Plural Identities Research Articles

Beyond Flexibility

While Derrick Darby and Eduardo Martinez's "Making Identities Safe for Democracy" proposes flexible identities as a solution to reconciling social identity with democratic politics, this paper argues that flexibility alone is insufficient to address contemporary challenges to democracy. Through a critical examination of their work, I identify two significant limitations in their argument. First, their primary example of veteran status as a flexible identity is problematic, as empirical evidence shows it remains significantly aligned with Republican partisan identity and may be grounded in potentially restrictive forms of national identity. Second, their framework fails to adequately address how identity flexibility can counter the phenomenon of partisan sorting, where partisanship has evolved into a mega-identity that increasingly structures both political and social life. In response to these limitations, I argue that emphasizing the plurality of social identities, rather than merely their flexibility, offers a more effective approach to treating—rather than just preventing—the challenges that identity poses to democratic practice. While flexibility remains important, cultivating multiple, distinct social identities that coexist and interact within individuals and communities may better dilute the dominance of partisan mega-identities and foster more inclusive democratic engagement.

We are a miraculous mess and that is the only way we can be

This article introduces the second issue of Stolen Tools by exploring the concept of the love and ‘the erotic’ as described by Audre Lorde. The erotic is a deep, non-rational life force rooted in creativity, self-knowledge, and authentic emotional connections. The erotic embraces a chaotic plurality of identities; creative, free and authentic expression; and meaningful, nurturing solidarity. It is crucial for resisting racial oppression and something that Stolen Tools aspires to, even in the face of institutional and personal blocks. The second half of this piece presents the papers that constitute this issue and build on its theme. The papers in this issue include fictional stories and a poem exploring the complexities of identity, resilience, and racism, as well as articles analysing the limitations of equality, diversity, and inclusion initiatives in academic and clinical settings. Thank you to everyone who worked on and contributed to this issue including Ricardo Twumasi, Gabi Nieuwoudt, Rubbia Ali, and Hannah Abdalla. Particular thanks to Ebony Burke, who has been seconded from the King’s College London Library and Collections to support our project and is indicative of the creative institutional support that we survive on. I dedicate this issue to my daughter Nika, who inspired the opening article and is one year old at the time of writing.

Streaming Diversité: Exploring representations within French-language scripted series on Canadian SVOD services.

Canadian subscription-video-on-demand (SVOD) services have commissioned French-language 'original' content to attract local audiences. ICI TOU.TV, Club Illico and Crave have indeed commissioned more than a hundred French-language scripted series, mostly produced in the Quebec province. However, the current state of research only marginally documents these services. Even in Canada, most research focus on US-owned streaming giants such as Netflix and Amazon, thus providing little information on Canadian national SVOD services, and their affordances in terms of storytelling and representation. Current research also completely overlooks French-language original content. This paper therefore discusses the results of the very first research project to specifically focus on the production of original French-language series for Canadian streaming services. After reviewing all original (scripted and unscripted) French-language content available on Canadian-owned SVOD services, a textual analysis of more than 40 scripted series has been conducted, which led to intricate insights regarding prevailing narrative trends and characteristics of main and secondary characters. In so doing, the objective was also to determine the level of diversity included within this so-called original content. In a context characterized by an unprecedented proliferation of scripted series, it indeed becomes crucial to ascertain whether a greater quantity of productions necessarily leads to a greater diversity in representation, that is, the inclusion of a 'multiplicity of forms', and an equitable plurality of cultural expressions and identities. This research produced several findings that testify to a significant inclusion of sexual, gender, and racial diversity, as well as a noticeable trend towards intersectional representation. Yet, the analysis also led to identify persistent issues, such as the qualitative marginalization of non-normative characters (queer, BIPOC, with disability, etc.), as they mostly are relegated to supporting roles. These findings therefore call for a nuanced assessment of the 'progress' in representation on streaming services.

Conventionalist Accounts of Personal Identity Over Time

AbstractConventionalism about personal identity over time is the view that personal identity is in some sense dependent on our beliefs, desires, social practices, or language use (collectively: on our “conventions”). This paper provides an opinionated survey of the state of the art about personal identity conventionalism. First, it offers a taxonomy of possible types of conventionalism along four different axes and discusses weak vs. strong, private vs. public, doxastic vs. non‐doxastic, and realizer‐relative vs. assessor‐relative varieties of conventionalism. Second, it reviews the main sources of motivation for conventionalism about personal identity: methodological, epistemological, and normative motivations. Third, it maps out the place of conventionalism in logical space and distinguishes it from related philosophical theses: personal identity pluralism, indeterminacy about personal identity, revisionism, and self‐concern relativism. Finally, some potential avenues for future research are considered.

“Genderation,” Identity, and Authenticity in the LGBTQ Marketplace

This study explores how LGBTQ identities and expressions evolve across generations, emphasizing the impact of sociocultural dynamics. It introduces the concept of “Genderation” to capture the fluidity and plurality of LGBTQ identities among younger cohorts, challenging traditional binary frameworks. The paper delves into the complexities marketers face in authentically representing this demographic, urging for inclusive and sensitive communication strategies. It highlights the pivotal role of digital platforms in identity formation and advocates for marketing practices that recognize and celebrate the diversity within the LGBTQ community. The research calls for a broader, global understanding of these generational shifts and a deeper investigation into the intersections of gender and sexuality, offering insightful directions for future inquiry and practice.

Education and structural racism: teachers’ views on racial discrimination experienced in the workplace

The research in question was developed together with the Center for Research and Extension in Human Rights (NUPEDH) and the Research Group Law, Gender and Plural Identities (DGIPLUS), both linked to the Postgraduate Program in Law and Social Justice at the Faculty of Law (FADIR) from the Federal University of Rio Grande (FURG/Brazil). We sought to investigate, analyze, and understand how structural racism – a phenomenon understood as systematic racial discrimination present in sociopolitical structures – is experienced by teachers who self-identify as black and who work in the public and private primary and secondary education network in the city of Canguçu located in the state of Rio Grande do Sul (RS), Brazil. Aiming to achieve the proposed objective, the deductive research method was adopted, comprising bibliographical research (scientific articles, theses, and books) and critical-reflective analysis of the collected material. As the aim was also to understand the reality of black teachers, empirical research was carried out through semi-structured interviews with all 41 black teachers out of a total of 775 teachers who work in the educational system in the city of Canguçu. Among the obtained results, the fact that the majority, that is, 99% of the teachers interviewed, stated that they had experienced situations of prejudice in work relationships and when teaching in the classroom stands out. Both the number of black teachers in the city of Canguçu and the testimonies of the interviewees corroborate the existence of structural racism in the educational sphere, since, as the authors who underlie the research emphasize, racial discrimination is one of the elements that make up the sociopolitical organization and economic aspects of Brazilian society.

Queering the Postcolonial Auto/biography: Doubleness and Unspeakability in J. M. Coetzee’s Boyhood and Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother

Examining representations of queer subjectivities as minor subjectivities, this essay compares J. M. Coetzee’s Boyhood and Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother to investigate the emergence of queer postcolonial auto/biography in the late 1990s. The two texts use a similar hybridized form (a blurring of autobiography and third-person biography) to represent marginalized queer subjectivities in the postcolonial contexts of South Africa and Antigua, respectively. In doing so, they redefine the notion of the minor as an anti-colonial poetics and a non-normative lived experience. Both narratives, published in the same year (1997) and composed in the midst of the HIV/AIDS pandemic and after the end of Apartheid, engage with related themes of doubleness, secrecy, and unspeakability to reveal the double consciousness of queer figures silenced and rendered minor as a result of internalized shame through the taboo on non-heteronormative desires. This essay analyses the intersections between postcolonial and queer dimensions of minor subjectivities in order to understand how the minor position of the queer subject in postcolonial societies is pluralized through strikingly similar literary strategies. Coetzee and Kincaid offer new possibilities for world literature through the publication of queer postcolonial auto/biographies which celebrate, facilitate, and complicate the plurality of minor identities and narrative viewpoints – especially the minor subjectivities and poetics surrounding queer postcolonial lives.

A Comparative Approach to Identities in Toni Morrison’s and Léonora Miano’s Novels

Women writers from the African Diaspora are committed to the question of identity. They construct extraordinary imaginary worlds, sometimes closely linked to their host societies or those of their ancestors. This in-between-cultures characteristic explains the plurality of identities that unfold. The desire to assert their rights and acquire financial mobility forces the fictional subjects evolving in these spaces to embark on a frantic quest for material goods. But to preserve their cultural heritage, influenced by that of elsewhere, they undertake a process of identity construction. Through these narrative strategies, a transgressive practice emerges whose aesthetic aim is to advocate justice. The novels surveyed depict several female figures whose convergent and divergent aspects merit in-depth critical analysis. To this end, the comparative approach will elucidate two major axes, namely "emerging identity forms" and "socialization strategies".

The Urbanized Museum

In the contemporary world of social change, accelerated mobility and plural identities, the creation of open and inclusive environments seems to be a recurrent aim at all levels from cities to buildings and to museums in particular. Through the first-hand study and analysis of current case studies, the paper will argue that museums engage space to express the contemporary museological concepts of accessibility, openness and inclusiveness, and through these to engage visitors in cross cultural informational experiences and social encounters. The spatial nature of the contemporary museum, it is proposed, points to a new concept of the museum, which often aims to be part of the city, both in the sense of how it connects to it and in being internally more like a city, and so a continuation of it.

Тема социокультурной неопределённости в Античности

The article deals with the process of reflection of sociocultural incertitude in antic philosophic and historiographical tradition. The sociocultural incertitude is the sociocultural state of subject, have been installed in the necessity of the choice between some variants of the further existence. Antic metaphysics, philosophy of nature, tradition of objective idealism, historiography give different variants of discovering the content of incertitude. The social, political, civilizational problematic of antic world Hellenistic and Roma periods added to the problem of incertitude the problematic of plurality of sociocultural identities, their coexistence, the possibility of their combination and the choice between them, voluntary for a person.

Социокультурные аспекты современных идентификационных процессов

This article is devoted to the problem of multiple identities and the specifics of their interaction in modern conditions. Plurality of identities, on the one hand, is considered a normal phenomenon that explains complex social communications and allows an individual to optimally participate in a diverse modern social life, applying to various situations. On the other hand, the authors note that in conditions of social, political, economic, and cultural mobility, the phenomenon of identity also turns out to be in an unstable state, which is aggravated by the fact that the phenomenon of identity itself is not completely static. If a few decades ago an equivalent diversity of identities implied their interaction, multicultural polyphony, where a plurality of identities could be realized as much as possible, then at the beginning of the twenty-first century, a request for hierarchization and ordering of identities arises in society. In the article, the authors attempt to determine by what criteria it is possible to build a hierarchy of identities, on which social and cultural events, accents, and preferences this hierarchy will depend, whether it will be accepted by the whole society, or whether it will require taking into account group subcultural specifics. The authors note the desire for the dominance of civil and civilizational identities based on cultural identity as a deep foundation. Civil identity in a multinational state with ethnic, cultural, and economic diversity among regions presupposes a strong consolidating resource. The needs of society for a clear definition of the civilizational vectors of modern Russia make the question of defining civilizational identity one of the most demanded. The article also examines how purposeful social and institutional formation of identities and their conscious alignment into a hierarchical pyramid is possible.

Towards inclusive PE for science granting councils in Sub-Saharan Africa: challenges and opportunities

Inclusive public engagement (PE), an approach that recognizes the plurality of gender identities, is crucial for science reach, uptake, and impact. This study explored the PE activities of 15 science granting councils in Sub-Saharan Africa to identify existing practices, their strengths, and barriers to inclusive PE practices. Key informant interviews were used to elicit data, with additional data collected through a digital audit of the 15 councils. The study established that SGC activities demonstrate relatively good alignment with their PE mandate. Initiatives have been developed and implemented, although there are areas that need strengthening. Some of the key areas that need strengthening are the lack of commitment to multilingual knowledge transfer using local languages; the explicit inclusion of women in policies and programs, the diversification of engagement platforms and tools to address the urban-rural divide and the digital divide.

‘Trapping my way up’: a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of Black Sherif’s songs

ABSTRACT Taking cognisance of the social and linguistic power of trap music and its song lyrics as crucial avenues for language use in society, this study set out to conduct a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of selected song lyrics of Black Sherif. The study synergised Wmatrix and a socio-cognitive approach to CDA to interpret the song lyrics. The analyses revealed three linguistic strategies: (a) pronouns; (b) Ghanaian Student Pidgin; and (c) metaphors in the song lyrics that served as a means of empowering the youth to survive and strive for success despite social and psychological aggressions in life. Also, the individualistic self-representation in the song lyrics included plural identities of people who share a common experience of struggle, pain, survival, and self-empowerment. Finally, the study highlighted crucial societal issues, such as economic hardship and social injustice, that may otherwise be overlooked or underrepresented in mainstream media or academia. Based on these findings, the study provides recommendations for practice and further research.

Effects of a teacher training programme on historical awareness skills, controversial issues and gender in secondary education

This research analyses the impact of a teaching intervention aimed at the development of historical awareness skills in future secondary school social science teachers (n = 19), and its relationship with the curricular inclusion of controversial issues, gender and its diversity in history education. From a quasi-experimental design, the Epistemology, Methodology and Gender in taught history (EMG) scale was adapted as a data collection instrument. The main results obtained report a statistically significant impact of the intervention on the curricular need for didactic treatment of social problems and controversial issues, and for addressing education for participatory democracy in the social science curriculum; making visible individuals, social groups/collectives and plural identities (including gender); recognizing the relative nature of social-historical knowledge; and redirecting historical knowledge towards purposes oriented towards social transformation and education for the future. Likewise, after the programme, the representations of future teachers tend to weaken the perception of historical knowledge as an interpretative reconstruction of the past, its limited impact on the historicity of the present and its absence in the configuration of desirable futures, and to strengthen the need to understand the historical method in the teaching of social sciences.

The Politics of space in Leila Aboulela’s Minaret and Jamal Mahjoub’s A Line in the River: Khartoum, City of Memory

The preoccupation with architecture, geography, and borders in the work of Anglo-Sudanese writers Leila Aboulela and Jamal Mahjoub is to a large extent tied to the postcolonial mindset the two authors share and the minority status of the Anglophone Arab literary tradition. This tradition aims, among other things, at rewriting space to negotiate questions of identity, power, and resistance. Drawing on recent research on the intersections between the postcolonial field and the field of space studies, this paper argues that, although Aboulela and Mahjoub both seek to expose the spatial organization of social reality, that is to say the ways in which space is both conceived and shaped to reinforce existing power differentials, they diverge on the esthetic and political strategies to challenge this power configuration. Therefore, by comparing Aboulela’s Minaret (2006) and Mahjoub’s A Line in the River: Khartoum, City of Memory (2018), it will be argued that, while Aboulela displaces the larger geographies of the nation and the city in favor of urban microstructures that become the site of dissent and empowerment for the alienated migrant subject, Mahjoub embraces the geography of the nation as holding the key both to the collective project of nation-building and the more personal task of coming to terms with the plurality of postcolonial identity.

О теории модернизации цифрового образования, формирующего множественность идентичности и интеллект обучающихся

The article deals with the problem of developing a theory of modernization of digital education, which forms a plurality of identities and the intelligence of students. The authors proceed from the fact that the functioning of modern societies in various states is complicated by the rapidly growing diversity in the world and the corresponding change in communication technologies and industrial relations, in connection with which the relevance of managing the socio-cultural life of people and society as a whole has increased. Therefore, identification research is of great importance today. The modern multiplicity of identification properties of people is associated with the existence of two opposite process-es in the information society: assimilation and multiculturalism. The authors of the article believe that in the system of modernization education of young people it is necessary to introduce such categories as "multiple identity" (multiple identity) and the plural-ity of skills, abilities and abilities (multiple intelligences), in view of the fact that students create themselves, describe, including their skills, potential and preferences. The authors came to the conclusion that educational organizations should independently develop their own policy of social and educational assimilation of students to the universal process of education, where there are "examples" of norms and values that allow students to identify themselves as "worthy" of certain expectations on the part of teachers, teachers and educational administration. institutions. This policy should also include methods of their social integration through informational impact and interaction of teachers with students, allowing them to maintain certain rules of interactive communication. The theory of modernization learning includes both communication theory and learning theory. The versatility of modern distance education is the construction of web communities, where dialectical and democratic pedagogy is recreated, combining various models and styles of learning (the concepts of behaviorism, cognitivism and constructivism are known in the education system).

Plural Identity and Migrant Communities in Guy Gunaratne’s In Our Mad and Furious City (2018)

This paper explores the complexity of plural identities of the characters living within the sociocultural space of a London community, who define themselves as being from “here” and “elsewhere,” in Guy Gunaratne’s In Our Mad and Furious City (2018). First-generation and second-generation migrants, originally from Ireland, Pakistan, Ja- maica, as well as other nations referred to in the novel, give life to the community at the Ends, a housing estate in Northwest London. On the one hand, in this suburban space, fury, neglect and powerlessness are deeply felt by the locals. However, the community also becomes the location for the creation of social habits, cultural patterns, forms of ex- pression and group unity through the interaction and shared experiences of the locals. This dichotomy reveals underlying anxieties that raise questions about otherness, marginalisa- tion and belonging, and how these aspects intersect in the construction of cultural identity. As characters struggle for meaning against a “cancel culture,” their individual experiences are what constitutes their plural and fluid identities.

Digital literary readings for the promotion of gender and affective-sexual diversity: Predictors of its didactic recommendation in secondary education

This study analyses the frequencies of inclusion of digital literary-educational proposals on the diversification of sex/gender/sexuality expectations by in-service Spanish teachers of secondary education (<i>n</i>=436), and the predictors that determine this inclusion. Based on the application of the instrument <i>Digital Literary Education and the Construction of Gender Identities</i> (DLECGI), the study is developed in non-experimental designs of a cross-sectional nature, and at the relational, explanatory and predictive levels of research, insofar as it seeks to reveal the socio-demographic, formative and didactic causes of the phenomenon or event of interest, and its degree of occurrence. The results obtained indicate the existence of a profile of teachers who promote the recommendation of this type of digital reading based on their belonging to non-binary gender groups with previous training in co-education and equality, and with explicit didactic stances on controversial issues. Likewise, the relationship between socio-demographic variables and the didactic positioning of teachers on the recommendation of digital readings on affective-sexual diversity shows that initial and/or ongoing specific training in co-education and equality is a key predictor of this relationship. These findings attest to the fact that the visibility and recognition of identity plurality in literary education necessarily involves the proposal of counter-hegemonic models regarding gender and affective-sexual identity. In this regard, teacher training must continue to progress towards the adoption of inclusive didactic approaches within the framework of educational principles for democratic citizenship, regardless of the gender or personal and social identity that defines these teachers.

Reverse Extensions and Multi-Layered Experiences of Harmony in Drake’s Harmonic Loops

Drake's music features both lyrics and harmonies that often appear multilayered, ambiguous, and conflicted to listeners. Sometimes these multilayered harmonies are created through what I call "reverse extensions," where the bass line moves one or more thirds below the root of the chord in a fixed harmonic loop. These reverse extensions can sometimes be heard as a "harmonic-bass divorce" (de Clercq 2019) in which the bass line moves independently from the harmonic layer. However, I argue that they often can also be heard as single integrated harmonies, and that these plural hearings draw on intra- and inter-textual memory to create multilayered harmonic experiences which help evoke the conflicted and ambivalent feelings that Drake's lyrics are famous for.
 The plural identities of these chords can be understood by adapting elementary concepts from jazz theory, in which extended chords can be mimicked by or substituted with "slash chords" that add a bass note below the base triad; for example, G/A (G major triad with A in the bass, or AGBD) sounds like Am11 (ACEGBD). This chord sometimes seems to convey a double function of both G and Am. Relationships like this create an "extension-related family" of chords which often easily substitute for one another in chord progressions. I argue that by enumerating possibilities for chord substitutions, and plural hearings of extended chords, reverse extensions are an “enactive music theory” which frames chord identity as a structure subjectively enacted by an individual, rather than an objective property inherent “the music itself.”

Recipes, Poems, and Memory in Contemporary Louisiana Francophone Literature

Louisiana French literature, like its cuisine, is fluid, plural, and forever evolving. Language and food are two vital mediums through which Louisianans express identity, emotions, memory, and culture. Even as Louisiana’s French language faced a near erasure in the mid-twentieth century due to Americanization, cultural expression and evolution thrive at the intersection of oral literature and cuisine. Food, as a theme, lexical field, and symbol helps contemporary cooks and writers define their own identity. In the review of creative writing, Feux Follets (1991–Present), food plays a vital role in the quest for identity among its contributors. The creolization of Louisiana culture manifests itself in creative expression, be it a dish in Melissa Martin’s Mosquito Supper Club (2020), or a poem in Feux Follets. This article demonstrates how the intersection of emblematic food items and creative writing provides a space for the evolution of a literary identity that is as vibrant and creolized as Louisiana cuisine and culture in general. Despite the fluidity and plurality of identities, writers of cookbooks and poetry write Louisiana cuisine as a metaphor, image, and cultural object to amplify Franco-literary voices in the twenty-first century.