Paradoxes Of Identity Research Articles

Unsettling the Self: the Paradoxes of Narrative Identity in Christian Testimonial Practice

AbstractBorn-again conversion offers the paradoxical promise of self-transcending self-transformation, which takes narrative form when converts attempt to recount their experiences: how to tell a story of self-transformation, in which oneself is neither the author nor the agent of change? Existing scholarship suggests that conversion narratives work insofar as they resolve underlying paradoxes and stitch together a sense of coherent selfhood. This paper tacks in the opposite direction: the analysis focuses on the tendencies of conversion narratives to blur, blend and double over categorical bounds of selfhood, highlighting paradoxes rather than looking for their resolution. The paper contends, therefore, that conversion narrative practices facilitate converts’ experience of conversion, not only insofar as they resolve paradox and stitch together coherent identity, but also insofar as they cultivate ephemeral experiences and explorations of narrative paradoxes that are inherent to—though often hidden from—most any attempt to find and feel identity.

World-Rank and/or Locally Relevant? Organizational Identity in the Mission Statements of Higher Education Organizations in Israel, 2008–2018

Israeli higher education organizations are currently under pressure to achieve global excellence, satisfy Israeli economic and security needs, and serve Israel’s diverse social groups; they are also required to meet standards of proper governance; and, they wrestle with Israeli, Jewish, Zionist and Palestinian legacies. This array of complex and often conflicting constraints drives our research, to investigate how Israeli higher education organizations are embedded in this particularly complex environment. Whereas research on the mission statements of universities focuses primarily on higher education organizations in the core countries, which serve as the ideals and templates for others worldwide, our investigation reorients this burgeoning research towards the study of higher education identification outside the highly-reputable Western academia. We examine the English-language mission statements of all academic organizations in Israel, in the period 2008–2018. Analyses reveal two main findings: (1) that local–global axis of organizational identity is ordered along place/space distinction and (2) that such glocal identity is enacted at the field level, among categories of higher education organizations. We discuss these findings in the context of the “identity paradox” of contemporary organizations, which are compelled to simultaneously declare their uniqueness as well as their relevance to certain social groups and agendas.

“Who’s gonna love a junkie? But he does”: Exploring couples’ identity negotiations and dyadic coping in the context of opioid use disorder

Opioid use disorder (OUD) is a leading cause of accidental death in the U.S., and people with OUD may rely on romantic partners to dyadically cope with their illness. Guided by the communication theory of identity, this study examines the identity tensions experienced by couples managing OUD and how identity negotiations contribute to couples’ efforts to dyadically cope with OUD. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 19 dyads and 6 individuals ( N = 44), all of whom were in relationships in which at least one partner was managing OUD. Analyses revealed that couples managing OUD experience three types of identity gaps: personal–relational, relational–enacted, and relational–communal identity gaps. These gaps coalesced around a central theme of couple identity paradoxes, which demonstrated the opportunities and potential downsides of dyadically coping with OUD. Findings deepen theoretical understanding of identity negotiation in couples and the role of relational identities in managing illness.

Trabalho artístico como prática de tradução no mercado de arte global

Identidade, diferença e tradução são conceitos teóricos importantes no campo dos estudos da tradução e dos estudos pós-coloniais. Um pressuposto básico desta palestra é a exposição da tradução estética e cultural ao paradoxo de identidade e diferença, e como esse paradoxo é particularmente evidente em práticas artísticas performáticas como a dança e a coreografia. Focando o trabalho artístico da coreógrafa e dançarina Germaine Acogny (Senegal), a palestra abordará práticas de tradução artísticas em condições pós-coloniais no mercado de arte global da chamada “dança contemporânea”. O objetivo é ilustrar como os processos de tradução cultural e estética são contraditórios, híbridos e fragmentados; como o mercado de arte global configura as estratégias artísticas de tradução; e como a produtividade estética reside na impossibilidade de traduzir a experiência cultural artisticamente.

Paradoxes of identity: the past and the present

The article deals with the problematic aspects of the concept of identity, the analysis of which helps to point out and to overcome the paradoxes of the “diachronic identity”, the identity of the human person (as identity of its inner cell) and “plural, flexible identity”, and also to clarify the conditions of the legitimate use of these concepts in contemporary philosophy and social science. The article examines two paradigms of identity: the substantive, when the identity of a thing is sought in an invariable property, which provides its synchronous identity, and the formal, when the identity is sought in a form, a structure of the language, which provides its duration in time and helps to understand the diachronic identity. The article shows the importance of the use of “criteria of identity”, introduced by analytical philosophers to find out the way of duration in time of beings which they try to identify, from the material objects to the collective beings, including the identity of the human person. The problem of subjective identity is pointed out as a separate problem. Two main approaches to it are differentiated: mentalist and expressivist. The first is focused on the inner world of the human being, its memories and feelings, creating paradoxes of the «identity for itself» which is not the «identity for the others», whereas the second lets include the social world in the definition of the subjective identity and facilitates the reconsideration of the boundaries of the internal and the external in determining the human self. The article analyses contemporary use of the concept of identity in social science and public discourses and demonstrates the contradiction of the concept of “plural, heterogeneous identity”, which formulates but doesn’t solve the problem of the subjective identity as the identification of an individual with different social groups.

From universities to Christian churches: agency in the intercultural engagement of non-Christian Chinese students in the UK

This study links the agency lens with the intercultural engagement of international students and examines how agency is affecting and is affected by the church participation (rather than other social engagement within universities) of non-Christian Chinese students in the UK. Adopting agency and adaptation theories, this research analyses quantitative data from questionnaires answered by 501 Chinese students and qualitative data from interviews with 15 students. The result shows that agency offers a critical perspective in terms of cross-cultural engagement for international students, and it complements a broader approach to understanding adaptation and self-formation in cross-border educational experiences. The research proposes a new theory, Theory of Agentive Cross-cultural Adaptation, and highlights the changes in agency and reflexivity modes throughout students’ international educational journeys whereby they actively respond to their own individual needs, address their problematic situations, and construct their personal intercultural spaces both within and beyond the university campus. In particular, Chinese students managed the different modes of relationships based on church experience and negotiated the identity paradox between “cultural interpreters” and “believers” in terms of their understanding of Christianity. The study encourages universities to facilitate spaces of intercultural engagement for international students to exercise their agency within the university and wider social contexts.

Self as an Aesthetic Effect.

Mainstream psychology has assumed a notion of the self that seems to rest on a substantialist notion of the psyche that became predominant despite important critical theories about the self. Although cultural psychology has recognized the diverse, dialogical, historical, narrative, and performative nature of self, as opposed to the idea of self as entity, it is not clear how it accounts for the phenomenological experience of self as a unified image. In this paper, we offer a theoretical contribution to developing the implications of a genetic approach to self in cultural psychology, taking into account an otherwise overlooked dimension: art and aesthetics. We draw on the work of classical authors relevant to cultural psychology, who, although geopolitically and theoretically diverse, are concerted in understanding human psychological life as part of a living process of becoming: James, Mead, Dewey, Vygotsky, Bakhtin, and Vološinov. Overall, the hypothesis developed throughout the paper is that self is produced within psychological individuation as an effect of the aesthetic activity involved in everyday discursive life. We deepen the ideas that self is not an entity but a process of open becoming and that cultural life entails a radical experience of alterity, but we recognize the psychological importance of the sense of unity and closure generated in this process. We argue that self entails not only the process of becoming but also an aesthetical effect of unity in becoming. Self as an aesthetic effect emphasizes the self as a discursive and technical process of production, involving a product that, despite not being a finished entity, is felt as unitary and as mine by virtue of a specific transformation of experience. We thus propose to define self, on one level, as an epistemological category that points to the paradoxes of identity and agency in psychological individuation, and, on a different level, as a twofold operation that makes possible the subjective experience of a constitutive effort as much as a transient but experienced identity or agency.

Paradox Of Identities, Girls As Wives, Boys As Children: The Attitude Of In-School Female Adolescents In Enugu State Towards Early Marriages In Nigeria.

Paradox Of Identities, Girls As Wives, Boys As Children: The Attitude Of In-School Female Adolescents In Enugu State Towards Early Marriages In Nigeria.

Artistic Work as a Practice of Translation on the Global Art Market: The Example of “African” Dancer and Choreographer Germaine Acogny

Identity, difference, and translation are important theoretical concepts in the field of translation studies and postcolonial studies. It is a basic assumption of this text that aesthetic and cultural translation is exposed to the paradox of identity and difference and that this paradox is particularly evident in artistic performance practices such as dance and choreography. Focusing on the artistic work of choreographer and dancer Germaine Acogny (Senegal), the text addresses artistic translation practices under postcolonial conditions in the global art market of so-called “contemporary dance.” The aim is to illustrate how contradictory, hybrid, and fragmented the cultural and aesthetic translation process is, how the global art market shapes the artistic strategies of translation, and how aesthetic productivity lies in the impossibility of translating cultural experience artistically.

Negotiating income and identity in cities: a case of ethnic migrants living beyond slum in India

ABSTRACT Ethnic communities constantly fear of being stripped of their cultural identities, which intern their preference of shying away from settling in slums. The difficulty arises from the highly contingent conceptualization of ‘slum’, as an agglomerate of poor seeking income. The paper investigates paradox of identity embedded in insecurities among ethnic migrants who lack recognition by the state and society. Data was collected using observation, in-depth interviews, and focus group discussions. Constant comparative method (CCM) together with thematic sampling was used for data analysis. The finding suggests that alienation of ethnic migrants is a consequence of constant negotiation of their identity in response to ‘self-society-State’. It recommends slum to retain independent social space for ethnic community and society in a composite culture. To overcome the challenges of identity, income, and insecurity among ethnic migrants, the paper proposes a convergence model to integrate co-existence of multiple identities for public entitlements, welfare, and social acceptance.

Neither “local” nor “global”: Chinese university students’ identity paradoxes in the internationalization of higher education

While previous research has explored the social and academic experiences of international students when studying abroad, limited attention has been paid to local students and their adaptation to the internationalization of higher education. To fill this gap, the present study, adopting identity as an analytic lens, examined a group of Chinese university students’ perceptions and experiences in an internationalized curriculum in China. The findings show that the participants tried to interpret, construct, and refine their individual, academic, and cultural identities on a daily basis. In particular, they encountered and negotiated with three identity paradoxes, i.e., between “dedicated learners” and “disoriented bees”, between “global citizens” and “proud Chinese”, and between “team players” and “independent fighters”. The study provides useful implications for university management, teachers, and students in response to the ongoing trend of internationalization of higher education.

How Moravian Are the Moravians? The Paradox of Moravian Identity

ABSTRACT In this article, the author sets forth the paradoxes and shortcomings of the designation “Moravian” for the Moravian Church as the name does neither refer to the historical place of origin nor to the ethnic identity of its members. Furthermore, the name suggests a larger degree of continuity between the Ancient Unity of Brethren and the Renewed Moravian Church than many historians are willing to accept. In fact, so the author argues, the previously widely accepted name Unity of Brethren expresses the theological foundations of Moravian identity much better. The author concludes that the name “Moravian” stands for an association with a story, similar to the narrative theology of the Bible. This is the story of those who left Moravia to form a new community of faith, binding together people from different cultures and backgrounds.

Feedback

Feedback Kylan Rice According to Benjamin Doty ("Digesting Moby-Dick," Leviathan 19.1 [Oct. 2017]), the alimentary content in Moby Dick indicates that Melville and his contemporaries attended to the reciprocal relationship between the mind and body. As medical scientists discovered that the brain "was no longer considered to be in charge of the nervous system but rather a part of it," and existed also in "nervous sympathy" with its "cultural and natural environment," nineteenth-century theories of medicine established that good mental health depended on good diet (88–89). The brain depends on the belly, as well as what's in it. Doty cites Melville's incorporation of medical-scientific discourse to argue that the author of Moby Dick believed that the physical realities of embodiment, including digestion, disrupted abstract "philosophical universals" so much so as "to ground philosophical speculation in the body" (91–92). Maybe John Keats shared this belief, when he wrote, in an 1818 letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, that "axioms in philosophy are not axioms unless they are proved upon our pulses." Our metaphysics also has its material basis. The ideal is subtended by the real—not the other way around. But where did the brain learn how to be a brain? Like a stomach tract, the brain also deals with inputs and outputs. Insofar as the brain is in the body, the brain can't think beyond the belly and its functions. Can the brain be more than a belly, then? A digester itself, the brain, too, is vulnerable to the "vibrancy of matter" (Jane Bennett's term)—that is, what is brought in from without. Doty's essay reminds us that even scholars have bodies that embody their brains. Poets, too. Surveying the field of digestion studies in the nineteenth century, Doty recalls Sean Ross Meehan's treatment of the "poetics of digestion" in Emerson and Whitman, who recognized that "digestion's ability to break down matter and assimilate it into new forms 'offers a paradox of identity through change'" (86). In the following poem, "Feedback," I perform a "poetics of digestion" that extends Doty's argument by proving its axioms on my pulses, breaking it down, and assimilating it into new [End Page 42] forms, an approach spurred by Emerson and Whitman, American poets who engaged in feedback loops as derivative as they were fecund and prolific and gut-floral. Some of the language and imagery in "Feedback" invokes the tradition of still-life painting, in which edibles are often arranged as codes signifying moral values on the assumption that food and appetite affect the human constitution. For example, from an emblematic, moralizing point of view, the presence on a table of oysters and cracked pepper means something vastly different compared to a table laid with walnuts and unripe peaches. Similarly, as Doty points out, the dietary reform movements of Melville's time were wary that "without regulation, food might be transmuted into the wrong sorts of 'mind and soul'" (90). If the scholar's brain is also her belly, peer review and critical dialogue take on new significance. After all, unless you account for what comes in, you can't account for what comes out. Feedback But as real as touch as a gauge for realnessis the impulse to touch. As real is the neuralstructure, saturated with acetylcholine asa pant-leg is with meadow-dew. The fabricof Parrhasius's curtain even more real thana clutch of grapes by Zeuxis (birds of the realdescending to gorge themselves), for the curtainwas thought to obscure some actual deception:delicate pastries, say, in a Wan-li bowl, or a tazzafilled with sugar-coated almonds—a milieuintérieur: words used by Claude Bernardto describe his thoughts on homeostasis:the mind no more than a crochet of loopsof feedback, the reality of a thing no morethan the reflex that attends it to attend, whereto clutch is the truer clutch, the obscurer source,the source of a meadow a river eating outits other bank, its own interior, the causeno slope I can tell. For it is all the same to me,all a...

Paradoxical identity: The changing nature of architectural work and its relation to architects’ identity

In this article, we explore what happens in professional formation when the locus of its meaning, as it has been formed, is increasingly contradicted by professional practice. Specifically, we explore the problematic nature of architects’ professional identity that is constituted in terms of the primacy of design aesthetics, in contexts where practice denies this identification. We highlight the tensions between identity and practices and suggest that while architects’ traditional self-identification enables perpetuation of the profession’s identity, it challenges the profession’s standing in its relations with other professions and occupations. We refer to this as a paradox of identity. Although much has been written about the profound changes occurring in professional practices and professional jurisdictions, scant attention has been given to the ways in which professionals shape their identities in the context of changing practices. We conducted a year-long ethnography of contemporary architects engaged in large and complex projects in order to examine both the architects’ and the profession’s identity. Our contributions are threefold. First, we conceptualize misalignments between professional identity and professional practice as identity paradox that has consequences for identity work among professionals. Second, we highlight how professional identity construction is organized around competing and paradoxical identification. Third, the article contributes to sociological studies of architecture by generating insights about the identity work of architects engaged in large multi-organizational projects.

Por una Escuela Inclusiva. Las Fronteras del Género

One of the goals of those who advocate social equality in the education system is inclusive schooling. Recognized the right to education of all people, there are still many voices who claim the need to think, study, propose and commit to new ways of understanding and focus the education of the diversity of students. Thus, the idea of an inclusive school arises. These current aims to go beyond the idea of integration, prevailing in Spanish legislation, involving a restructuring of schools to meet the needs of all students. It is important to note that the need for identity, and by extension of representation –policy–, is understood as a basic necessity and should therefore have its consideration in the educational field, in order to avoid any form of segregation within the classroom. I defend the need to attend equally to the different ways of being, to define and identify ourselves, as an essential part of these diversities. Through the analysis of the paradox of feminine identity, gender boundaries and their consequences on the agency within feminism, I propose an extension of the concept of inclusive education with the objective of taking a step further in speaking about a truly equitable, critical and democratic education.

Project Networks: Governance Choices and Paradoxical Tensions

This article examines how project networks may be viewed as either a single interorganizational project or as a series of projects that are interconnected by interorganizational relationships. The article then discusses some core theoretic assumptions about project networks as more than temporary systems in comparison with the extant empirical research. Next, the article presents four types of mechanisms for governing and coordinating not only projects but also project networks: responsibilities, routines, roles, and relationships. Finally, the article unearths five types of paradoxes (the distance paradox, the learning paradox, the identity paradox, the difference paradox, and the temporal paradox) impacting project networks and offers insights into the governance-based choices available for coping with these paradoxical tensions.

Fashioning Futures: Life Coaching and the Self‐Made Identity Paradox

Contemporary processes of individualization push people to construct single‐handedly their own identities. This urge runs counter to a fundament of sociology, which proposes that identities are social products that must be validated through social relations. Based on participant observation and in‐depth interviews with life coaches and their clients, I investigate life coaching as a social institution that aims to resolve the paradoxical nature of the desire for self‐creation. Locating life coaching in the larger identity‐fashioning market, this article illustrates how the artificial nature of outsourced social relations reconciles two apparently contradictory desires: the “need for help” and “wanting to find it on my own.” Three mechanisms are involved: creating an independent social space where identities can be crafted away from significant others; deliberately deemphasizing the coach and intentionally underwriting personal authorship; and encouraging clients to root identities in the social world while promoting an instrumental view of sociality. The article discusses the blurring of boundaries between intimate social relations and utilitarian market logic, and the implications of the ongoing outsourcing of identity support that reinforces the privileged ideal of self‐made identities.

Identity Paradoxes: How Senior Managers and Employees Negotiate Similarity and Distinctiveness Tensions over Time

Employee identity is shaped by a need to feel similarity to, as well as distinctiveness from, others in organizations. While this paradoxical tension is important we know little about how it is managed over time, especially when senior managers prioritize one element of the paradox over the other. Consequently I investigate how senior managers and employees negotiate the similarity–distinctiveness identity paradox over time, doing so through a longitudinal case study of a police organization undergoing change. The study contributes to prior paradox literature in two significant ways. First, it reveals how senior managers and employees negotiate tensions in employee identity between similarity and distinctiveness as an emergent and cyclical process of identity regulation and heterogeneous identity work. This shows how the balance between similarity and distinctiveness is both elusive to achieve for all organizational participants and difficult to sustain over time. Second, it highlights how defensive approaches to identity paradox may lead to positive outcomes, with this contingent on organizational participants’ ability to make strong claims about the importance of the paradox element they favour for the organization’s future.

Sexual exploitation and abuse in UN peacekeeping missions: A case study of MONUC and MONUSCO

ABSTRACTPeacekeepers are, at once, both protectors and perpetrators of violence. They themselves suffer from crises of masculinity as warriors sent to “wage peace.” Thus, this article highlights the troubling paradox of male identities in conflict by examining the high rates of sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA) by UN peacekeepers in the United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUC) and the subsequent United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO). Although SEA in the DRC has declined in recent years as the UN has taken important steps to address the problem, this case study reveals the pertinent social, legal, and political institutions impacting UN peacekeeping and identifies four factors that continue to contribute to the high rates of SEA amongst UN peacekeepers in the DRC. This study also identifies and formulates significant structural changes in training and enforcement methods in order to prevent SEA in future UN peacekeeping operations.

Learning to Circumvent the Limitations of the Written-Self: The Rhetorical Benefits of Poetic Fragmentation and Internet ‘Catfishing’

One of the most complex relationships we have to convey as humans is the written identification of that which we call the self. Despite the fact that we are multifaceted beings, contemporary lingual limitations often force the perception of the individual as a definitive entity through three fundamental normative communication standards: authority, authenticity and moral accountability. This essay examines the resulting paradoxes of writerly identity in relation to these constructs, and simultaneously proposes that the way to rectify such issues is to embrace disparate identity performances of writings past and present.Using research from multiple disciplines, including sociolinguistics, literary theory, and composition studies, this essay asserts that there is a great deal to be learned from the practices of two unlikely genres of written communication— Specifically, it draws a parallel between current internet culture and poetics, as the phenomenon of “catfishing” (or creating and portraying complex fictional identities through online profiles) parallels earlier Modernist acts of fragmentation through poetry. Therefore, this paper argues that although their motives may differ considerably, both endeavours are useful rhetorical performances in that they provide a practical framework for circumventing common lingual identity traps. Ultimately, it suggests that these unconventional perspectives of the “impersonal” in and through writing can help us to (re)approach the methodology of lingual identification and those written performances of the self (professional and everyday) that may not properly serve us.