Nexus Of Identity Research Articles

Uncovering the Nexus of Identity and Forced Migration: A Collaborative Autoethnographic Study of Afghan Women’s Experiences in Diaspora

This qualitative research investigates the educational mobility of Afghan women in diaspora, particularly those who have experienced forced migration following the Taliban's takeover of Afghanistan in 2021. The study delves into how their intersectional identities, including gender, ethnicity, religion, and socioeconomic status, shape their educational experiences. These Afghan women's educational journeys are further complicated by the challenges posed by political and economic conditions in refugee communities, which limit their access to education and employment opportunities while increasing the risk of discrimination and violence. Using an autoethnographic approach, we leverage our personal experiences as Afghan women who immigrated to Canada during two distinct Taliban occupation eras. Through self-reflection, journaling, and daily life observation, we provide nuanced insights into the multifaceted challenges faced by Afghan women during their forced displacement and migration.

Maintaining status quo or realizing transformation in transboundary water conflicts? The power–interests–identity nexus in the Helmand river basin

ABSTRACT This paper contributes to the critical hydropolitics literature by introducing the power–interests–identity nexus framework and addresses how it shapes decisions and (re)actions to transform or maintain water conflicts. The framework is investigated using the Helmand/Hirmand river basin, shared by Afghanistan and Iran. It elucidates which factors led to the transformation of Iran–Afghanistan water conflicts and the signing of the 1973 Treaty, as well as the influential factors that have contributed to its maintenance in the 2020s. The results demonstrate using the framework provides comprehensive insight by identifying the influential latent factors of transboundary water arrangements.

The Places of Modernity in Early Mexican American Literature, 1848–1948 by José F. Aranda Jr

Reviewed by: The Places of Modernity in Early Mexican American Literature, 1848–1948 by José F. Aranda Jr Sandra Dahlberg José F. Aranda Jr., The Places of Modernity in Early Mexican American Literature, 1848–1948. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2022. 269 pp. Hardcover, $99; paper, $30; e-book, $30. In The Places of Modernity in Early Mexican American Literature, 1848– 1948, José F. Aranda investigates the “fusions of two historically competing colonialisms” when, in 1848, the Spanish/Mexican “colonial matrix gave way to a yet more powerful” Anglo American one (25, 24). He analyzes the portrayal of Mexican Americans’ dual positionality as colonizers and colonized in texts produced in the century following the US–Mexican War. The focus of Aranda’s methodology is a concept he calls “modernities of subtraction” through which he articulates “a peculiar mode of modernity whose darker side, coloniality, operates at a greater distance from the rationalizations and promises of Enlightenment ideology” (2). His approach draws on Walter Mignolo’s interrogation of settler colonialism in addition to Aníbal Quijano’s examination of how modernity’s promise was “obstructed by Anglo-American ideologies of racial superiority” (12). He also borrows from theories of critical regionalism advanced by Krista Comer and Melina Vizcaíno-Alemán to explore the nexus of identity and place. According to Aranda, “to read modernity through place, through geography, invariably disrupts and questions the naturalizing effect of timelessness that each colonializing institution . . . has had over space” (231). Aranda’s study of subtractive modernity begins by analyzing three generations of works by the Vallejo family of California. From Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo’s Recuerdos históricos y personales to Francisca Vallejo’s “Padres, Gringos, and Gold” radio program in the 1930s, the Vallejos, including María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, worked [End Page 435] to disrupt Anglo-American narratives that Mexicanized Californios. They did so by employing a “coloniality of nostalgia” that expressed their loss of social capital after American annexation and, Aranda contends, projected a “Spanish fantasy heritage” that distanced elite Californios from associations with Mexico or Mexicanness. After 1848 Aranda demonstrates how the term “Mexican” became a “potent and particular instance of a modernity of subtraction,” functioning as a “sly marker for race, racism, and white nation-building” that enables the displacement and disenfranchisement of Mexican Americans (151–52). In another chapter Aranda mines José Villarreal’s novel Pocho to elucidate the “statelessness” of twentieth-century Mexican Americans who faced “racial discrimination in the United States and social discrimination in Mexico” (204). Through the work of writer/folklorist Jovita González, Aranda discusses the gendered qualities of these “racialized connotations” and asserts that “Shades of the Tenth Muse” is González’s “attempt to theorize her colonial, [gendered] condition in Texas . . . as related to but ultimately separate from the model of feminine creativity provided by the Tenth Muse of either New England or New Spain” (169). Unlike González, those tenth muses, Anne Bradford and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, occupied dominant positionalities in their colonial landscapes. Place, according to Aranda, shapes modernism’s “subtractive prerogatives” and the “interplay” of race, racism, and raced communities throughout the Southwest (112). This interplay is particularly evident, he argues, in Miguel Antonio Otero’s The Real Billy the Kid, which depicts a late-nineteenth-century geography where Nuevo Mexicano civic authority was predicated on a “collective denial of ever having shared an indigenous heritage” and immigrant Anglos like Billy the Kid often adopted a “settler hybridity” by becoming Hispanicized (133, 139). In The Places of Modernity in Early Mexican American Literature, 1848–1948, particularly with his theory of a “modernity of subtraction,” Aranda provides an important lens through which to wrestle with the competing Spanish/Mexican and Anglo-American settler colonialist ideologies in Mexican American cultural production. [End Page 436] Sandra Dahlberg University of Houston-Downtown Copyright © 2023 Western Literature Association ...

Trans migrations: Seeking refuge in “safe haven” Toronto

Trans and gender nonconforming (TGNC) people who make refugee claims in Canada negotiate a complex nexus of identity, belonging, and citizenship. Drawing on insights from TGNC refugees, immigration lawyers, and frontline workers, in this paper we examine the ways the state controls the trans body through the refugee claims process and in the process of integration into life in Canada, while also highlighting trans refugee methods of survival and resistance. What emerges is an understanding of the ways that refugees navigate the tension between gender, sexuality, and homecoming as both intimately felt and geopolitically managed. We convey TGNC refugee narratives to demonstrate how they both confirm and expand upon the existing literature on Canadian LGBTQ+ refugees. TGNC refugees' experiences at the Immigration and Refugee Board confirm insights from existing LGBTQ+ refugee studies. However, TGNC refugees' day‐to‐day lives differ significantly from LGB refugee lives as recounted in the literature. In TGNC refugees' attempts to access gender‐affirming documentation, healthcare, housing, and income, they confront distinct systems of transgender exceptionalism, border imperialism, and racial and heteropatriarchal capitalism that limit their access to basic necessities and impact how they build home both conceptually and materially.

The strategy–identity nexus: The relevance of their temporal interplay to climate change

Grand Challenges have stimulated a search for new solutions at the interplay between fields and disciplines which previously have been separated. In this essay, I argue that a further development of temporal interplay between strategy and organizational identity may enrich studies of Grand Challenges, exemplified by how actors respond to climate change. This interplay is motivated by recent elaborations of the differences in temporality between strategy and organizational identity from a distinction between a dominant focus on the future (strategy) or the past (organizational identity) to a conceptualization of the differences in temporal structures between them. Using management research to contribute to the fight against climate change, sustained temporal interplay between strategy and organizational identity can advance our understanding of how organizations may act now for future climate goals. I suggest questions for future research focused on making an impact.

Agency in the Nexus of Identity and Social Network: Understanding the Second Language Socialization Experiences of International Students in China

ABSTRACT Studying abroad entails international students’ identity (trans)formation and social network development, but individuals’ decisions and choices while engaging in these processes remain underexplored. Informed by the notion of agency in second language socialization theory, this longitudinal case study examined the interplay of identity and social network in the socialization experiences of three international students learning Chinese as an additional language in China. Analysis of ethnographic interviews, a Study Abroad Network Questionnaire, observational field notes, and supplementary data revealed the role of individual agency in mediating the students’ heterogeneous ways of mobilizing linguistic and cultural resources to construct identities and build social ties. The study also illustrated that agency was not readily or equally accessible to all participants, but it was negotiated in the nexus of their identity and social network. Finally, the study discussed the issues that surfaced in students’ distinctive learning trajectories, and offered implications to inform potential stakeholders.

Agency and professional identity among mobile teachers: how does the experience of teaching abroad shape teachers’ professional identity?

ABSTRACT In the context of global mobility research, this study explores agency and identity formation among mid-career teachers who travel abroad to experience teaching in a new country. We conducted in-depth interviews with 16 Israeli teachers and examined their retrospective narratives of their teaching experience. Our findings reveal a complex nexus of identity and agency, whereby identity formation echoes agency choices. We conceptualise forms of agency and point to possible connections between agency types and their use in identity formation. We conclude that under circumstances of rapid change, agency plays an important role in identity formation.

Paying Homage: The Participation of Guild Confraternities in Archiepiscopal Entries into Tarragona

The original significance of the public entry of a new archbishop into Tarragona lies in the fact that the city, through its confraternities, honoured one of its social elite with a popular celebration. Urban government was based upon two authorities: the king and the archbishop. In Tarragona, a city of deeply rooted customs and traditions, the entry ritual remained almost unchanged from medieval times to the modern era. Guild confraternities were active participants in urban ritual, with their dances, figures, and fantastic animals, and thus created a nexus of identity among the urban community as a whole. Detailed descriptions in municipal chronicles make it possible to study which confraternities existed in Tarragona, and in what ways they participated in the festive celebrations and were connected to the social network, as, for a brief moment, they enjoyed an activity far removed from the daily grind of work. The aim of this article is to observe how the ecosystem of guild confraternities in Tarragona varied little over time, how they always participated with the same dance and, as a result, how the soundscape of those dances became a characteristic soundmark of urban ceremony there.

Rejoinder to George Lyons

Abstract The author explains that his previous philosophical arguments for compatibilism (“the logical harmony of determinism and volition,” which he explicates as value-determinism-plus-conditional-free-will) provide a robust basis for ethical and legal responsibility. He defends entity causation, arguing that no coherent model of the universe, including human action, can be formulated that rejects entities as the nexus of identity and causality. Finally, he contends, ontological compatibilism (of determinism and free will) and ethical compatibilism (of determinism and personal responsibility) are both best supported by a more fundamental methodological compatibilism of philosophical and scientific approaches to seeking truth.

A ritual approach to deterrence: I am, therefore I deter

How can ritual help to understand the practice of deterrence? Traditional deterrence scholarship tends to overlook the active role of deterring actors in creating and redefining the circumstances to which they are allegedly only reacting. In order to address the weight of deterrence as a symbol, collective representation and strategic repertoire, this article proposes to rethink deterrence as a performative strategic practice with ritual features and critical binding, releasing and restraining functions. I posit a ritual account of deterrence to better grasp the performance, credibility and the presumed effect of this central international security practice. An understanding of deterrence as a ritual-like social practice probes the scope of rational deterrence theory, replacing its ‘I think, therefore I deter’ presumption with a socially and politically productive ‘I am, therefore I deter’ logic. Drawing on the example of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s enhanced Forward Presence, the proposed conceptualization of extended deterrence as an interaction ritual chain in allied defence, solidarity and community-building offers novel insights about the deterrence and collective identity nexus. Extended deterrence has much more than deterrence at stake: how an alliance practices deterrence tells us more about the alliance itself than about the nature of threats it responds to. The tripwire posture of the enhanced Forward Presence highlights the instrumentality of ritualization for mediating ambiguity in extended deterrence.

Seamus Heaney’s ‘Hermit Songs’: An education in the nexus of identity and language

In this paper I am going to explore the theme of this ERL issue – language and identity, by focusing upon a sequence of poems by the Irish writer, Seamus Heaney, ‘Hermit Songs’ (2010). I will argue that, by telling the story of his own identity formation through his encounter with reading, writing and the learning of languages, Heaney offers his own portrait of the artist as a young man. The story is a dynamic and dramatic one. Drawing upon close analysis of the poems based on literary critical models such as Practical Criticism and Intertextual criticism, I will demonstrate how Heaney’s identity as a poet emerges out of a playful and painful agon about art and nature, about the private and the public, about art and reality. / Keywords: Heaney, practical criticism, education and identity, language and identity, postcolonialism

Negotiating Chineseness: Incorporating critical reflection into workplace research on Chinese investment in Ethiopia

Critical geographic reflection on researcher subjectivity is inadequately practised by scholars studying workplaces, especially those involving emerging powers from the global south. In the context of growing Chinese investment in Africa, this paper reflects on the negotiation of my Chineseness during multi‐sited research on capital–labour and expatriate–local relations in three Chinese companies in Ethiopia. It examines the nexus of identity, power, and place to shape my fieldwork process at three stages: seeking access to the enclosed space of companies, building credibility in front of different groups of participants, and arranging interviews in the particular socio‐spatial contexts of the workplace. Specifically, I explain the enabling and problematic nature of my Chinese identity when intersectioned with my multiple subjective positions as a US‐based female student‐researcher. I elaborate how my engagements with expatriates and locals are influenced by the existing system of power relations in Chinese companies. I demonstrate that the place of interview can generate crucial insights into management practices and work relations, and facilitate researcher autonomy and employee agency to momentarily revert the power relations in the workplace. My field experiences highlight the importance of critical reflection to assist researchers to navigate the layered complexity and unexpectancy of doing fieldwork.

Veiled Muslim women’s responses to experiences of gendered Islamophobia in the UK

In a post-9/11 climate, Islamophobia has increased significantly in the UK and elsewhere in the West. ISIS-inspired terrorist attacks in the UK as well as in France, Belgium, Germany and, more recently, in Sri Lanka have triggered an increase in verbal and physical attacks on Muslims. Drawing on intersectionality (as a nexus of identities that work together to render certain individuals as ‘ideal’ targets to attack), veiled Muslim women are likely to experience gendered Islamophobia in the cyber world but also in ‘real’ life due to the intersections between their ‘visible’ Muslim identity and gender performance. In the British context, although Islamophobia is recorded as a hate crime nationally, and misogyny as a hate crime locally in some police forces, veiled Muslim women are unlikely to report their experiences to the police. Drawing on qualitative interviews with Muslim women who wear the niqab (face veil), the purpose of this article is to examine the ways in which they respond to experiences of gendered Islamophobia as well as their reasons for not reporting their experiences to the police.

Anti-identity strategizing: The dynamic interplay of “who we are” and “who we are not”

In this article, we investigate the strategy–identity nexus by illustrating the interaction between organizational identity, anti-identity, and strategy. While extant research illustrates the potentially constraining role of organizational identity on change trajectories, less is known about the role of organizational anti-identity. Drawing on a qualitative case study of a leading German distributor’s 32-year history, we highlight the importance of organizational anti-identity for both continuous and discontinuous change initiatives, and illustrate how organizational members can overcome identity ambiguity by referring to “who we are not as an organization” rather than to “who we are as an organization.” We further show how managers who draw on identity reservoirs may have greater leeway when exploiting anti-identity, and how ambiguity and resistance may be overcome by referring to “who we are not” as an organization. Our findings broaden our understanding of the role of anti-identity for strategy selection and contribute to the burgeoning literature on the strategy–identity nexus.

From the Obama Doctrine to America First: the erosion of the Washington consensus on grand strategy

This article explores the social construction of American grand strategy as nexus of identity and national security. The article first highlights how the identity construct of American exceptionalism has underwritten a grand strategy of global leadership and military interventionism since the end of the Cold War, constituting liberal hegemony as dominant position within the bipartisan US foreign policy establishment. The article then explores the political impact of counter-hegemonic discourses of restraint and offshore balancing under the Obama presidency. It argues that in ‘leading from behind’ the Obama Doctrine represented a moderate intra-elite challenge to the status quo. Obama’s use of exceptionalist rhetoric to legitimate restraint simultaneously exposed the political limits of this strategic paradigm shift, which oscillated between continuity and change. Finally, the article examines Trump’s ‘America First’ stance, concluding that its combination of nationalism, nativism, and protectionism has resulted in the erosion of the Washington consensus on liberal hegemony.

Molecular Identities

This essay revisits the concept of the theatre laboratory as a site for investigating the nexus of identity and technique in practice. Informed by new materialism, critical race and gender studies, and social epistemology, it examines the materialization of racial, religious, and other identities in song-based experimental practice and shows how the act of singing can not only illustrate the complexity of contemporary identity but also effectively generate new ‘molecular’ identifications. Taking jewishness as a paradigmatic category of identity in which race, religion, nation, language, and even gender are historically intertwined, the essay responds to Santiago Slabodsky's call for ‘decolonial’ judaism as an epistemological challenge by framing an attempt to develop new jewish decolonial identity through songwork.

Becoming Global Actor: The Turkish Agenda for the Global South

Interpretations about Turkey’s strategic orientations in the post-Cold War had sim- plified the divide between the Western, and non-western orientations. The prob- lematic relations with the European Union, the increasing discussions about the role of Turkey in the Syrian crisis, and the increasing rapprochement with the Rus- sian Federation are lively examples of the tangled options of Ankara’s foreign policy. Despite that, there is an proliferating literature about the growing role of Turkey in the Global South, especially related to the expansion of diplomatic networks, for- eign aid, humanitarian assistance and quasi-interregional cooperation. This paper will address the southern dimension of the Turkish foreign policy by identifying the main international and domestic variables that have pushed for further activism in the Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. The main argument is that the political and economic emergence of the non-western world, next to the narrative promoted by the ruling JDP elite - especially connected to the quest for a global engagement and partially related to the identity nexus – helped to expand this strategic perspec- tive formulated in the late 1990s.

Comment on the Definition of Eligible Organizationn for Purposes of Coverage of Certain Preventive Services under the Affordable Care Act

This comment letter was submitted by U.C. Berkeley corporate law professors in response to a request for comment by the Health and Human Services Department on the definition of "eligible organization" under the Affordable Care Act in light of the Supreme Court's decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby. "Eligible organizations" will be permitted under the Hobby Lobby decision to assert the religious principles of their shareholders to exempt themselves from the Affordable Care Act's contraceptive mandate for employees. In Hobby Lobby, the Supreme Court held that the nexus of identity between several closely-held, for-profit corporations and their shareholders holding “a sincere religious belief that life begins at conception” was sufficiently close to justify granting such corporations an exemption from the Affordable Care Act's contraceptive mandate pursuant to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993. More specifically, the Court ascertained that the overall interests of the corporations and their natural-person shareholders were sufficiently identical to warrant ascribing the religious commitments of the shareholders to their corporations. Notably, the Court stopped short of articulating a diagnostic test for determining when a sufficient overlap of interests exists; instead, it concluded that well-established principles in state corporate law should provide such guidance. We believe that state corporate law does in fact provide the diagnostic test the Court desires for determining when it is appropriate to disregard the distinct identity of a corporation for the identity of its shareholders. This test is rooted in the long-standing case law that constitutes the alter ego doctrine (commonly referred to as “veil piercing”). To sustain a claim of veil piercing, state corporate law uniformly requires there to be “unity of ownership and interest” between the corporation and its shareholders. If a corporation is operated as the effective alter ego of its shareholders to such an extent that its separate corporate existence ceases to exist as a practical matter, then a veil piercing claim can be established that effectively attributes the corporation’s legal rights and obligations to its shareholders, and vice versa. A veil piercing conclusion effectively holds that there is no practical difference between the corporation and the shareholders themselves.We therefore propose that for purposes of defining an “eligible organization” under Hobby Lobby, the HHS and other federal organizations should follow the corporate law doctrine of veil piercing. Indeed, to make this doctrine administratively feasible, we further suggest that shareholders of a corporation should have to certify that they and the corporation have a unity in identity and interests, and therefore the corporation should be viewed as the shareholders’ alter ego.

Civil Religion and the Cultural Politics of National Identity in Obama's America

American civil religion (ACR) burst on to the scholarly scene in 1967, and has been periodically revived as a source of analytic insight and normative hope since that time. It posited a universalist, prophetic, nonsectarian faith, referenced on the nation, that served as both a source of unity for the American people and a discursive resource for political leaders and protest movements. Using recent political events as illustrative cases, I argue that ACR is not only a universalist, prophetic creed, it is also an expression of tribal identity that ascribes a particular character and purpose to the American people. In particular, this “tribal” civil religion has an often‐unstated assumption about the inseparability of religion, race, and national identity—that is, white, Christian, and American. Recent events have disrupted those implicit connections, leading to a vociferous reemphasis of their centrality to the national story. I maintain that neither ACR, nor recent politics involving immigration and Barack Obama's presidency, can be understood fully without considering the religion‐race‐national identity nexus.

Points of the Star, Branches of the Cedar: Israeli and Lebanese Military Integration Policies

The use of military policy to foster the political integration of ethno-religious minorities has long been assumed to aid in the formation of national identities in heterogeneous societies. Recent scholarship has challenged this notion in emphasizing the role of political contestation. Using a contrast of contexts research design of Israeli and Lebanese military integration policies, this research looks to the relationship of the military in relation to its society before considering the distinction between the identity and ideology of ethnic minorities. In exploring these facets, a renewed focus on the nexus of identity and ideology is warranted.