Production Of Identity Research Articles

The Analysis of Affective Atmospheres in Audiovisual Media

The far-right is an integral part of the political everyday life in Germany. Far-right projects are always geopolitical projects too, as they aim to reorganize space, power and identities. Within the spreading of far-right worldviews and ideologies music videos play an important role as they seem particularly suitable for conveying identity constructions affectively. Research in feminist geography has focused on the role of affects and emotions in the production of collective identities and emphasized that national affiliation is not cognitively known, but primarily felt. Based on a relational understanding of affect and the concept of affective atmospheres, I propose in this article a set of methods with which the affective production of identities in multimodal arrangements can be explored. I understand affects as an important part of discourse and media analysis and would like to open up a perspective that enables affective atmospheres to be attached to formal and content-related features: Following current theoretical discussions in the social sciences and political geography, I show how affective atmospheres and affect potentials can be analyzed in audio-visual media referring to affective markings, the explicit articulation of affects and affective movements and interactions. Using the example of far-right rap music, I sketch how collective identities are conveyed in pop-cultural contexts. In doing so, I trace that the far-right does not aim exclusively at a consolidation of national identity, but at a division within society. Accordingly, the examined videos produce affective atmospheres that alternate between fear, anger and sadness and make political goals and offered identities appear achievable primarily through violence.

Inside and outside of identity in the cultural experience of pandemic and war

Despite the widespread understanding of identity as “the meaning of oneself” (S. Huntington), it remains an opaque concept that firmly holds a double identity — a simultaneous reference to uniqueness in the subject (identity to oneself), singularity and to sameness (identity as an analogy to a norm, type, class, collective pattern). This key paradox, the contextual dependence of this concept, is cultivated not only within scientific discourse, but also in the habitual gesture of public rhetoric, which tirelessly “calls things by their proper names”. Based on modern ideas about the production of identities through the "politics of resentment" (F. Fukuyama), "politics of the street" (J. Butler) or "politics of vulnerability" (L. Chouliaraki), the article examines the transformation of cultural identities in Ukrainian society in recent years. The fragmentation and multimodality of identities in the state of the coronavirus pandemic is due to the testing of new formats of global and local interactions against the backdrop of changes in information regimes, forced closure of national territories and actively implemented biopolitics. The event of Russia’s military invasion divided the space and time of existence into "we" and "they", overcoming the uncertainty and multiplicity of previous reactions of individual and collective subjects, turned participation in society, the fact of citizenship into an existential experience of people, formed the Ukrainian project as a model of identity, with a clearer than before value credo of "freedom, dignity, security." The near future will show how the mastered practices for producing identities will be sustainable and effective in the conditions of the “new normality”, what are the risks of their modifications.

My address is the Soviet Union – or is it? Baltic identity in souvenir production within the Soviet discourse

In the 1960s, tourism in the Soviet Union underwent radical changes. While previously the focus had been on showcasing the rapid modernization of the empire, this new type of tourism focused on introducing foreigners to the regional vernacular culture in the Soviet Union. As the number of tourists increased, the need for wider mass production of souvenirs emerged. This research focuses on the identity of souvenirs produced in Baltic states as a case study for identifying the existence and nature of regionalism within the Soviet system. This study found that within Baltic souvenir production, two separate types of identities manifested. Firstly, the use of national or vernacular symbols was allowed and even promoted throughout the Soviet Union. A famous slogan of the era was ‘Socialist in content, national in form’, which suggested that national form was suitable for conveying socialist ideals. These products were usually made of local materials and employed traditional national ornament. However, this research identified a secondary identity within the souvenirs manufactured in the Baltic countries, which was based on a shared ‘European past’. The symbol often chosen to convey it was the pre-Soviet Old Town, which was in all three states based on Western and Central European architectural traditions. This research suggests that this European identity validated through the use of Old Town as a recurring motif on souvenirs, distinguished Baltic states from the other regions of the Soviet Union. While most souvenirs manufactured in the Soviet Union emphasized the image of locals as the exotic ‘Other’, Baltic souvenirs inspired by Old Town conveyed the idea of familiarity to European tourists.

Living with difference: Ontological security and identification of second-generation members of the Nigerian diaspora in Peckham, ‘Little Lagos’, London

This article presents the impact of digital technologies and small media on the second-generation members of the Nigerian diaspora in Peckham (London, United Kingdom). Situated within the larger context of global trends, cultural production and commodification that have become central to contemporary identity articulation, the article argues that cultural production and consumption have become the site of creativity in negotiating multiple attachments for this second-generation offspring of the initial migrants in such a way that living with ‘difference’ has become a part of everyday diasporic experiences. The article shows how second-generation Nigerians in Peckham perform their diasporic identities around the popularity and the inclusion of Afrobeats music, Nollywood films and the representation of ankara clothing styles in the host society and in the global mainstream. It reveals the dialectic interaction between local cultures and global media by showing how digital technologies not only make it possible to connect across space and time but also aid the production of new identities. In contrast to the fear of the older migrants over their perception of non-involvement of young Nigerians in belonging to their homeland, a sense of patriotic pride is demonstrated by their offspring. Insights are drawn from seven-month ethnography of the Nigerian diaspora in Peckham, London. The findings suggest that the inclusion of local artefacts from Nigeria in the host society provides a sense of national pride for the born abroad children in their country of heritage.

Of Sankardeva, Sanskrit and Saraswati: The Interplay of the Regional and the National Symbols in a School in Assam

In South Asian societies, nationalist projects have often relied on cultural symbols drawn from varied native traditions for their legitimacy claims. In a multi-ethnic society like India, with a multitude of narratives about collective pasts, it becomes difficult for such projects to achieve a multi-symbol congruence that is deemed necessary. The schools are key sites where such complex interplay of the production of locality (region) and national identity can be examined. Schools located in the state of Assam afford a vantage point to examine the vexed relation between the national and the regional imaginaries. The article draws on materials collected from a school affiliated to the Vidya Bharati Trust located in Assam. The Trust and the schools run by it have been extensively examined for their focus on promoting a certain ideology of nationalism which is based on the cultural supremacy of Hindu symbols. However, the branches of such schools in Assam carry a distinct regional character in their endorsement of regional icons and of Assamese language. This article examines the dynamics of nation, religion and region within educational spaces in the deployment of visual images and in the curricular materials used in a school named after Sankardeva.

Decolonizing the Shopping Mall: A Reading of Spaces within the United Arab Emirates

Does it make sense to speak of a ‘reading’ of space? If so, what implication does that have on our experience of said space once a reading is complete and to what extent would this reading hinder or strengthen the individual or community? A reading of space has become a crucial tool in global affairs and multinational internet culture. Such a tool would allow for critiquing and dissecting unidentifiable power relations within spaces then redirecting the social production of identity and hegemony. One such discourse can be of Western cultural hegemony. This paper will begin by defining the theoretical framework that will then be used to illustrate and analyze a given space. The space chosen will be shopping malls in the United Arab Emirates, specifically their food courts and restaurants, as this nation is situated geographically in a non-Western region. A Content Analysis of the websites of the malls selected in the capital, Abu Dhabi, will illustrate the physical literal construction of this space. An analysis of these theories and illustrations about the space will aid in a debate on shopping mall restaurants' implications on identity and Western cultural hegemony. It will be concluded that a reading of space is a crucial tool to demystify the reality of Western influence on Eastern social and cultural development, ultimately critiquing the production of such spaces in order to decolonize the region.

A digital territory to be appropriated: the state and the nationalization of cyberspace

Next to land, water, air and space, cyberspace is the complex socio-technical setting often called the ‘fifth domain’. Nationalism has taken over the organization of the first four domains, in the form of constructing national states, national territorial waters and national airspace. The basic proposition of this article is that the ideology of nationalism has also infiltrated the fifth domain – cyberspace – in two ways. First, through state-led cyber-nationalism via official government websites that present ‘national’ achievements and propagate the official state positions on disputes about territory, symbols or history. Second, through individual communities who use the internet to sustain a sense of national belonging and/or to promote and disseminate their nationalist ideals. Both ways are important in an online national identity (re)production framework that, in a fluid, global, modern world, functions supportively towards the traditional national identity (re)production mechanisms. This article aims to examine the patterns of the nationalization of cyberspace through an analysis of state-led institutions and government websites that aim to enhance national identity and the sense of national belonging in a globalized world, as well as to propagate official state positions. It will focus on Greek, Dutch, US and Israeli websites. The term ‘nationalization’ in this context denotes the ideological charging of the cyber-footprint of the nation: how the internet produces and re-produces the nation, how the users partake in the national community by way of ‘consuming’ the digitalized national ideology, and the way cyber-nationalism defines people’s sense of belonging.

Поэтика Homo Economicus

Homo Economicus details Vogl's major project of betraying secular theodicy in modern economics. We get to know a new kind of man, his origin and future. It seems, Vogl concludes, that we have found the latest realization of homo economicus – a person who goes hand in hand with a new way of subjectivation. The compulsion to identity has become a compulsion to non-identity, otherness, uniqueness. The production of these so-called patchwork identities has become an economic program; a program that generates items with a flexible core and fuzzy edges – items that can be in demand on the market. With this figure, the history of homo economicus comes to an end; it gives way to a new type of people: a type that acts economically precisely by producing itself, its own subjectivity and spirituality. Vogl Joseph. Poetics of Homo Economicus // Continent. Issue 4.1. 2014: 95-104.

The pursuit of ‘the good life’: Muslim masculinities and the transition to higher education in Australia

ABSTRACT Within the social imaginary of Australia’s dominant ‘White’ culture, ethnic minority men, particularly Muslim men, are often depicted as ‘folk devils,’ resistant to the cultural norms of mainstream society. Muslim masculinities have been problematically conflated with notions of radicalisation, terrorism and violent extremism. There has been decidedly less attention to Muslim men’s acclimatisation to the secular mainstream. This article presents a longitudinal case study of two second-generation young Australian-Muslim men who have attended an Islamic secondary school and spent most of their lives within a cloistered Islamic community. We document their experiences and aspirations as they come to be in higher education. The article considers the discursive production of identities of these men during a liminal time in their lives and how they construct their identities in relation to familial and community-based expectations around success and failure.

An Education: Race, Class and the Rhizomorphic Bildungsroman in Erna Brodber’s Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home

This article examines Erna Brodber’s 1980 Jamaican experimental novel Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home. In contrast to readings that emphasize the protagonist Nellie Richmond’s journey from psychological fragmentation to wholeness, the essay argues that there is instead a dispersal of Nellie’s identity where no psychic wholeness of the self or the collective happens. Here, Brodber employs a non-linear and polyvocal version of the Bildungsroman genre—a coming of age tale of growth and development from childhood to adulthood. The article explores this literary genre in relation to various regulative frameworks, which recast ‘contexts’ as the perpetual social production, conditioning, transformation and regulation of identity, spectatorship, subjectivity, psychology and behavior. In its exploration of Nellie’s life history within these regulative frameworks, Brodber’s unusual rhizomorphic (or rhizomatic) version of the Bildungsroman exists at the intersection of postcolonial and postmodern narrative forms and critically reworks the category of ‘progress,’ both personal and cultural-historical. More specifically, Nellie’s informal education about her tangled family and community history as well as various formal educational situations in Jamaica and the United States amplify tensions between race and class that help her to denaturalize and critique both. Indeed, she navigates her ambivalent relationship to those terms in relation to both Afro-Caribbean and Euro-American culture. This critique makes her character both idiosyncratic and representational, illustrating that identity, both individual and collective, is fragmented rather than unified.

A discursive study exploring the professional identities of registered nurses employed in older person residential care settings.

The phenomenon of an ageing population is being experienced globally requiring the ongoing provision of residential care services. A large number of registered nurses work in these settings; however, many challenges exist in their recruitment and retention. To explore professional identities and emerging discourses of registered nurses working in older person residential care settings. This study employed a discursive-based research methodology with a central focus on the role language, and discourses play in identity construction. Fourteen in-depth narrative interviews were completed with registered nurses in residential care settings in the Republic of Ireland. Thematic analysis was underpinned by a critical discursive psychology framework. Four key identities and related discourses emerged: 'skilled professional identity', 'person-centred identity', 'subordinate identity' and 'product of healthcare reform identity'. Discourses presented contrasting professional identities held by nurses in residential care settings; on the one hand, they employed positive professional and person-centred discourses, while on the other hand, tensions associated with healthcare reform and a subordinate identity exist. This study presents unique insights into how registered nurses in residential care construct their professional identity and in doing so, enhances opportunities to promote recruitment and marketing in this setting. Equally, the challenges and opportunities of healthcare reform require sensitive management so that the professional identity of nurses working in residential care is enhanced and protected. How registered nurses working in residential care settings view their professional identity directly impacts on attitudes and behaviours and the subsequent delivery of care. Greater understanding and insight into how they construct their professional identity may enhance recruitment and retention initiatives. Study results also provide an opportunity for policymakers and service providers to create more positive working environments that promote professional identity development for this nursing group.

The ‘preservation by relocation’ of Huizhou vernacular architecture: shifting notions on the authenticity of rural heritage in China

ABSTRACT The practice of ‘preservation by relocation’ is representative of China’s ‘heritage fever’. It is the source of a controversial debate regarding heritage conservation, and it remains understudied from a critical perspective. This paper addresses two cases of ‘preservation by relocation’ of Huizhou-style vernacular architecture, rebuilt as part of mixed hotel and residential developments on the outskirts of Shanghai and Shaoxing in China. Through this paper we will argue how the practice of ‘preservation by relocation’ stretches different notions of authenticity. Our research will show how relocations lead to a shift in the value of vernacular architecture, as it is used for the production of new identity for tourist and real estate developments in China. Using grounded theory based on site visits and semi-structured interviews, this paper proposes that originality and verisimilitude merge to become an authenticity-on-the-making, under the cover of dominant heritage discourses in China. This pursuit determines the heritage conservation practices of relocated assets, as they serve entrepreneurial interests and contribute to wider official narratives about the past in China.

Ideals of ‘Britishness’ reproduced in the musical adaptation of David Walliams’s The Boy in the Dress at the Royal Shakespeare Company

This article examines the use and purpose of the nostalgic interventions in the latest Royal Shakespeare musical, The Boy in the Dress, and considers the implications of utilizing a mythologized, rose-tinted past on the creative production of national identity. It questions the meanings which are produced when a government subsidized, national theatre company with an international reputation eliminates the female voice from the stage and represents the United Kingdom as English, predominantly white and middle class. In addition, this article deconstructs the performances of gender fluidity depicted in the show and widens the acknowledged interpretation of cultural appropriation, when applied to race, to include gender.

Rethinking ‘the personal is political:’ Enacting agency in the narrative of sexual harassment experiences in China

Through a close reading of 1904 individual stories of sexual harassment collected through an online survey, the study investigates how storytelling constitutes a feminist media practice that (re)defines sexual harassment, exposes the power relations at play in the situations described in the stories, and opens up space for discursive politics in everyday life. In focusing on the active production of identities through discourse, we demonstrate how women themselves make sense of their experience. Most of the storytellers struggled to define what sexual harassment meant to them in their first-person narrations of their experiences. Guided by feminist standpoint methodology and narrative analysis, the study recognizes the narratives as powerful sites of knowledge production from a marginalized group of people who rarely speak out about their sexual harassment experiences, and it reconsiders the importance of the personal in digital space, evaluating how varied narratives can be cooperative and participatory to enact agency in contentious politics.

The affective cultural commons of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement and figurations of the anonymous protestor

ABSTRACT The cultural commons which foregrounded an aesthetically pleasing and affective commitment to Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement’s comprised, in addition to urban graffiti juxtaposed with posters and post-it notes on Lennon Walls, a variety of consumable artworks including food items. This work introduces the notion of visceral citizenship and discusses how, through creative art forms, the identity and ‘figure’ of the Hong Kong protestor is (re)produced through its capacity to engender raw, affective feelings and orientations towards China through sensorial embodiments. In the aftermath of a recently introduced national security legislation creating a fresh climate of fear, cultural artefacts popular with pro-democracy Hong Kongers encourage the material consumption and (re)production of a localist identity and politics of belonging to Hong Kong that engenders visceral and affective responses from viewers. Visceral forms of belonging, it is argued, have the potential to not only create creative forms of activism but provide an important substrate to Hong Konger identities in the body.

The Suicidal Self in Cyberspace: Discursive Constructions of Identity in a Pro-Recovery Suicide Forum

The proliferation of suicide-related content online has led to widespread fears that suicidal persons are at elevated risk in our networked society. Though much research has been done on the benefits and harms of digital technologies, few studies have attended to the deep discursive meanings co-created by suicidal users. The present study attends to meanings about identity interactionally created by members of SuicideForum.com (SF), a pro-recovery website. Methodologically, I collected a purposive sample of 2,119 posts across 131 threads, which I then examined using cultural discourse analysis, tracking discursive hubs like “suicide” and “suicidal” to arrive at corresponding radiants of meaning. Findings reveal two sets of discursive themes: one set speaks to problematic identities, the other to a self emancipated from suicidality. The suicidal self is expressed in discourse as the product of a fractured identity, marked by schism between an authentic “inner self” and a socially aligned but inauthentic “outer self.” However, resolution of fractured identities depends not on harmonious fusion but on reconciliation. Moreover, staying alive—continuing to be—is contingent upon recognizing that every life, including one’s own, has value, finding purpose and meaning, and tending to others’ well-being. The analysis uncovers discrepancies between SF users’ folk understanding of the suicidal self and that espoused by dominant (i.e., biopsychiatric) models. Their implications for clinical and therapeutic practice are discussed.

Producing the self: Digitisation, music-making and subjectivity

This article demonstrates how the availability of music platforms, the guidance of online tutorials and user-friendly affordances of software interfaces have democratised the making of electronic music. Software users traverse new forms of technology as part of their social and cultural selves, the confluence of musical affiliation and specific social media platforms supporting the production and exploration of identity. Case studies of women and non-binary identifying music-makers highlight digitisation’s role in enabling creative agency. Music emerging through these processes evidences a stylistic fluidity that indicates its means of construction, using the sampling, pitch, and time-stretching capabilities of the digital audio workstation. Digitisation provides the inspiration of a world of music and the means and knowledge of how to make it, allowing musical, personal and collective subjectivities to be explored.

Repertoires of ‘migrant names’: an inquiry into mundane identity production

ABSTRACT This paper examines how, when and where personal names are produced as ‘migrant names’. Drawing on 21 interviews with young Irish and Latvian migrants in the UK, I demonstrate how mundane stories, linguistic details, and repertoires about migrant names are embodied, mobile, relational, and produce everyday social distinctions. Empirical analysis unpacks changes in naming stories throughout participants’ multiple migration trajectories in Ireland, Latvia, the UK and beyond. I argue for a geographically sensitive take on migrant names because they are produced as such through recognisable repertoires of displacement and then re-emplaced in certain spaces and times. The paper makes three main original contributions. The first is to interdisciplinary literatures on names, specifically on the significance of temporal and spatial contexts and the relationalities underpinning the production of migrant names. Second, it brings to geographies of identities novel understandings of ethnic and national power relations in naming practices, including an emphasis on the process of ambiguous whiteness. Finally, I contribute much-needed methodological propositions on how to pseudonymise names in migration research.

Belongings and Expulsions: Marriage, Borderlands, and the Management of 'Queerness' in Global Taiwan

This work explores the international politics and practice of LGBTQ rights, specifically the practice of same-sex marriage, as a constituent of the Taiwanese state’s security regime. Through exploring the discourse around family and marriage and their particular relations to the state’s security, a series of belongings and expulsions that constitute the global progressive neoliberal rights regime entangle “Taiwan” in the globalized relationships of empire. This necessitates a reparative return to line work as a queer method to recover the lives lost to forms of imperialism. This work's data sources include textual analysis of local news reports and media discourse, while Allan Sekula’s Fish Story (1995) and Hsu Yoshen’s Stones on the Shore (2003) figure dominantly in the second chapter. My methods include discourse analysis and photo analysis. By questioning the Taiwanese state’s regulation of marriage and migration, I reveal the Taiwanese nation-state project's contingency on the developmental economies and production of identities, security issues, and incorporation of global discourse. I conclude with some ideas on the future of queerness and the centrality of “Asia” in international security.

Translating Feminist Identities: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Urdu Translation of Brown’s Work ‘The Dancing Girls of Lahore’

The present paper focuses on the construction and production of gender identities through discursive mechanisms during the process of translation. It also attempts to focus on the various discursive strategies used by the translator in the phenomenon of translation. The data comprise Louis Brown's book 'The Dancing Girls of Lahore' and its Urdu translation by Pakistani male writer and translator Dr. Naeem Tariq. The theoretical and conceptual framework for the present research is based on three dimensional model by Farahzad (2012) in the light of Critical Discourse Analysis. The data related to feminist discourse in both the source text and the target text is selected through the purposive sampling technique. The analysis of the present paper reflects the position of the translator through his lexical and grammatical choices in the process of translation. The findings of the present study reflect the position of male translators and expose the socio-political structure of Pakistani patriarchal society. This study provides various dimensions to explore feminist translations for future researchers.