Nascent Identity Research Articles

Forging Frontline Russians

This article considers efforts by the de facto authorities of non-governmental-controlled areas (NGCAs) of eastern Ukraine to shape regional identity from 2014 through 2021. It focuses on the paradoxes of top-down identity construction in an environment of mixed popular sentiments, fluid borders, and an uncertain political future. It argues that nascent identity construction projects in the NGCAs were often inconsistent and unclear, emphasizing different layers of “candidate Fatherlands,” be it the individual self-declared republics, the Donbas, Novorossiia, the Russian Federation, or a broader Russian civilization. While internally inconsistent and contradictive, however, the various initiatives often took antemurale political myths as a point of departure. These myths spin around the idea that regional inhabitants constitute a particular brand of “frontline Russians”—hardened warriors protecting a western outpost of the Russian civilization. Even as “candidate Fatherlands” came and went, this ideational core manifested not only in policy and aloof declarations, but also in a persistent growth of so-called military-patriotic education in the region. Militarized ideas of political identity became mainstream within the occupied areas—reflecting both influences from Russia and the ongoing war.

Editor’s Introduction

In this issue, four scholars working in a broad range of fields offer four different views on warfare as an agent of change in the Mediterranean region. Marcello Pacifico, renowned author of works that argue for Frederick II as a man of two worlds, considers what the history of the thirteenth-century Crusades is, and what that history could have been if the man known as Stupor mundi had won his battle for a realm where two faiths coexisted in peace.In his detailed three-part history of mayorazgo, Andrew Villalon devotes an entire section to the role of warfare in the proliferation of this Spanish institution that originated in the thirteenth century to address the management of the inheritance of property. Late fourteenth-century conflict would ultimately force a confrontation between the Spanish Crown and the elite, resulting in a change in how landed nobility maintained a hold on inherited properties.Examining the effects of the capi da guerra serving in the Venetian army during the seventeenth-century War of Crete, Filip Novosel finds that these veterans of the Thirty Years’ War were at the heart of an exchange of military knowledge in Albania and Dalmatia. Combined with the growing internationalization of European armies of the time, this transfer of expertise both reflected and produced military innovations.And finally, Jonas Hock and Laura Linzmeier propose model practices for the study of island identity in their richly documented inquiry into sardità. As this team of scholars observes, World War I was the first time in the history of Sardinia that communities across the island, historically isolated from each other, experienced a collective identity as Sardinians. This nascent identity was fueled in the postwar period by veterans of the Brigata Sassari, a fighting unit composed of men from all communities in Sardinia, and gave rise to the Partito Sardo d’Azione, a political party that would adopt as its platform self-determination and the protection of a Sardinian identity.All in all, warfare may not make for pleasant companionship in a changing world, but the articles in Mediterranean Studies 31.1 help us appreciate the mechanisms of change activated by these perennial violent confrontations and the transformations they bring about.The contribution of book reviews to this issue is nothing short of splendid. Once again, reviewers remind us of the expanse of the Mediterranean region and the wealth of scholarship available for the study of it. In Mediterranean Studies 31.1, four reviews draw our attention eastward along the Mediterranean basin. Ifigeneia Giannadaki reviews Sexual Labor in the Athenian Courts by Allison Glazebrook. This work offers an in-depth analysis of five speeches on the actual labor of sex laborers, exploring the relationship between sex labor and Athenian society and involving both male and female sex laborers. Joshua Birk’s review of Dynasties Intertwined: The Zirids of Ifriqiya and the Normans of Sicily introduces us to a thought-provoking study by Matt King, who argues that the dynasties of the Zirids and the Normans were deeply intertwined during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, to the extent that the history of neither can be understood without examining the history of the other. In Nazlı Songülen’s review of A Companion to Early Modern Istanbul, edited by Shirine Hamadeh and Çiğdem Kafescioğlu, a compilation of studies of the early modern city is thought to reflect a recent shift of interest to the local scale of phenomena, opening new conceptual avenues for scholars working in premodern non-European contexts. Finally, Jerusalem: History of a Global City, under the direction of Vincent Lemire, is reviewed by Michael Zank. With his team of expert scholars, Lemire has put forth a resolutely clear-eyed urban and local history of this city that exists in so many material and imagined realities by Jews, Christians, and Muslims. On behalf of the scholars whose articles and reviews give this issue its remarkable variety and depth, welcome to Mediterranean Studies 31.1.

Performing Political Persuasion in the United States in the Early Years of the Republic

Theater productions were born out of a paradox in the United States of the Revolutionary War and shortly afterwards. While the nation’s dominant ideology was anti-theatrical, theater often served a nationalist agenda, co-defining the new American nation and its nascent identities – such were, for example, productions of Joseph Addison’s Cato at Valley Forge in 1778 and William Dunlap’s André at the New Park in New York in 1798. These theater events empowered the audience to publicly perform their national identity as Americans and exercise their republican fervor. Similarly, a production of Bunker-Hill by J. D. Burk at the Haymarket in Boston in 1797 was crucial in helping define the social and political identities of its audiences, who were motivated to attend the performances as an expression of their partisan preferences. This article shows that literary, theatrical and social practices served to constitute performatively the early American national identity.

Teachers as health promoters: Factors that influence early career teachers to engage with health and wellbeing education

Factors that affect novice teachers' willingness to engage with health and wellbeing education are explored. An online questionnaire was sent to novice teachers in England (n = 114) who had received pre-service training in health and wellbeing. Semi-structured interviews were conducted (n = 14) to support the questionnaire findings. Pre-service training appears to have some impact on new teachers. However, school ethos, attitudes of senior leadership, the level or extent of mentoring influence these novice teachers’ identity as health promoters. Nurturing this nascent identity has policy and resource implications for senior leaders in schools and governments particularly where health and wellbeing is not prioritised.

Organizational Identity Formation and Change

Theory and research concerning organizational identity (“who we are as an organization”) is a burgeoning domain within organization study. A great deal of conceptual and empirical work has been accomplished within the last three decades—especially concerning the phenomenon of organizational identity change. More recently, work has been devoted to studying the processes and content associated with identity formation. Given the amount of scholarly work done to date, it is an appropriate time to reflect on the perspectives, controversies and outcomes of this body of work. Because organizational identity change has received the preponderance of attention, we first review that extensive literature. We consider the conceptual and empirical work concerning the three putative “pillars” of identity (i.e. that which is ostensibly central, enduring, and distinctive). We devote particular attention to the most controversial of these pillars—the debate pitting a view that sees identity as stable over time (a position we term as the “enduring identity proposition”) and a contrasting stance that sees identity as more changeable (the “dynamic identity proposition”). Following our review of the identity change literature, we next take up a review of the notably smaller compendium of work on identity formation. We consider the conceptual and empirical work devoted to studying the external influences on, as well as the internal resources used, to fashion a nascent identity. Finally, we discuss in more depth the controversies associated with the pillars of identity, assess the four prevalent views on organizational identity (the social construction, social actor, institutionalist, and population ecologist views), assimilate the research on both identity formation and change, and consider the prospects for future work on both phenomena.

Resistance and challenge: competing accounts in aftercare monitoring

This article explores a candidate example of competing accounts of aftercare under supervision of a discharged forensic patient and worker in one part of the UK. It is taken from a study involving 59 in-depth interviews with patients and their workers to investigate community return after detention in forensic psychiatric facilities. Fear of mental illness and associated dangerousness are embodied in discourses surrounding the forensic patient. In living with deviant labels and seeking to establish independence from the psychiatric system patients' talk demonstrates nascent identity work in an attempt to resist alternative dominant discourses. Workers however deploy occupational knowledge of risk and associated monitoring as the basis for claims of safe aftercare. Both patient and worker accounts are reflexively aware of competing versions and seek to portray the provision of aftercare monitoring in self-interested ways. Aftercare monitoring and supervision may ostensibly be about integration and rehabilitation but as this study shows risk is an ever-present concern forming an important backdrop to the attempts of patients to forge new identities and the normalising ideologies of those working with them.

History and the Contours of Meaning: The Abjection of Luisa Nevárez, First Woman Condemned to the Gallows in Puerto Rico, 1905

Abstract The article analyzes the case of Luisa Nevárez, the first woman condemned to the gallows in Puerto Rico at the beginning of the twentieth century. Convicted for the killing of her almost year-old daughter, she never admitted the crime nor showed any remorse. Yet, Luisa did not make an easy transition into the sphere of the criminal. The nascent identity that was being forged in early twentieth-century Puerto Rico configured the delinquent as a masculine subject who was acknowledged as possessing intellectual malice and the capacity for social action. Luisa’s condition as a woman, mother, and mulatta, her ignorance, and other factors deprived her of any possibility of entering the space of the criminal subject. Instead, the figure of Luisa oscillated between monster and madwoman in the discourses of the time. Around the mid-twentieth century her discursive figure emerges again, this time in the authorized voices of those concerned with criminal activities on the island. In this context, we find her embodying the prototype of the criminal woman: degenerate, ugly, black, and sexually insatiable. It is Luisa’s abject condition that places her on the threshold of history and on the borders of the intelligible. However, the impossibility of explaining her actions in a rational way constitutes a formidable challenge for the historian. In this respect, the article is also a reflection on the limits and possibilities of the representative faculties of the historical narrative.

Time, Globalization and the Nascent Identity of Mankind

A person's identity is defined by the ways in which he or she is similar to and different from other persons in body, conduct, and thought. The identity of a tribe, nation or civilization is also defined by the ways in which it is similar to and is different from other social groups of its kind. A peculiar difficulty arises when the identity sought is that of a globalized mankind because there are no other mankinds with respect to which ours could establish its hallmarks of similarities and differences. A global society is a one-and-only system of its kind, as unique as is the object we call the universe or the idea of God, in monotheistic religions. To get around the difficulties posed by this uniqueness, the paper notes that all identities must include references to intentional conduct and hence to time. It then takes advantage of this necessary relationship and discusses some representative issues unique to a globalized mankind.

A Very Qualified Success, Indeed: The Case of Anthony Giddens and British Sociology

Anthony Giddens as a Symptom of Sociology's Decline The Gulbenkian Commission on future of sciences has popularized idea that sociology is a discipline that has outlived its usefulness (Wallerstein 1996). According to this argument, sociology had made sense over previous 100-150 years, with ascendancy of Euro-American nation-states increasingly concerned with integrating diverse peoples in terms of various functions, to which standard-issue sociology textbook dutifully assigns a chapter apiece. Emile Durkheim and Talcott Parsons marked high points in this conception of rise of sociology. However, with end of Cold War has come decline of welfare-warfare that had kept forces of global capital in check. The result has been increasingly indeterminate and permeable boundaries of life that mark the postmodern condition. For example, while topics relating to -- be it defined in legal or medical terms -- retain their traditional popularity, deviance is now put in scare quotes and researchers wince at social problems perspective from which field arose. After all, presupposes a strong sense of normativity, which after Michel Foucault has acquired a negative connotation that Durkheim would not have recognized. Moreover, these postmodern sociologists justify their rejection of norm-deviance binary, not on grounds of political correctness, but simply increasing practical difficulty of enforcing distinction. Consequently, historically innocent empirical researchers in can discover nascent identity politics in heretofore deviant groups. However, this probably has more to do with retreat of state power from civil society than any philosophically inspired realization of inherent perniciousness of binary oppositions. While this begins to explain global decline in sociology's disciplinary identity, much more needs to be said to explain peculiar form it has taken in United Kingdom, major nation with probably weakest institutional tradition in field. Here sociology remains very popular with students, largely because it is natural home of cultural and media studies programs that in, say, US would be housed in departments of literary studies. In this respect, British sociology has turned its disciplinary permeability from a weakness to a strength, effectively rendering itself the science of postmodern. Moreover, there is a thriving, albeit publisher-led, sociological book industry in UK. On one hand, this means that British sociology journals exert relatively little impact on field' s global research agenda; on other, it ensures that sociology is seen by people in other disciplines and countries through eyes of British teachers. From this milieu emerges Anthony Giddens, first Professor of Sociology at Cambridge and now Director of London School of Economics. As principal theorist behind third way between capitalism and socialism that enabled Labour to regain control of Parliament in 1997, Giddens is probably most internationally influential British scientist since John Maynard Keynes -- ironically another thinker who was often portrayed as offering a third way between these very alternatives. However, despite Cambridge connection, Giddens and Keynes demonstrate rather different paths to influence. Keynes hailed from science -- economics -- in which UK has been an acknowledged world leader. Moreover, his career involved shuttling between Kings College tutorials and Treasury assignments. In contrast, Giddens has always been oriented to pedagogy, be it large introductory classes he continues to teach at LSE or academic publishing empire he founded that is Polity Press. Seen in world-historic perspective, two features of Giddens' career stand out. …