism of stance alignment enabled identification and characterization of interactional mechanisms of stancetaking in situations of risk. Explorations of stancetaking in ex situ discursive conditions of metacommunicative situations of risk shed light onto socio-semiotic potential and pragmatic-rhetorical patterns of stancetaking. Complex analysis of the stance-takers’ language output provided a basis for establishing a typology of their situational identities, constructed in mediated discourse situations – layman, expert, mediator whose strategic speech behavior depends upon the balance of epistemic and affective components in their respective stances.

Nurses’ Experiences of Process-Oriented Supervision—Acquiring New Approaches to Demanding Situations

Background: Providing nursing care for patients and relatives requires a great effort from a nurse. It is therefore important for the nurse to have the opportunity to reflect on the caring acts included in process-oriented nursing supervision (PRONS). The overall objective of the nursing supervision is to support the professional development identity, competences, skills and ethics in different situations in nursing care. Aim: To investigate nurses’ experiences of the model of purging, playing and learning (PPL) according to Eriksson theory in a (PRONS) related to strengthen safe care, quality and professional development. Method: A qualitative study with individual interviews and the data was analyzed using qualitative interpretive content analysis. Participants: All eleven registered participated nurses were from southwestern Sweden and worked in different hospital units. Ethical Considerations: The study carried out in accordance with the ethical guidelines laid down in the Helsinki Declaration and according to the recommendations of the regional ethics committee. Findings: Three categories were identified, valuable purging in the process, responsive playing and awareness of learning. The study found that by participating in PRONS the nurses had developed new approaches with different “tools” when difficult situations occurred in daily nursing practice. Conclusion: PRONS with the model PPL has an important role to support nurses in daily nursing practice. The study highlights that there are residual successful effects after PRONS for the nurses in managing care situations that experienced strengthen quality in care and professional development.

Paysages urbains intermédiaux : Revoir le Londres gay dans Folly/ Monument; Excerpts from Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library de Scott Lyman (2014)

This essay focuses on the video installation Folly/Monument; Excerpts from Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library, by American artist Scott Lyman, first exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, as part of the Bloomberg “New Contemporaries” 2015 exhibition. The viewer entered a site-specific, pale pink, neoclassical “folly”—an enclosed, intimate space for no more than two visitors at a time—, in which a 26-minute film offering a fragmentary vision of Alan Hollinghurst’s 1988 début novel was played on a loop. This essay analyses the way in which Lyman’s video installation re-imagines the London of 1983 and the relationship between urban space and dissident sexualities explored in Alan Hollinghurst’s 1988 novel. It argues that beyond an aesthetics of discontinuity, based on abrupt, incongruous contrasts, Lyman’s piece—thus mirroring Hollinghurst’s novel—weaves an intricate web of relationships between past and present, notably through its soundtrack and the motif of dancing: Lyman’s cityscape is turned into a soundscape, reconfiguring the gay London mapped by Hollinghurst. This essay finally contends that Lyman’s piece, in a playful and queer mode, blurs the lines between the inside and the outside, the intimate and the monumental, the individual and the collective, questioning our own position or “situational identity” as viewers and London flâneurs.

Negotiating national identities in conflict situations: The discursive reproduction of the Sino-US trade war in China’s news reports

The force of globalization has greatly challenged people’s conceptualization of national identity. The traditional definition of national identity as being distinct, stable and generated by such internal factors as ethnic, religion, citizenship and so on, has been replaced by the understanding that national identity is invested with more dynamic and complex features and is actually constructed differently in different situations. By following Van Dijk’s socio-cognitive perspective in critical discourse analysis (CDA) and drawing on the 47 news reports collected on the websites of People’ s Daily Online and Xinhuanet, this study explores how China’s national identities are negotiated in its news reports of the Sino-US trade war. It is found that China’s news reports have constructed three types of Sino-US relations, namely, antagonistic, negotiatory and cooperative relations. Out of these relations, China has been constructed as victim of the trade war, defender of free trade, driver for negotiations and beneficiary of mutual cooperation. The construction of these identities and relations is realized through constructive, destructive, justification and transformation strategies. It is further found that the diversity of both China’s national identities and Sino-US relations in China’s news reports is the result of the political, social and economic differences between the two countries.

GaeltechVR: Measuring the Impact of an Immersive Virtual Environment to Promote Situated Identity in Irish Language Learning

This study investigates how a design-based research methodology is best suited to measuring the impact of a designed virtual reality experience to improve situated identity in Irish learners focusing on their attitudes, motivation, and confidence as Irish language learners. This paper describes the design of GaeltechVR: an immersive Irish language VR experience designed for the VIVE Pro. It also gives the results of a mixed-methods study to measure the impact in a local adult Irish language learner context. A questionnaire on situated attitudes and motivation to language learning (Ushioda & Dörnyei, 2009) was adapted for the Irish context to investigate a small scale sample of the local context’s attitudes to Irish language learning. The participant’s gameplay was recorded for analysis along with questionnaires on presence (Witmer & Singer, 1998), simulator sickness and an adapted questionnaire on their attitudes after the intervention.Using best practice in design-based research experiments (Nelson, Ketelhut, Clarke, Bowman, & Dede, 2013) the study had two main goals: To investigate the usability of the design of GaeltechVR and to measure the impact of the intervention on attitudes, identity and motivation in the local Irish language learning context.

Analysing the ways of participating in interview settings: young people’s identity performances and social class in focus groups

Critical discussions on the focus group method have highlighted the importance of considering the forms of interaction generated in groups. In this empirical paper we argue that these forms of interaction are intimately linked to the ways participants interpret the study setting, and these interpretations are likely to differ significantly depending on participants’ social backgrounds. In the light of our data consisting of 18 focus groups with 15-year-old school pupils from both affluent and deprived neighbourhoods of Helsinki discussing film clips about young people drinking alcohol, we ask what kinds of modes of participation are mobilised in focus group discussions in order to mark the social position of participants. We further analyse these modes in relation to situated identity performances, arguing that contextual factors of the study setting become especially important to consider when researching vulnerable groups and heterogeneous populations. The analysis yields three modes of participation: these are active/engaged, resistant/passive and dominant/transformative. We argue that these modes can be viewed as actively taken positions that reveal what kinds of identities and competences participants are able and willing to mobilise in the study setting, and that recognising these modes is important in all interview settings.

The Interplay Between Social Contexts of Power and Aggravation Strategies: Identity-Specific Perspectives in Fictional Discourse

This paper attempts a pragmatic analysis of the interplay between social contexts of power and sociolinguistic device of aggravation strategies concerning dialogic discourses in Vikram Seth’s novel A Suitable Boy (ASB) (1993). The paper attempts to validate that aggravation strategies have been an integral part of human discourse. It demonstrates how people use aggravation strategies to exercise power over others in different communicative contexts. It also exemplifies how power is vested in specific identities, and their role relationships in different power structures existing in the society based on their caste, age, sex, social standing, political or official identity, and how the power is exerted in the context of their social identities. The paper defines various aspects of aggravation, explains the dominant participatory identities, namely master identities, situated identities, and discourse identities and analyses how these social identities exercise power through aggravation strategies in the dialogic discourses in ASB.

The Interplay between Social Contexts of Power and Aggravation Strategies: Identity- specific Perspectives in Fictional Discourse

This paper attempts a pragmatic analysis of the interplay between social contexts of power and sociolinguistic device of aggravation strategies concerning dialogic discourses in Vikram Seth’s novel A Suitable Boy (ASB) (1993). The paper attempts to validate that aggravation strategies have been an integral part of human discourse. It demonstrates how people use aggravation strategies to exercise power over others in different communicative contexts. It also exemplifies how power is vested in specific identities, and their role relationships in different power structures existing in the society based on their caste, age, sex, social standing, political or official identity, and how the power is exerted in the context of their social identities. The paper defines various aspects of aggravation, explains the dominant participatory identities, namely master identities, situated identities, and discourse identities and analyses how these social identities exercise power through aggravation strategies in the dialogic discourses in ASB.

Situational Identities along the Raiding Frontier of Colonial New Mexico

Situational Identities along the Raiding Frontier of Colonial New Mexico

Perceived Accent Discrimination: Psychosocial Consequences and Perceived Legitimacy

Prior research has documented that nonstandard ways of speaking can be subject to discrimination, and that nonstandard speakers are aware of the biases toward their accents. However, few studies have investigated the consequences of this for the stigmatized speaker. The objectives of this study are to explore how perceived legitimacy of discrimination moderates the relationship between perceived accent discrimination and the following two variables: (a) situated francophone identity and (b) French language confidence. Participants were nonnative ( n = 113) and native ( n = 225) speakers of French who completed questionnaires assessing the above constructs. Moderated regression analyses revealed that language discrimination is significantly and negatively related to language confidence. For native speakers from a high vitality region, legitimacy was found to moderate the relation between language discrimination and identity. When discrimination was perceived to be less legitimate, the relation between perceived discrimination and situated identity was positive.

Collective Social Identity: Synthesizing Identity Theory and Social Identity Theory Using Digital Data

Identity theory (IT) and social identity theory (SIT) are eminent research programs from sociology and psychology, respectively. We test collective identity as a point of convergence between the two programs. Collective identity is a subtheory of SIT that pertains to activist identification. Collective identity maps closely onto identity theory’s group/social identity, which refers to identification with socially situated identity categories. We propose conceptualizing collective identity as a type of group/social identity, integrating activist collectives into the identity theory model. We test this conceptualization by applying identity theory hypotheses to the “vegan” identity, which is both a social category and part of an active social movement. Data come from comments on two viral YouTube videos about veganism. One video negates prevailing meanings of the vegan identity. A response video brings shared vegan identity meanings back into focus. Identity theory predicts that nonverifying identity feedback elicits negative emotion and active behavioral response, while identity verification elicits positive emotion and an attenuated behavioral response. We test these tenets using sentiment analysis and word counts for comments across the two videos. Results show support for identity theory hypotheses as applied to a collective social identity. We supplement results with qualitative analysis of video comments. The findings position collective identity as a bridge between IT and SIT, demonstrate innovative digital methods, and provide theoretical scaffolding for mobilization research in light of emergent technologies and diverse modes of activist participation.

Situational Identities along the Raiding Frontier of Colonial New Mexico. Historical Archeology of the American West Series. By Jun U. Sunseri

Situational Identities along the Raiding Frontier of Colonial New Mexico. Historical Archeology of the American West Series. By Jun U. Sunseri