Production Of Identity Research Articles

Domov jako konceptuální rámec, téma i výzkumný terén: vývoj i současná podoba studií domova

Over the past thirty years there has been a substantial change in how home is understood in the social sciences. While it is still possible to discern the influence of phenomenology on contemporary thinking about home, the studies presently at the forefront of the geography, anthropology, and sociology of home largely reflect the impact of critical social theory and the cultural and spatial turn in the social sciences, and they have also made the lines between these disciplines blurrier. This article primarily aims to provide readers with an overview of the developments in the field and to explore contemporary approaches to home as a complex and multifaceted phenomenon. It also seeks to unravel the developments and topical shifts in (largely English-language) studies of home and to present the current Czech approach to the issue, which are both influenced by the contemporary focus on home as the site of the continuous production, consumption, and negotiation of meanings and identities, and by an emphasis on the everyday experience of home.

Language and indigeneity

Work in indigenous language revitalization often justifies itself along using one of two arguments: the intrinsic good of diversity and the importance of language in constructing indigenous identity. This article examines the second argument, first analyzing modern trends in the conception of indigenous identity and its link to language, and then uses two recent studies in indigenous language loss from South America and North America to determine the role of indigenous language in the production of indigenous identity. The result is that indigenous language serves as a linguistic mechanism of othering – the creation of an out-group with language as the criterion of exclusivity, and as a means of transmitting a romanticized image of indigenous people through indexicalizing such into indigenous language use. However, this article points out that the debate is far from over and that further research is need in the field of indigeneity and language.

Commoning in the periphery – The role of the commons for understanding rural continuities and change

This paper explores how commons reproduce over time and introduces the concept of commoning to discuss rural continuities and change. The point of departure is that commons are essential for local community development in that they have an important role for mediating social change and for local identity production. Through an ethnographic and historical study of a number of commons systems from the village of Angersjo in the Midwest of Sweden, the paper argues for a more historically and socially grounded understanding of how commons evolve. The paper examines Angersjo’s commons within two broad historical time frames – the pre-industrial (4th to 20th century) and the post-industrial time periods (20th century to the present) – in order to understand commons, not just as arenas for resource extraction and resource struggles, but also as important contexts for identity formation, local mobilisation and for shaping rural change. The paper reveals how the commons have co-evolved with changes in society at large and how the meanings and functions of the commons have changed throughout history – from being important economic resources – to cultural and symbolic resources that have created new avenues for collective action.

Escaping Youth

The contemporary sociological debate highlights that youth is a category of age, but actual chronological youth is hardly viewed as a period of age production. Transition studies exclude youth as a stage of age identity production, while age studies do not problematize young people’s experience. This article focuses on age construction by two groups of chronologically young women. The analysis of 40 qualitative interviews with 15- to 20-year-old girls and 30- to 35-year-old women from Saint Petersburg shows that the concept of youth is slipping away from the biographical narratives of the informants from both age groups. Subjective adulthood experienced by young women is a goal and a value, while a young body does not prove to be a significant and available resource. At the same time, adulthood is not constructed as a set of clearly defined social characteristics but as an identity, a subjective experience, embodied adult personhood.

The ‘strong’ state and the ‘soft’ market in educational reform processes: Management philosophies and their consequences

In contemporary western society, welfare work in general, particularly in education, has been struck by an endless series of policy reforms, discourses and technologies. These have consequences not only for the production of professional identity, but also for the way educational tasks are understood and handled. Inspired by the work of post-structuralist thinkers such as Foucault, Rose, Ball, Alvesson and Willmott, and the psychoanalytical thinker Žižek, the authors describe some of these consequences by analysing two examples which stem from the Danish educational context: upper secondary schools and vocational educational training. The first example shows how a ‘strong’ state logic results in a focus on numbers, which leads to a form of cynical leadership and an undermining of teachers’ professional judgment. The second example shows how leaders and teachers in a vocational training school, with help from critical utopian action researchers, seek to innovate their practices in accordance with ‘soft’ market logic. As a consequence, teachers’ professionalism is ‘hijacked’ by a new form of organizational professionalism.

Social integration at a frontier and the creation of Mississippian social identity in southwestern Virginia

ABSTRACTFrontier areas are poor in labor but rich in land. To be successful, frontiers must attract people and socially integrate them using both low- and high-level social integrative mechanisms, which can range from basic work groups to elaborate feasts. Craft production can be a useful means of accomplishing low and high levels of social integration because it can be done as part of a work group but for special purposes, such as exchange. In the process of social integration, social identity specific to the types of crafts produced and their uses emerges. This paper examines a Mississippian frontier site, Carter Robinson, and discusses evidence for the production and use of ceramics and shell beads as integrative mechanisms at the Southern Appalachian Mississippian frontier area. Through the use of these types of mechanisms I argue that both a communal social identity and an identity of social inequality were created at Carter Robinson which resulted in the production and reproduction of Mississippian identity.

México en Estados Unidos: análisis de los procesos de conformación de la identidad mexicana «ilegalizada»

En 2006 las manifestaciones por los derechos de las personas migrantes, en Estados Unidos, se convirtieron en importantes escenarios de expresiones de identidad mexicana. El presente artículo propone acercarnos a este hecho analizando, a partir de un marco histórico, los procesos que intervienen en la adscripción de dicha identidad, en el proyecto estadounidense, desde parámetros de pertenencia subordinada. Para ello, se proponen tres ejes de análisis 1) incorporar la producción de identidades políticas externas, como una característica constituyente de la comunidad nacional, adscrita al modelo de Estado; 2) reconocer el papel actual de la herencia colonial; y 3) incorporar la interrelación entre la consolidación de la economía de mercado y la producción legal de una mano de obra prescindible y precaria. Este trabajo concluye con la propuesta de atender a la «ilegalidad», como un espacio sociopolítico dinámico, y no como un estatus jurídico, desde dónde se pueden producir nuevas fórmulas de ciudadanía activa.

The pride of east Belfast: Glentoran Football Club and the (re)production of Ulster unionist identities in Northern Ireland

It has become a truism that football provides a revealing window into how various forms of identity are (re)produced. There is a not insubstantial body of academic work which illustrates that football in Northern Ireland has long served as a vehicle for individuals to come together, develop a sense of belonging, share in common bonds of loyalty and articulate both semantic and syntactical forms of identity. This certainly holds true for the country’s Ulster unionist population. Indeed, in many ways, the game has been inextricably bound up with the development of unionist politics and identities. As such, football and football clubs in Northern Ireland represent a particularly useful, yet currently under-utilised, lens through which to analyse the development and nature of the identities of the majority population and how these have manifested themselves in civil society at various points in time. Better understanding how these identities are generated and articulated is important in the context of a society emerging from almost four decades of internecine, ethno-sectarian conflict and particularly at a time when sections of the unionist community have grown disaffected at what they consider to be deliberate attempts to dilute and diminish their identity and cultural traditions. This article contributes to and expands on what is barely a fledgling scholarship on sport and Ulster unionism by examining the ways in which unionist and loyalist identities have developed through and coalesced around Glentoran Football Club, one of Northern Ireland’s leading domestic teams.

The ‘Old Gym’ and the ‘Boys’ Changing Rooms’

This article examines how space and pleasure are discursively interlinked in boys’ performances of gender in school physical education (PE). Although previous research has implicated spaces in the production of gendered identities and unequal power relations, there exists a gap in the current literature focusing on how space also contributes to pleasure in PE. This article draws on an ethnographic account of boys’ PE, and Gregson and Rose’s (2000) concept of ‘performative space’, an extension of Butler’s (1990) notion of performativity, to illustrate how the pre-existing spaces of PE come to matter or become meaningful through the boys’ performances with/in those spaces. I argue that the boys derive pleasures as the productive effect of the power (Foucault, 1985) articulated in and through the spaces of PE. This article accordingly contributes to understandings of the complex nature of how PE is constituted and constitutive of gendered performances, spaces and pleasures.

“A Fantasy of Untouchable Fullness”: Melancholia and Resistance to Educational Transformation

AbstractThe progressive language of growth and development that informs our shared ideal of the educated subject also informs the curricular structure of schooling, in which new learning builds upon established knowledge and students' development depends upon their desire to take on those identities associated with various achievements of knowledge. Each re‐creation of the student's identity requires a new production of the student's former identity as an uneducated self — a negative statement of the self‐overcome, fashioned in the language of the curriculum. But what of those objects of attachment or aspects of the child's identity that can neither be integrated in the student's educated identity nor accounted for as a recognizable lost object of childhood? In this essay James Stillwaggon argues that considering the student subject in terms of its melancholic attachments offers some alternatives to thinking of student identity primarily in terms of its progressive learning function. Julia Kristeva's treatment of melancholia as “asymbolia,” or against the representational function of language, is especially significant to this discussion, as it highlights the melancholic's resistance to the most basic educational purpose, namely the further engagement of the subject in language.

Longing for landscape: Homesickness and place attachment among rural out-migrants in the 19th and 21st centuries

Migration research has begun to consider the emotions associated with moving. In so doing, it has engaged with geographies of home and feelings of homesickness, yet less so with emotional attachment to elements of the non-human environment. Historians, too, have begun to consider the human longing for natural landscapes, though historical examinations of homesickness tend to be similarly focused on longing for family and familiar built environments. This mixed methods research, conducted by a geographer and a historian, considers the environmental homesickness experienced by rural out-migrants. Out-migrated Vermonters have consistently expressed a longing for landscape from the nineteenth century to the present. Drawing on nineteenth-century archival materials and findings from a recent migration survey, the paper examines the production of place-based identities and enduring attachments to landscape over time. The research reveals the emotional dimensions of moving away and the ways in which people have attempted to remain connected to home. The work suggests expanding theorizations of home to include the natural environment. The intersection of individual identity, rural place attachment, and migration history is fertile ground for additional research.

O “sujeito científico” no sistema filosófico de A. Badiou: o caso da biolinguística chomskyana

Neste artigo argumenta-se que o programa biolinguístico de Noam Chomsky contém uma ontologia subjacente cuja implicação diz respeito a uma transformação radical da noção de sujeito e da categoria de identidade que lhe sustenta, assim como da noção kuhniana de ciência normal. De fato, um dos desafios de uma ontologia estruturalista da qual Chomsky é pessoalmente distante, mas formalmente próximo, é de transpor as teses sobre o real da questão do ser e do acontecimento para um realismo, campo que proporciona as condições de criação de um sujeito diferencial e genérico pela geração de estruturas sintáticas elementares projetadas em séries de palavras. Desta forma, a capacidade linguística auxilia na produção e na criação da identidade. Argumenta-se que o programa biolinguístico é ainda revolucionário no sentido em que despertou e perpetuou uma nova figura subjetiva da ciência, isto é, uma figura emancipadora do sujeito pensado pela ciência em relação à qual uma ontologia fundamental só pode se adequar na base da multiplicidade, tal como tem feito Alain Badiou.

Bodywork in identity: passing as ethnography

ABSTRACTDespite its centrality to organizing life sciences and identity politics, the body tends to disappear even when it is under scholarly consideration. The disappearing act of the body is supported by theoretical and methodological approaches that implicitly or explicitly see the body as an object that is acted upon and/or is the medium through which other concepts operate. A methodological approach that begins with bodywork allows us to understand the body not only as a site of action but also constitutive of the possibilities and limits of interacting with fields of power and ideology. Beginning with a consideration of the phenomenon of identity passing, the ethnography produced by bodies in action becomes apparent both to scholars and to those engaged in identity production and reaction.

The Wuchang ideal: Buddhist education and identity production in Republican China

ABSTRACTBuddhist education in China went through a fervent period of growth and significant changes during the 1920s and 1930s. Focusing on the pedagogical goals and agenda of the Wuchang Buddhist Studies Academy (Wuchang foxueyuan 武昌佛學院), this essay is a study of the convergence of identity and institution in this specific historical context. It begins with an institutional history of the academy, focusing specifically on the years between its founding in 1922 and Taixu’s departure in 1924. Despite its short life, the Wuchang Academy occupies a special place in the imagination of modern Chinese Buddhist identity. In the second part, I argue that the Wuchang Academy marked the emergence of a collective identity, the student-monks, which had a long-lasting impact on the practice of modern Chinese Buddhism.

Education of Roma Youth in Hungary: Schools, Identities and Belonging

Historically, schools have been homogenizing institutions that often disadvantaged people of color and ethnic and religious minorities. In this article I examine Roma education in Hungary, focusing on (re)production of racial identities and the negotiation of ethnic labels. I distinguish two models of education as they relate to ideas of integration, and assess the evolving ethnic labels: “bad Gypsies” and “good Roma.” These labels reflect different philosophies of education, and both contain different tensions and challenges.

Charlotte Brontë’s First Person

This essay reads Charlotte Bronte’s use of first-person narration in Villette as a contribution to a Victorian reassessment of personal identity as material, heterogeneous, and adaptive. Challenging common readings of Bronte’s first-person fictions as displays of self-definition and authority, I unpack the relationship between the narrated and narrating person in both Jane Eyre and Villette to reveal dual operations of narrative—world-making strategies and adaptive tactics—that express competing notions of personhood. By comparing Villette (1853) to Jane Eyre (1847), we can chart a shift from a strategic to a tactical emphasis in narration indicative, I argue, of a broader movement in nineteenth-century thought from Cartesian dualism toward associationist and materialist theories of consciousness as adaptive and processual. Villette ’s narrative tactics demonstrate the potential in novel form to enact processes of being in the world that challenge both traditional concepts of a unified, self-contained consciousness and new Victorian scientific conceptions of a material mind only knowable from science’s “objective” perspective. Positioning Bronte’s novel form alongside psychological debates about the nature and study of mind, I show how the novel offers alternative methodologies and conclusions about the nature of personhood to those proffered by an emerging Victorian psychology. When Bronte’s first-person narrative produces (rather than assumes the prior presence of) a “person” narrating, it asks us to read that production of identity and consciousness as an experiment with what it means to experience oneself as, in the words of Jane Eyre, a “heterogeneous thing.”

“Uneasy Hinges” and “Secret Signals”

"Uneasy Hinges" and "Secret Signals" Sarah Ruddy (bio) Queer Pollen: White Seduction, Black Male Homosexuality, and the Cinematic by David A. Gerstner. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2011. Pp. 304. $95.00 cloth, $27.00 paper. David A. Gerstner's Queer Pollen—subtitled White Seduction, Black Male Homosexuality, and the Cinematic—examines the role of the cinematic in inventing the textual selves of the twentieth-century artists Richard Bruce Nugent, James Baldwin, and Marlon Riggs. The volume casts the queer textual practices of each of the three authors in terms of the cinematic in order to reveal what Gerstner calls the "secret signals" and "uneasy hinges," perhaps other words for seduction, that whiteness engenders in each. What we find is "the presence of authorship," a kind of relational resistance to the various ideologies doing battle in modern queer black cultural production (9, his emphasis). Further, Gerstner poses the central question about such presence: "In what way do the authorial gestures of black queers make present what Marx once called the 'invisible threads of production' in white Western-industrialized culture?" (10). A similar challenge, to conceive of whiteness, and in turn blackness, as spatial, is posed in the Baldwin chapter (106). As such, Gerstner looks less at "queer whiteness" / "queer blackness" or "white queer culture" / "black queer culture" as oppositional than he does at how the cinematic, as a method of cultural production, enables these artists to dissolve one into the other such that the seeds of this dissolution remain in evidence on the textual/ [End Page 149] filmic surface. Gerstner defines the cinematic as "an aesthetic concept—one that allowed for an envisioning of dynamic modern space and time—and an industrial apparatus that formalized these conceptualizations through the discrete properties the camera-machine offers" (15). In its aim to "investigate what is at stake in the production of queer black identity when the cinematic is put to use," Gerstner's project calls for a new sensual language, named the cinematic, that productively rhymes with current work in the sensory ethnography practices of multimedia and academic digital humanities. Fittingly, then, instead of imposing theory on this varied body of work, Gerstner looks at the works and artists individually in an to attempt to find, through entangling their textual/ cinematic practices, readable and portable aesthetic processes that will become a sort of transitory theory. The author stresses the cultural agency constructed "in the modes of (messy) aesthetic production that black queers choose when they assert their lived experiences through the work of art" (13). Gerstner is careful to address "the different aesthetic and industrial registers" through which the cinematic filters into the works of Nugent, Baldwin, and Riggs (15). Thus, it is important to frame Nugent's work as relying less upon the "cinematic as an industrial tool and more as a modernist sensibility." Framing the chapter in this way is both necessary and useful, but also limiting because it discourages readers from making productive connections to the works of the later artists; if there is a precedent set anywhere in queer black literary history for such a thing as a postmodern, retroactive blackness tooled by the dissolution of white queerness, it's here, where through Nugent we discover queer Harlem as a "mobile" and "sensorial" experience (21). Nugent's movements, his walks through Harlem, simultaneously look back at the modernist flaneur and forward to "cruising" culture as ways to enact "otherness" in "culturally inscribed repetitions" of difference (28). Throughout his work, Gerstner notes, such inscriptive repetitions take sensorial forms when "light, color, smell and sound traverse Nugent's queer bodies"; in turn, these inscriptions are how Nugent "marshals the haptic through [the] queerly eroticized cinematic dissolves" of the mobile and sensorial textual self (48). Perhaps the most radically queer idea in Gerstner's text is his assertion of the cinematic, through careful readings of Nugent's spatial practices, as a space "where one can love" (52, his emphasis), queerly. Through his mobilization of the sensorial, sensual experience of queerness within white/black space, across [End Page 150] its surface, refusing to disperse, Nugent—"in every sensational suggestion"—"sharply homosexualizes what the industry could only homoeroticize" (63). Nugent thus introduced...

Another Sharp Weapon: Gender and Revolt in Arab and Jewish Editorial Cartoons, 1936–1939

72 Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Vol. XL, No.2, WINTER 2017 Another Sharp Weapon: Gender and Revolt in Arab and Jewish Editorial Cartoons, 1936-1939 Jeff Barnes* Introduction Editorial cartoons gained a prominent position in the Arab and Jewish press in mandatory Palestine during the 1936-1939 Arab Rebellion. Cartoons in the Jewish daily Davar and Arab daily Filastin expressed Jewish and Palestinian nationalist sentiments respectively during the revolt, negotiating the complicated and emerging contours of nationalist discourse in both communities during this key historical juncture. They played a significant role in producing and reflecting public opinion,1 especially during the national strike that defined the first stage of the rebellion, and provide an excellent lens through which to view the emerging conflict in Palestine in the first half of the twentieth century. In spite of their prominent role in theArab and Jewish press in Palestine during the 1936 strike, they have received little attention from scholars.2 In his excellent monograph on the press in mandatory Palestine, Mustafa Kabha briefly considers *Jeffrey John Barnes is a Ph.D. student in the department of history at the University of Akron specializing in twentieth century Palestine. His research focuses on editorial cartoons and identity in Palestine and Israel in the twentieth century. 1 Press argues that cartoons occupy a liminal status between their production by societal elites, who dominate print media, and their reception by a (in the case of Palestine, largely illiterate) mass audience. This tension leads to cartoons, especially in low-literacy contexts like Palestine, simultaneously producing and reflecting popular opinion. See: Charles Press, The Political Cartoon (London: The Associated Press, 1981), 11. 2 Scholars have devoted considerably greater attention to Palestinian editorial cartoons in the post Naksa (1967) era. This is in part due to the towering influence of Naji al-Ali, Palestine’s most prominent cartoonist. See for example: Sune Haugbolle, “Naji al-Ali and the Iconography of Arab Secularism,” in Visual Culture in the Modern Middle East: Rhetoric of the Image, ed. Christiane Gruber and Sune Haugbolle (Bloomington, IN: Indian University Press, 2013), OraybAref Najjar, “Cartoons as a Site for the Construction of Palestinian Refugee Identity: An Exploratory Study of Cartoonist Naji al-Ali,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 31 (July 2007), and Nadia Yaqub, “Gendering the Palestinian Political Cartoon,” Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 2 (2009). 73 cartoons in Filastin, especially as they relate to British censorship of the press, but offers no analysis of specific images.3 Khalidi, who provides a cogent discussion of the role of the Mandate-era press in the project of Palestinian identity, stating that “[o]ne of the best ways to gain an understanding of the linkage between local patriotism, anti-Zionism, and Arabism in the coalescence of Palestinian identity if via study of the burgeoning press in Palestine,”4 fails to reference cartoons at all, in spite of the fact that they demonstrate this linkage to perhaps a greater degree than the editorials he cites. LeVine’s work, which highlights the importance of images, especially advertising, in the production of Palestinian identity in the Mandate-era Jaffa press, provides a brief reference to cartoons yet offers no analysis.5 The only work entirely devoted to cartoons in both the Jewish and Arab press during the Thawra is Sandy Sufian’s well-researched and illuminating article that draws on representation theory and demonstrates that physiognomic depictions of the body of the “Other” in Jewish andArab cartoons during the period in question served to construct the opposing group as deviant, manipulative, uncivilized, and premodern.6 The present paper adds to the extant scholarship through viewing these images through the lens of gender. Editorial cartoons in theArab and Jewish press reveal how nationalists saw the emerging conflict in Palestine primarily in gendered terms. Many of Filastin and Davar’s political cartoons employed caricatures of women to signify national difference; others referenced gendered components of Jewish and Palestinian nationalist discourse respectively. The gendered content of cartoons in both papers intersected with other signifiers including race, an imagined historical past, and national figureheads, contributing to the construction of the Jewish and Palestinian national imaginary. Decoding the multilayered signs...

'Technologies of Reflexivity': Generating Biopolitics and Institutional Risk to Supplement Global Public Health Security

Critiques of global public health security (GPHS) and proposed solutions tend to overlook the potential of the individuals and groups that are subject to and governed by GPHS – ‘the governed’ – to contribute their ‘on the ground’ knowledge and experience to decision-making in order to improve regulatory responses. This article argues for the development of a more reflexive approach as a way of ensuring the epistemic integration of these knowledges with the scientific-technical knowledges that currently dominate decision-making processes. I identify human rights as the conceptual lens that is most likely to enable reflexivity by the governed and regulators, and understanding and communication between them. The governed can use perceived or actual breaches of human rights to articulate ‘on the ground’ knowledges as institutional risks to reputation and standing and, in turn, threaten the production and legitimation of organisational identity, socio-political orders and projects of rule. The particular sensitivity of regulators to these risks could compel epistemic integration. This more reflexive approach to GPHS promises to improve the knowledge base, efficacy, accountability and legitimacy of decision-making at multiple levels: WHO, EU, national and ‘on the ground’.

¿Quién es el troll?: La construcción de identidades políticas en social media en el contexto peruano

One can easily find discrediting accusations between users with different political affiliations or ideological orientations on social media. The objective of this article is to affirm that these practices are neither superfluous nor secondary, but rather fundamental in the formation and consolidation of political identities of those who participate in these discussions. This article reviews up-to-date academic literature about three recent trends in the dynamics of political discussion on social media (the polarization of the political debate, the focus on personalities and figures, and the trolls’ practices) and, using tools taken from Netnography, it explores and applies these concepts to the Peruvian context. Consequently, the article offers an outline about the daily political dynamics on social media, how users take sides and disputes happen, and how this serves to the (re)production of political identities. The results of this investigation show a scenario where two characteristics prevail: the polarization between different political stances and the uncertainty about the information and identities in circulation.