Process Of Identity Negotiation Research Articles

Accessing Identity through Face Work: A Case Study of Historical Courtroom Discourse

AbstractThere are certain areas of study where present-day pragmatics can benefit from history. This study investigates the processes of identity construction and negotiation through face work, using as a case study the historical courtroom in 18th century America. Adopting a social constructionist perspective to identity, the paper proposes that face is inextricably intertwined with identity, as it involves the process in which interlocutors position themselves, through discourse, in social interaction. Drawing upon the framework of self-politeness (Chen 2001), the paper reveals the ways in which an expert identity is constructed and negotiated during a trial where two medical professionals testified as expert witnesses and, at the same time, were challenged by the hostile interrogators. It is found that the experts resorted to two main discursive strategies which enhanced and restored their self-face, namely redressive and off-record, in their struggle for an expert identity, primarily because in the context of cross-examination, such strategies enabled the experts to directly or indirectly voice their response to previous face damaging utterances, instead of being silent on an issue (i.e. the withhold self-face threatening act strategy) or admitting that there was inconsistency in their testimony (i.e. the bald, on-record strategy). Such strategies helped the experts to construct and renew their identity or even resist others' identity ascriptions, enabling them to present themselves in a favourable light as their identity was under constant face threats from the adversarial interlocutors.

SPEAKING ENGLISH AND THE MALAY COMMUNITY

This research, situated in Malaysia, uses the first-person narratives of Malay learners to explore adult second language learning beyond the classroom as a process of identity negotiation, and a struggle for participation, acceptance and legitimacy in multiple communities. Set within a constructivist framework, it examines how ethnic, religious and cultural affiliations can structure access to linguistic and interactional opportunities, and how these are in turn constituted and reconstituted in the process of language learning and use. The study foregrounds the interplay between community ideology, language use and identity, and shows how learners’ investment in English is an investment in new identities and possibilities for the future.

Identity Negotiation in Psychotherapy: The Influence of Diagnostic and Rapport-building Strategies on the Effects of Clinical Expectations

In therapy, the expectations or hypotheses that therapists have of their clients, and the therapeutic strategies they employ with them, could influence identity negotiation processes. In the current study, 38 postgraduate therapist trainees interacted with 72 undergraduate clients in audiotaped counseling sessions. Therapists were led to expect that their clients were depressed or were given no expectation, and were asked to employ either diagnosis or rapport building with their clients. Therapists with expectations of client depression elicited similar levels of depressed behavior in their clients during diagnosis and rapport building as well as when they had no expectation and diagnosed their clients. Therapists focused on rapport building without an expectation elicited significantly less depressed behavior from their clients. Both applied and theoretical implications are discussed.

“Malays Are Expected To Speak Malay”: Community Ideologies, Language Use and the Negotiation of Identities

This article seeks to explore adult second language learning beyond the classroom as a process of identity negotiation, and a struggle for participation, acceptance, and legitimacy in multiple communities to which learners belong or aspire to belong. Drawing on constructivism to conceptualize language learning and notions of identity, the study examines the first-person narratives of Malay learners of English in Malaysia gleaned from journals and focus group discussions. By triangulating the various sources of data, the analysis brings together speakers' perspectives and the realities of local contexts to arrive at a more interpretive understanding of how they navigate their way through conflicting ideologies, vie for acceptance in the various communities, and strive to construct a bilingual self. The article concludes by considering the interplay between community ideology, language use, and identity and how an informed understanding of this can help bridge the gap between classroom learning and real world experiences.

Narrating hyphenated selves: Intergroup contact and configurations of identity among young Palestinian citizens of Israel

Abstract Contemporary Palestinian citizens of Israel must negotiate disparate identities as they construct a “hyphenated” self. Their status as a national indigenous minority places them in a particular location of subordination and existential insecurity within Israeli society, which has been accentuated during the intensification of conflict between Israel and the Palestinians in the occupied territories since 2000. This study examines processes of identity negotiation and reconciliation in the personal narratives of young Palestinian citizens of Israel who participate in intergroup contact with Jewish Israelis and Palestinians from the occupied territories. An interpretive thematic analysis of personal narratives reveals the discursive strategies youth employ as they traverse the limits of hyphenation, constructing configurations of identity that reconcile conflicting discourses. Pre-contact narratives suggested considerable variability in processes of identity negotiation. Post-contact narratives were characterized by three patterns: (1) Palestinian identity accentuation, in which youth came to identify more strongly with their Palestinian national identity over their Israeli civic identity; (2) temporal stability, in which youth whose pre-contact narrative was already characterized by Palestinian identity accentuation maintained that configuration; and (3) life at the hyphen, in which youth actively struggled with and vacillated between states of conflict and integration of their disparate identities.

Disclosing the Ethnographic Self

Disclosing the Ethnographic Self

Becoming “Hispanic” in the “New South”: Central American immigrants’ racialization experiences in Atlanta, GA, USA

For many migrants from Latin America, “Hispanic/Latino(a)” is an identity that they encounter in the United States with which they were unfamiliar in their home countries and must negotiate in their everyday lives in a new context. Specifically, immigrants from Central America are unlikely to see themselves as “Hispanic” or “Latino(a)” prior to living in the United States, more often identifying with their home country, city, town, village, or neighborhood. This paper draws on racialization theory and twenty-seven in-depth interviews with Central American immigrants in Atlanta, GA to examine this process of identity negotiation across the traditionally black/white racialized landscapes of a “New South” city. Interview participants adopt a racialized Hispanic identity through a complex process involving the interplay between how they think of themselves and their perceptions of how native-born Atlantans view them. The interview analysis presented herein demonstrates that although Central American immigrants actively negotiate a Hispanic racialized moniker, they do so within an urban context dominated by native-born residents whose racialized assumptions lump Spanish-speaking, brown skinned individuals into a monolithic “Mexican” category. Thus the ways in which racialized difference is constructed in contemporary Atlanta for recent Central American immigrants is very much bound up in such false presumptions of national identity and cultural group belonging.

Storying my self: negotiating a relational identity in professional sport

Much existing sport research subscribes to a dominant performance narrative which prescribes sacrifice, dedication, discipline and an overriding focus on winning as prerequisites for success in sport. Recently, however, narrative scholars have criticised the performance narrative on the basis of its damaging effects on identity development and psychological well‐being and have identified alternative but silenced life stories among highly successful professional sportspeople. These alternative stories allow athletes to resist the dominant performance narrative and thereby sustain a multi‐dimensional identity and sense of self. My purpose with this paper is to provide some insight into how these narrative processes unfold through an autoethnographic approach which foregrounds particular moments of my own life in sport. Through telling these stories I hope to illuminate processes of identity construction and negotiation in the context of a golf career which included multiple professional tournament wins, two European Master’s Championships and representation of England, Great Britain and Europe.

The Classroom as Stage

This article explores the social-psychological process of identity negotiation in collaborative teaching, using Erving Goffman's (1959) theoretical tradition of dramaturgy to analyze the classroom itself as a performance venue. A dramaturgical analysis of collaborative teaching is especially significant given this growing pedagogical trend because identity negotiation in team teaching has the potential to impact one's teaching, one's career, and students' learning. We demonstrate that despite the positive outcomes of collaborative teaching for both teachers and learners, building a successful team is a process that takes time, effective communication, risk taking, and trust. Most significantly, sustaining a clear definition of the situation in the classroom is a challenge when a teaching team is engaged in the ongoing negotiation of roles, power, and course structure—in front of students. We argue that making identity claims in a collaborative team teaching situation is both more challenging and rewarding than acting alone on the classroom stage.

Migrants and ethnic minorities in post-Communist Europe

Migration movements within Central and Eastern Europe and the development of related migrant diasporas are to date relatively underresearched topics. Also, little attention has been paid to the process of identity negotiation that takes place between post-1989 migrants, their co-ethnic minorities native to the host state and the host state national majority. This article looks into the development of diasporic identities among Ukrainian and Romanian migrants in Poland and Hungary, focusing particularly on members of the political elite of these recent migrations. The informants included in this study form part of a civically and politically active small elite among the recent migrants. They have a double importance for their diaspora group: they play a constitutive part in the making of the diaspora, as they are the ones to set up the diaspora institutions, and they are also the ones who bear the brunt for carving an identity space in the country of settlement: between the native majority and their co-ethnic native minority. Of particular interest is how these first-generation elite immigrants negotiate their national identity within the triangle of country of origin, country of settlement and co-ethnic national minority (native in the host country). The methodology of critical discourse analysis is used to analyse in-depth interviews with 10 first-generation immigrants in the two countries.

Detecting Perceiver Expectancies: The Role of Perceiver Distraction in Spontaneously Triggering Identity Negotiation

To examine whether social interaction processes can trigger naturally-occurring identity negotiation, the current research manipulated perceiver distraction and valence of perceivers' expectations about targets. Nondistracted perceivers corrected their behaviors and impressions for the influence of their expectancies. Distracted perceivers corrected their overt information-gathering behaviors, but appeared to exhibit their biases in subtle ways. Targets detected distracted perceivers' negative expectancies, and showed signs of engaging in identity negotiation processes by behaving contrary to their perceivers' expectancies. The results suggest that distraction may facilitate the emergence of subtle expectancy-biased perceiver behaviors, and may trigger targets to intuitively engage in identity negotiation processes.

What Are “Reverse Diasporas” and How Are We to Understand Them?

This article presents empirical evidence from two contemporary diasporas to support the thesis that formal return to the homeland does not necessarily “unmake” diasporas, as some scholars have previously suggested. I argue that, instead, so-called reverse diaspora formation processes take place, with important repercussions for the acculturation of co-ethnic immigrants in their nominal “homelands.” This article focuses on this latter issue, primarily on processes of identity formation and notions of belonging and home, which are particularly meaningful in the context of this diasporic “homecoming.” It draws on the structured comparison of the ethnic Greek and ethnic German diasporas from the former Soviet Union who moved to Greece and Germany after perestroika. Despite their rich and illuminating analogies and overlaps, these two diaspora groups have never been compared and contrasted before. After a brief historical contextualization, complicated processes of identity negotiation and belonging in the putative “historical homelands” are investigated comparatively, lending credence to the idea that “reverse” German and Greek diasporas have developed within (and often in conflict with) contemporary Greek and German societies. The fact that they occur simultaneously in both countries tends to suggest that the concept of reverse diaspora is an important one that needs closer attention from scholars in the future. The article concludes by outlining how we may conceptualize a reverse diaspora, based on existing definitions of diaspora. My research materials consist of in-depth qualitative data collected over the course of six years by means of eighty-one semi-structured interviews in Russian, German, and Greek with migrants and experts in Greece and Germany, embedded in ethno-graphic research and supplemented by statistical data.

`I'd rather not take Prozac': stigma and commodification in antidepressant consumer narratives

This article explores the idea that narrative is the primary vehicle through which antidepressant consumers negotiate their sense of identity and reality. Antidepressant consumers represent a unique consumer culture because of the stigma that society attaches to mental illness. Recent media attention, including direct to consumer (DTC) advertising, appears to decrease the stigma surrounding antidepressant use while at the same time commodifying and branding them for mass consumption. Antidepressant consumers must negotiate the threat of stigma and the threat of commodification through the process of constructing narratives. Exploring the narrative process of identity negotiation reveals how the interconnected cultural processes of stigma and commodification are undergoing historical shifts. Among these shifts are the intensification of branding and an expansion of consumer culture. Implications for health promotion and further research are discussed.

Revealing and Concealing: Interpersonal Dynamics and the Negotiation of Identity in the Interview

With questions of identity negotiation and power now central in anthropol‐ogy, anthropologists must become more attentive to negotiations in the interview process itself. This article draws together insights from sociolinguistics, psychoanalysis, and literary criticism to identify procedures for recognizing multiple layers of signifi‐cance in interview responses. Passages from two well‐known ethnographies, Dorinne Kondo's Crafting Selves (1990) and Sidney Mintz's Worker in the Cane (1974), are reinterpreted to demonstrate how attending to transference and countertransference, allusion and intertextuality, and linguistic phenomena such as ambiguity and pronom‐inal shifts can enhance the anthropologist's awareness of the process of identity negotiation in the field and yield richer ethnographic writing that goes beyond the use of abstracted cultural patterns as an explanatory device to a demonstration of how cultural practices are enacted with and through the ethnographer. [interviewing, ethnography, identity, transference, sociolinguistics, intertextuality]

“I'm Not an Immigrant!”: Resistance, Redefinition, and the Role of Resources in Identity Work

In this paper we examine the identity negotiation processes of North African immigrant women in France. Participants engaged in various forms of identity work, including selective association and management of appearance, as well as resisting others' attempts to categorize them as immigrants. Given that these women have chosen to move to France and remain there, this finding is surprising. Using the concept of the Not-Me identity, we explore how people can redefine and refuse labels that seem to be self-evident and to lack room for negotiation. At the same time, we examine how class and educational resources and other structural factors influence these immigrant women's ability to control others' perceptions of their identity.

The self and identity negotiation

Identity negotiation refers to the processes through which perceivers and targets come to agreements regarding the identities that targets are to assume in the interaction. Whereas past work has focused on the contribution of perceivers to the identity negotiation process, I emphasize the contribution of targets to this process. Specifically, I examine the tendency for targets to work to bring perceivers to verify their self-views. For example, people prefer and seek self-verifying evaluations from others, including their spouses and employers — even when this means attaining evaluations that validate negative self-views. Moreover, receiving self-verification has adaptive consequences, even improving the performance of workers in diverse groups. Some boundary conditions of self-verification strivings as well as implications for making of minds are discussed.

Fostering group identification and creativity in diverse groups: the role of individuation and self-verification.

A longitudinal study examined the interplay of identity negotiation processes and diversity in small groups of master's of business administration (MBA) students. When perceivers formed relatively positive impressions of other group members, higher diversity predicted more individuation of targets. When perceivers formed relatively neutral impressions of other group members, however, higher diversity predicted less individuation of targets. Individuation at the outset of the semester predicted self-verification effects several weeks later, and self-verification, in turn, predicted group identification and creative task performance. The authors conclude that contrary to self-categorization theory, fostering individuation and self-verification in diverse groups may maximize group identification and productivity.

Female repeat offenders negotiating identity.

This study examines the process of identity negotiation for Israeli female ex-convicts who were separated for extensive periods of time from their children and eventually lost custody over them. The content analysis of in-depth interviews reveals that these women were able to reconstruct their biographies and retrospectively account for their crimes and drug addiction in terms of the sexual, physical, and economic abuse they had endured and by appeal to higher loyalties, their children who they had to provide for. However, when having to account for their fallings as mothers, all biographical reconstruction, external blame, and accusation collapsed. Looking at themselves through their children's eyes, female offenders were simply unable to renegotiate the imputed identity of incompetent mother. They could neither confront their children's anger nor explain to them why they had abandoned them. Permanently alienated from the center of motherhood, these women were doomed to an existential chaos.

Waning of Stereotypic Perceptions in Small Groups: Identity Negotiation and Erosion of Gender Expectations of Women

Changes in the gender-stereotypic perceptions of men and women were examined in a prospective study of MBA study groups (N = 253). At the outset of the semester, group members perceived women, as compared to men, as more “communal” (other-focused) but equally “agentic” (self-focused). Over the subsequent 9 weeks, gender-stereotypic perceptions of women faded. The extent to which group members individuated one another at the outset of the semester predicted the extent to which they developed appraisals that verified their partners' self-views. These identity negotiation processes, in turn, predicted change in stereotypic perceptions.

Contextual Variations in Young Women's Gender Identity Negotiations

This article explores young women's strategies for seeking personal power and resisting gender-based stereotypes in a wealthy, suburban, White community and a working-class, urban, community of color. Semi-structured interviews with 27 young women were used to examine contextual variations in these gender identity negotiation processes. Both groups of young women were acutely aware of women's subordinate social and cultural position and this awareness contributed to some negative feelings about being female. However, their strategies for locating strength in their identities varied by social contexts. Moreover, the two groups of young women encountered distinct sets of stereotypes in their respective communities. Forms of resistance to these stereotypes led to significantly different behavior patterns. These comparisons build a richer theoretical understanding of the contextual dimensions of young women's gender identity negotiations.