Own Sense Of Identity Research Articles

Postfeminism in prison: A discourse analysis of women correctional officers’ accounts of gendered appearance at work

This article explores sense-making among female prison workers as they negotiate their appearance at work. Appearance is a vehicle through which gender is performed; yet research into how women account for their appearance in this male-dominated profession remains limited. We address this gap through an analysis of 16 women's accounts of their appearance work produced from an in-depth cooperative inquiry with women working in Australian men's prisons. We discuss three overarching patterns of talk, “look good, feel good, be good,” “my choice, not yours,” and “look good, but not too good.” These accounts showed both alignments and tensions between (a) postfeminist imperatives to meet feminine appearance norms and (b) an organisational culture that devalues normative femininity but values attention to appearance. In this context, our participants developed individualised solutions, crafting their appearance in ways that would consolidate their own sense of identity and communicate their professional value to others. We find that exploring women's sense-making of appearance at work provides a critical avenue to understand the manifestation of sexism within organisations.

The Impact of K-pop on Chinese Fan Culture

The influence of K-pop as a global cultural phenomenon extends beyond just music and fashion - it also impacts social patterns in today’s society. This study seeks to delve into the unique characteristics of K-pop and how it shapes the lives of its fans. By conducting surveys through questionnaires, the author has uncovered the profound impact that K-pop has had on Chinese fans in both life and spiritual aspects. In terms of lifestyle choices, it is evident that K-pop has left an indelible mark on its followers. Fans have adopted new aesthetic preferences inspired by their favorite idols while also adapting their language style and even eating habits based on what they see from these stars. It is common for enthusiasts to emulate the appearance and behavior of their beloved idols as a means to establish their own sense of identity. Furthermore, at a deeper level - spiritually - we found that K-pop has significantly shaped the outlooks held by its followers towards life itself along with influencing their consumer behaviors as well as criteria for selecting potential partners or mates. The resilience exhibited by these idols serves not only as inspiration for remaining optimistic during personal challenges but also prompts shifts in personal aspirations leading towards self-realization.

A Surreal Relation with Otherness in Shirin Neshat’s Land of Dreams

Since her early photographic series Women of Allah (1993−1997), the Iranian-American artist Shirin Neshat has been either praised for her alternative representations of veiled Muslim women or criticised for practising self-Orientalisation. This article reflects on Neshat’s Land of Dreams (2019) where the artist turns her lens towards American people and landscapes, investigating how her aesthetic and dialogic search for the Other within a demographically diverse state in the US, New Mexico, challenge the pre-conditioned expectations of her works as art from the Middle East. Engaging with Neshat’s surreal interactions with her sitters in this photographic and video installation, the focus is how she becomes a mediator to show a dynamic of Relation, in Édouard Glissant’s sense of the term, and the complexity of the individuals’ minds and life experiences through blurring the lines between dream and waking life, fiction and reality, past and present. The analysis further explores Neshat’s viewpoint as a diasporic artist manifested in her visual strategies to facilitate a nuanced and fluid understanding of the artist’s own sense of identity, belonging and homeland.

‘Where are you from?’ and ‘foreigners’

This paper discusses the discursive ways in which a group of well-established academics living in the UK construct their sense of identity in their personal everyday lives-outside the context of academia, by projecting their self-perception vis-à-vis how they believe they are perceived by ‘the white perceiving subject’ (Rosa and Flores 2017). While race and accent are the lens through which these academics believe are perceived whereby, they are labelled ‘foreigners’ and questioned about who they are through what can be described as a politically loaded question of ‘where are you from?’, they resist being framed within these categories. This is by labelling themselves differently in ways which defy identity ascription and assert their own sense of identity. This paper reveals that experiences of exclusion and discrimination permeate the lives of these professionals who are ascribed identities based on perceptions of how they look and sound.

The conceptions of Spanish and Colombian students regarding processes of historical reconciliation

In the field of history education research, the analysis of the construction, circulation and appropriation of controversial and difficult histories has become a particularly relevant issue. Based on this line of research, the present study seeks to analyze the historical judgments of Spanish and Colombian students regarding processes of historical reconciliation, linked to situations of a controversial and difficult nature. To achieve this objective, a quantitative, non-experimental, survey-based design was employed. A total of 648 Spanish and 764 Colombian students from schools located in the cities of Murcia (Spain) and Bogotá (Colombia) participated by answering a closed questionnaire. The results show that ethical judgments on controversial issues, established on what is considered to be politically correct, are more frequent when the problem being evaluated is situated in a frame of reference external to questions of national belonging. However, such judgments tend to decrease, or assume a neutral standpoint, when the controversial issue is related to the individual’s own sense of identity. Thus, it is clear that the learning of difficult and controversial historical issues is not only built on a cognitive dimension. It is also supported by political, ethical and aesthetic dimensions, leading to the processes of making and receiving historical judgments being even more complex.

Becoming Entrepreneurs of Connection: How community partnerships shape engagement across difference and anti-poverty commitments

This article contributes to the civic identity development literature by exploring how a scholarship program emphasizing entrepreneurship and economic revitalization can facilitate engagement across difference in pursuit of shared anti-poverty commitments. Drawing on theories of entrepreneurial action, civic identity development literature, and a mixed methods approach, we propose a framework for how students conceptualize identity, race, and poverty as entrepreneurs of connection. The role of uncertainty is central to entrepreneurial action and a hallmark of community engagement. Combining an inquiry into their own sense of identity in relationship to their peers and community partners, students contribute to the development of the entrepreneurial ecosystem by making connections at the interpersonal, organizational, and systems levels. Students merge an understanding of their personal identities and situational context to build trust with diverse peers and community partners. Entrepreneurs of connection take action with community partners to pursue innovative solutions with a focus on social change.

Fraser in Fearn: Migration, Diaspora, and the Ghosts of Empire in the Return Visits of Peter Fraser (New Zealand Prime Minister) to the Highlands, 1935–1949

Building on Eric Richards’ ideas about Scottish Highlanders as an ‘imperial people’, this article is about how diasporic movement and connection created significant bonds between Easter Ross and New Zealand in the twentieth century and beyond. It focuses on a microstudy of the village of Fearn, famed as the birthplace of Peter Fraser, who was Prime Minister of New Zealand from 1940 to 1949. Peter Fraser returned to the Scottish Highlands many times during the 1930s and 1940s, and these visits reveal the diasporic links between different parts of empire and ask questions about our understanding of enduring imperial legacies and memories. I argue that Peter Fraser’s return visits to Fearn can be interpreted as a form of ‘homecoming’, which tell us much about Fraser himself and how his own sense of identity continued to be shaped by a connection to the place of his birth. However, this article focuses less on Fraser and more on the effect his return visits to Fearn had on the village and its communities. Fraser and Fearn become, then, a case study of the diasporic ties of belonging between Scotland and New Zealand and how a shared belief in empire, especially during World War Two, connected folk in the Highlands with diasporic Scots, such as Fraser, on the other side of the world. Peter Fraser’s return visits to Fearn nurtured this sense of imperial connection and the way in which Fraser’s Highland homecomings are remembered in the region demonstrate the ongoing legacies of empire that continue to shape Scotland to this day.

Beyond reconciliation, towards regeneration: social circus in Northern Ireland

ABSTRACT This article acknowledges for the first time in an academic context the significant role played by social circus in conflict transformation across Northern Ireland and, more specifically, urban regeneration in Belfast after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement. The focus is on the Belfast Community Circus School (BCCS) and the annual Festival of Fools, which emerged from the social mission and practical delivery of BCCS activities. BCCS was founded in the mid-1980s to offer children and young people in Belfast an alternative, creative outlet for their feelings and to establish “common ground” between communities amid conflict. This essay takes its lead initially from BCCS founders, reconsidering their motivations and the fundamental tenets of the School – as expressed by teachers and former pupils – alongside other studies of social circus in action around the world throughout a similar period. It also theorises the political intent and impact of BCCS through reference to the performance philosophy of Alan Read. Evidence in support of the argument is drawn from a range of available sources including policy and strategy documents, annual reports, performance evaluations, and interviews with key figures within the organisation. From this body of evidence, it becomes clear that, in the move towards what we might term (after Read) a Republic of Play, a change in BCCS, its own sense of identity and purpose within society was inevitable, as Northern Ireland continues the process of reconciliation and post-conflict transformation. Finally, then, the article attends to the recent transformation within BCCS itself, which in 2021 became Circusful: an organization with its own set of social and economic goals.

Quest for Feminine and Cultural Identity by Contemporary Indian Adolescent Girls in the Young Adult Literary Works of Metali Perkins

Purpose: The goal of this review paper is to draw attention to the multiple difficulties that modern Indian adolescent girls encounter in their quest for personal and cultural identity in an intercultural and globally connected environment. This study highlights the current social and cultural challenges the adolescent Indian females must overcome in order to pursue and realise their ambitions. This study aims to examine how these issues are handled in the chosen books of Mitali Perkins. Design/Methodology/Approach: The current study has a qualitative tone and relies more on reasoning than a survey. The masterwork by Mitali Perkin, "You Bring the Distant Near," served as the research's primary source. Secondary sources included the internet and a few particular articles. Most of the research journals are used from Research Gate, Google Scholar, Academia, SSRN, and Shodhganga to identify the research gap in this study. Results/ Findings: The challenges that modern adolescent females in India encounter are the paper's principal finding. These girls' attempts to preserve their cultural heritage and find their own sense of identity are also included. Perkin vividly depicts a young girl's internal struggle to uphold cultural expectations while still pursuing her own sense of identity as a woman. Originality/Value: This study is unique and groundbreaking because it uses Mitali Perkins' novels to examine the subject of Indian adolescent girls overcoming obstacles and dismantling barriers to achieve their unique cultural and personal identities. Type of Paper: Literature review.

‘Slaves’ Without Coercion? Work-Related Classification Patterns Among Romanian Migrant Workers

Tens of thousands of Romanian migrants work in the German construction sector. Their work is often characterized by unpaid wages, long workdays and by the withholding of sick or holiday payments. The risky and exploitative nature of the conditions under which Romanian migrants work on German construction sites is reflected in their negative evaluation of their engagements as “slave labor” by Romanian workers. Starting from such a clearly negative evaluation, the paper asks how Romanian construction workers in Germany classify their work and what role such classifications have within the context of labor exploitation. Based on qualitative interviews with and participant observation among Romanian construction site workers in Germany and in Romania, the article reconstructs four work classifications. Work may be interpreted as the fulfillment of obligations or as necessary for economic revenue; hard work itself can be a symbolic contribution to one’s own sense of identity or it can have the meaning of being part of everyday normalcy. Each of the work classifications offers a different reason to make hard work plausible in the eyes of the workers and employers actively turn such interpretations into a mechanism of vulnerability. Without direct physical coercion, these ideas motivate workers to take on work that they themselves criticize as ‘slave labor.’ The paper concludes by arguing that the recognition of such classifications and their social effects are crucial for an understanding of labor exploitation.

Grounding Identity and Mission in Catholic Universities: A Relational Approach

Since at least the 1960s, responding to changes both in the world and in the Church the project of Catholic university education in the United States and elsewhere has undergone a significant alteration in structure, and subsequently of its own sense of identity, purpose, and mission. Concerns about the integrity of Catholic universities both as Catholic and as university abound and have done for some time. Providing a brief review of some of the existing literature, this paper argues that the contemporary discussion regarding identity and mission for Catholic colleges and universities suffers from a decidedly modern inability to the address first order questions. This failure to properly treat questions pertaining to metaphysics render Catholic institutions of higher learning locked within the superficial plane in terms of how they address their own sense of identity and mission. In response to this, this paper argues that there exists within the Catholic tradition adequate metaphysical richness that can and should more faithfully ground the essence of the Catholic college or university. Drawing on the metaphysical work of such figures as David L. Schindler and others, the author argues that a relational ontology, characterized by an understanding of the metaphysics of gift can not only save the project of Catholic university education but is in fact central to its mission.

Colliding Identities and the Act of Creating Spaces of Belonging in the Occupational Therapy Profession

Introduction. Despite numerous initiatives to recruit a more diverse health professional workforce, those entering the health professions from marginalized groups experience significant barriers to inclusion. The occupational therapy (OT) profession is no exception. The profession, despite language of inclusion, is heavily influenced by colonialism and ableism, and positions itself largely under a Western world view. Literature points to OT students and clinicians from marginalized groups experiencing discrimination and racism, alienation, and internal conflicts between their own sense of identity and that which is expected in the OT profession. Lack of belonging can be a major barrier to success and fulfillment for those wishing to enter the profession. Objective. To highlight the invisible work done by those from marginalized groups to create spaces of belonging in the OT profession, through telling personal stories. Key Issues. Feelings of personal and professional belonging deeply impact the ways diverse OT students and clinicians engage meaningfully with themselves and their communities. Given the profession is currently aiming to identify its largely uninterrogated Western underpinnings, we must listen and learn from and with those from marginalized groups to create systemic, meaningful change. Implications. Creating community and supports within the profession in the context of a marginalized identity takes a significant amount of time and robust mentorship. We must begin to highlight this additional “invisible” work to create systemic changes and solutions and ease the burden for diverse peoples entering the profession.

Actual and Symbolic Spaces in Andrzej Bobkowski's Wartime Notebooks

Abstract Andrzej Bobkowski spent the entire period of World War II as a Polish refugee in Nazi-occupied France. He kept a diary, first published in Paris in 1957 as Szkice piórkiem and recently translated into English as Wartime Notebooks. France, 1940–1944. This article examines the impact of Bobkowski's experiences on his evolving views about cultural characteristics of the Poles, the French and the Germans, as well as his own sense of identity as man and writer. The article's conclusion connects transformations of Bobkowski's worldview in the course of the war with his decision to leave Europe after its end.

What I Think about When I Think about Teaching Ethics: A Philosophical Exploration in Pedagogy

What I Think about When I Think about Teaching Ethics: A Philosophical Exploration in Pedagogy

Manning the British Empire: Gender, Identity and Emotions in Early Twentieth Century Britain

This article analyses the thought processes of Ralph Furse, a senior civil servant tasked with selecting and training senior colonial officials during the early twentieth century. It makes use of his desk diaries between 1910 and 1914, which he used to record his impressions of candidates for the colonial service, and his autobiography, published after his retirement in the 1960s. Furse based his assessments on masculine qualities of the candidates, as he saw them, and on their emotional styles. Those who projected authority as men, were physically imposing and could manage their emotions effectively were generally deemed suitable, whilst the more gregarious candidates lacking these masculine qualities were rejected. Furse was a gatekeeper to elite male status and his job helped shape his own sense of identity as a landed gentry man.

Experiencing Everyday Otherness: A Study of Southeast Asian Marriage-Migrants in South Korea

Summary This study explores the everyday Otherness experienced by Southeast Asian marriage-migrant women in South Korea. South Korea is increasingly ethnically diverse due to the dramatic rise in international marriages between foreign women and Korean men, most of which are facilitated by marriage brokers. Yet little research has been conducted on marriage-migrants’ experiences of communicating with local Koreans. Drawing on data collected through in-depth interviews with five participants from Cambodia and Vietnam, this study focuses on specific factors that cause conflicts between these women and local Koreans in various social contexts, including the household, workplaces, and wider communities, and how the women respond to such conflicts and manage challenging interactions. The participants’ narratives demonstrate the tensions and conflicts they encounter, which can be divided into three categories: the imposition of Korean ways of living, negative stereotyping, and language use. The women describe being perceived as deviating from Korean society’s cultural and linguistic norms and facing pressure to conform to these norms, which sometimes conflict with their own sense of identity. In addition, they experience marginalization through Othering and negative stereotyping in their interactions with Koreans and struggle to develop a sense of belonging to the host society. The results of this study provide implications for second language programs designed for marriage-migrants, which have the potential to enable marriage-migrants to achieve sustainable development in their second language learning and to support their development of multilingual and multicultural identities.

Positive Affect and Letheby's Naturalization of Psychedelic Therapy

Letheby’s naturalistic theory of psychedelic therapy argues that the therapeutic power of psychedelics lies in their ability to allow individuals “to discover the contingency, mutability and simulatory nature of their own sense of identity and habitual modes of attention.” The general shape of this project is persuasive; it is hard to see how the claim that successful therapy must involve changes to the self could be objected to, and Letheby sketches a consistent, if speculative, picture of psychedelic experience. But the role of affect in psychedelic therapy is insufficiently explored by Letheby as a comparison to MDMA-assisted therapy indicates. This comparison further suggests that Letheby’s reliance on a particular conceptualization of ego dissolution experiences is in need of further explanation and justification.

The struggle for recognition in the age of facial recognition technology

Facial recognition is a promising emerging technology, but it sometimes fails to recognize people adequately. Facial recognition applications have been found to regularly misidentify certain demographics, misinterpret traits like gender, age, beliefs, or emotions, and categorize individuals in ways that do not resonate with their own sense of identity. In this paper, I argue that in each of these cases, the person who has their face analyzed is not merely misidentified or misunderstood, but misrecognized in an ethically relevant sense. Following Charles Taylor’s The Politics of Recognition (1992) and Axel Honneth’s The Struggle for Recognition (1996), I describe how those subjected to facial recognition systems on the one hand struggle to obtain adequate recognition on a universal level, as being equally important to others, and lack recognition for their individual uniqueness, on the other hand. These forms of misrecognition are of ethical concern, because they can harm a person’s identity formation. So, ironically, facial recognition technology can give rise to a struggle for recognition.

Rights, Interpersonal Violence and Settler Colonialism in Early Nineteenth-Century South Africa: Thomas Pringle and Scottish Colonialism at the Cape, 1820-1834

Thomas Pringle, a Scottish settler at the Cape Colony and later secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society in England, was both a settler in territory recently conquered from the Xhosa and an advocate against violence on Eastern Cape borderlands. This article examines both aspects of his career in the 1820s and early 1830s, and asks how they relate to one another. While working to put accounts of abuse into trans-imperial circulation, Pringle was caught up in the structures of settler colonialism at the Cape, including militarization and the quest for African labour. The evidence he provided was nonetheless politically significant. The article places Pringle’s work in the context of a larger history of the development of human rights and their interaction with both humanitarianism and colonialism. The article further asks what difference, if any, Pringle’s Scottishness made to his own sense of identity, political activity and views of colonialism.

Simukai Chigudu: elucidating the politics of global health

In 2003, aged 16 years, Simukai Chigudu came to the UK as a student from Zimbabwe, a country in political upheaval as opposition to the then President Robert Mugabe grew. A year later, Chigudu began a medical degree at Newcastle University. It was, he recalls, an unsettling time: “I felt this sense of being caught between worlds, where I was really struggling to be at one with my new setting in Newcastle, and yet I could never feel disencumbered of home. The more that things in Zimbabwe had deteriorated, the more powerless I felt…It was as if my own sense of identity was being fragmented as much as the country was being fragmented.