Socio-political Identity Research Articles

Code-Switching and Sociopolitical Identity among the Druze in Israel

Code-Switching and Sociopolitical Identity among the Druze in Israel

Eve A. Kheir. Codeswitching as an index and construct of sociopolitical identity: The case of the Druze and Arabs in Israel. Leiden: Brill, 2023. Pp. xx, 244. Hb. € 115.

Eve A. Kheir. Codeswitching as an index and construct of sociopolitical identity: The case of the Druze and Arabs in Israel. Leiden: Brill, 2023. Pp. xx, 244. Hb. € 115.

Getting critical with compelling questions: Shifts in elementary teacher candidates’ curriculum planning from inquiry to critical inquiry

ABSTRACT While recognized as a foundational practice, social studies educators struggle with enacting inquiry-based instruction. With critical inquiries that examine sociopolitical and other injustices, developing aligned compelling questions represents a challenge, particularly for elementary teachers. Informed by four lenses of criticality from social studies scholarship, this design-based mixed methods research follows 28 elementary teacher candidates from two universities and regions as they formulated compelling questions for critical inquiry units together. Data sources included audio transcriptions of group discussions, course assignments, curriculum planning documents, and reflections. Qualitative and quantitative findings show that candidates created more critical questions with the intervention scaffold, suggesting a new criterion for determining open questions: identifying ongoing issues of empirical injustice. Most still struggled with identifying implicated social groups and clarifying relationships of interdependence. Group members’ positional awareness of sociopolitical identities appeared to support more critical collective question design trajectories through understandings of structure, agency, and place relative to the content. Results suggest the importance of scaffolding critical inquiry question development—with special care to support teacher candidates’ sociopolitical consciousness, and consider their and K-12 students’ implicated identities in power systems, situated in specific teaching contexts.

Comes the Southern Revolution: The Reframing of Chinese Shan-zhai Toward Identity Change

AbstractFollowing the literature on entrepreneurial framing and identity change, we examined how Chinese shan-zhai phone entrepreneurs have drawn on their cultural resources to reframe their businesses to claim new identities and gain legitimacy over time. Through qualitative procedures, we found that a staged process of collective identity development underlies this entrepreneurial process, consisting of building (a) niche-market identity via pragmatic reframing, (b) socio-political identity via nationalistic reframing, and finally (c) professional identity via comprehensive reframing. There has also been a clear change in the sources of legitimacy from the indigenous market through the wider Chinese society to the more globally defined industry. Our central contribution is a processual model of identity change through cultural reframing specifically focused on how informal entrepreneurs grow into formalization and global competition.

«Другие мигранты» на Дальнем Востоке России, или Поиск советского народа в период нациестроительства на постсоветском пространстве

The article examines a new, not very important from the statistical viewpoint, but extremely unusual flow of migrants from the former republics of the USSR, primarily Central Asian and, to a lesser extent, Transcaucasian. In the recent past a typical migrant in the Far East, as well as in Russia as a whole, can be described as a resident of a small city or village, who is focused on a short-term or cyclical stay in the region for the purpose of earning money and minimally interacting with the host community. However, the new flow of migrants includes residents of large cities who travel to Russia with an intention to integrate. For these types of migrants the usual economic push/pull factors do not play a significant role. The representatives of this group possess sufficiently high qualifications and did not experience any serious economic problems in the country of origin. The motives for their move are rather political in nature, and this is not persecution for dissent or participation in opposition activities, but rather what the authors refer to as the search for the Soviet people. According to the authors’ conclusion, the emergence of this migration flow is associated with the growing process of ethnicization (as a form of nation-building) in the states of the post-Soviet space, which is increasingly becoming less post-Soviet. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the authorities of the newly independent states pursued an extremely cautious national policy, which was largely explained by the artificial nature of the contemporary borders of these states and their ethnic foundation. The former imperial cities, the previous centers of power, whose population most closely corresponded to the image of the Soviet people, preserved their high status. However, in the recent years the situation has changed. As ethnicization intensifies, accompanied by the ousting of the Soviet, which was equated with the Russian, the “debris” of the Soviet people lose not only their social status, but also the foundation for self-identification. They move to Russia in search of such foundation, with the hope to find confirmation of their own professional and socio-political identity.

The Pulse of Africanness in African Drama: A Study of Selected Plays of Wole Soyinka and Tewfik Al-Hakim

Most African drama is built on the religion, myths and oral culture of the African people, depicting their traditional ways of life passed down through generations. African drama, like other forms of African art, reflects the unique cultural, social and political identity of the African continent and people. This serves as a vehicle to convey the experiences, struggles and triumphs of the African people. Various playwrights have emerged from the African continent and each of these playwrights highlight the uniqueness of Africa through different perspectives in their plays. This paper explores the striking features that define African consciousness in African drama. Hence, it examines the pulse of Africanness in African drama using textual illustrations from Wole Soyinka and Tewfik AlHakim’s plays as well as highlighting the similarities and differences in their methods of storytelling from the African perspective. Keywords: Africa, Culture, Oral Traditions, Socio-political identity, Drama

THE EFFECTS OF MODERN POLITICAL MOVEMENTS ON CULTURAL IDENTITY: THE CASE OF RITES OF PASSAGE IN TÜRKİYE

An analogy is often established between the concepts of cultural change and cultural transformation. The forms represented by innovations that allow a concrete follow-up of culture in folk life can arise through change and transformation. The connection established between these two concepts is limited to new representation forms. Apart from this limited cooperation, cultural change often takes place in a balanced and harmonious manner without any obligations. Cultural transformation refers to a fragile process in which the individual or the community is forced to accept, often through the manipulation of the powerful, the elements such as history, origins, and sense of belonging in order to create an identity. Political identities and ideologies that affect the natural course of social and cultural change in Turkish sociology and culture have become dominant since the 2000s. The rich diversity of birth, marriage and funeral ceremonies contains important findings for understanding the arguments that affect the transformation of folk life and culture. This article discusses the impact of Islamist and secular ideologies and groups on the structural and functional transformations observed in rites of passage in Turkish folk life. The study argues that the roles of conflicting socio-political identities in the processes of reinterpretation and representation of folkloric knowledge are more pronounced than in the past. Data obtained with ethnographic research techniques also support this claim. The qualitative field research was conducted within the constraints of ritualistic traditional ceremonies of birth, marriage and death in urban and rural communities in western Türkiye.

The centrality of disablement subjectivation to the reproduction of capitalist social relations: considerations for Critical and Global Political Economy

In the face of a global, mass impairment- and chronic illness-producing event such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the question of how to consider and integrate the politics of disablement within Global Political Economy scholarship and anti-capitalist activism has become ever-more pressing. In this article, I provide a proposal for how to conceptualise the capitalism-specific commonality between people who identify as having impairments, being chronically ill, neurodivergent, D/deaf, experiencing mental distress and who may or may not also identify as disabled people. To this end, in this article I adopt the ‘social model of disability’ and engage with both Moran’s cultural-materialist approach to identity and Autonomist Marxism’s ‘class composition’ thesis. Then, I make the case for the analytic usefulness of the non-identity, relational concept ‘subjects of disablement’ as the technical composition of disability on the basis of which the socio-political identity ‘disabled people’ as the political composition of disability emerges. Acknowledging disablement oppression and exploitation as central and fundamental to the reproduction of capitalist social relations would equip the GPE scholarship embedded within the praxis of dissent and resistance (see Bonfert et al, 2022) to generatively support activist groups’ already-existing efforts and mobilisations against and beyond – what I call – disabling capitalism. The Global Political Economy journal offers the opportunity for the ‘sluice gates’ (Clua-Losada and Moore, 2022: 6) of this interdisciplinary field to be widely opened for, and welcoming of, further explorations of how capitalism cannot be fully understood and ruptured without an analysis of structural disablement.

Understanding spelling conflicts in Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian: Insights from speakers’ attitudes and beliefs

This article analyzes spelling-change conflicts linked to Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian. These standard languages share a long history of common sociopolitical identity and high mutual intelligibility, and the spelling standardization processes became embroiled in the Yugoslav disintegration process and the creation of new political entities. This study presents results from a 2022 survey of 2000 participants in four countries (matched to country census quotas on five demographic criteria), and is thus one of the largest data sets of speakers’ attitudes and beliefs about language identity and its sociopolitical context. I argue that analyzing spelling-change conflicts can uncover the motives for spelling changes and the causes of such conflicts. I propose, based on this analysis, three principles for predicting (inter)national spelling-change conflicts. These principles offer a novel contribution to the state of the art in comparative standardology and sociological studies of conflicts.

Synchronizing the Dalan, Chandal Aesthetics and Namashudrayan in ManoranjanByapari’s Autobiography Interrogating My Chandal Life

The study looks into the vexed issues of caste and marginality in the context of the Partition experience in South Asia. The discussion takes clues from Manoranjan Byapari’s Interrogating My Chandal Life (English trans. Shipra Mukherjee, 2018). The paper situates itself between two significant strands - one the Partition and the second, the Dalit consciousness to critically examine the positionality of the Namashudra refugees during/post Partition resettlement in Bengal. The discussion treats Byapari’s text as an auto-ethnographic account that introduces “Chandal aesthetics,” Namashudrayan to foreground the contested issues of subalternity, religiosity, spatiality and socio-political identity in a post-partition South Asia. The Dalit voice, represented through the writings of Byapari, records the micro-narratives of the lower-caste/subalterns/marginalized people who have been denied spaces in nationalist/majoritarian histories and their archives. The paper attempts to locate the largely silent zones of Bengal’s partition histories and their intergenerational shared memories and re-representations that have occluded, evaded and circumvented the questions of caste and, specifically, the Dalit experience.

THE EFFECTS OF MODERN POLITICAL MOVEMENTS ON CULTURAL IDENTITY: THE CASE OF RITES OF PASSAGE IN TÜRKİYE

An analogy is often established between the concepts of cultural change and cultural transformation. The forms represented by innovations that allow a concrete follow-up of culture in folk life can arise through change and transformation. The connection established between these two concepts is limited to new representation forms. Apart from this limited cooperation, cultural change often takes place in a balanced and harmonious manner without any obligations. Cultural transformation refers to a fragile process in which the individual or the community is forced to accept, often through the manipulation of the powerful, the elements such as history, origins, and sense of belonging in order to create an identity. Political identities and ideologies that affect the natural course of social and cultural change in Turkish sociology and culture have become dominant since the 2000s. The rich diversity of birth, marriage and funeral ceremonies contains important findings for understanding the arguments that affect the transformation of folk life and culture. This article discusses the impact of Islamist and secular ideologies and groups on the structural and functional transformations observed in rites of passage in Turkish folk life. The study argues that the roles of conflicting socio-political identities in the processes of reinterpretation and representation of folkloric knowledge are more pronounced than in the past. Data obtained with ethnographic research techniques also support this claim. The qualitative field research was conducted within the constraints of ritualistic traditional ceremonies of birth, marriage and death in urban and rural communities in western Türkiye.

THE EVOLUTION OF GEOPOLITICAL VALUES AND ORIENTATIONS OF UKRAINIANS UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF THE WAR

The article analyzes of the dynamics of the processes of geopolitical and civilizational self-identification of Ukrainians, the impact on the perception of the consciousness of citizens of the place and role of Ukraine in the world, as well as on the attitudes to Western institutions and values. Empirical indicators of the state of society, trends in its development, the search for mechanisms to preserve and strengthen the unity of Ukrainians, particularly in the context of their geopolitical orientations, are monitored. The main attention is paid to the study of qualitative and quantitative changes in the attitude of Ukrainians to the processes of European integration, Ukraine's accession to NATO, the relationship between modernization reforms of Ukrainian society and the pace of Euro-Atlantic integration processes, cultural and civilizational development guidelines. The focus is on the problem of consolidating Ukrainian civil society, using its potential for effective reconstruction and further successful development of the country. It was determined that the strengthening of the Euro-Atlantic orientation of Ukrainians became an additional source of Ukraine's power, as citizens of Western geopolitical identification demonstrated the greatest determination in protecting the territorial integrity and sovereignty of their country. The study showed the almost complete disappearance of the complexes «inferiority» and «Soviet nostalgia», the actualization of socio-political identity and the understanding of Ukraine's international subjectivity in the context of Euro-Atlantic integration. Preservation and maintenance of a high level of consolidation of society requires responsible political institutions and leaders capable of implementing an effective state policy of restoring and reforming society, protecting and supporting the sovereignty of Ukraine in the international arena.

African Diasporic Narratives from the Czech Republic

Abstract Studies have addressed the historical trajectories of people of African heritage in the Czech Republic (CR), but there is no comprehensive study of the contemporary lives and identities of African people. Given the increasing number of African people living in the country, research into an emerging African diaspora is imperative. This empirical study emerges as part of a larger project which aims to address this paucity through an interdisciplinary and ethnographic lens. Its primary aim is to develop a detailed and nuanced account of sociopolitical identities among people of African heritage in the CR by focusing on the dynamics of language and race and, to a lesser degree, gender. Theoretically based on intersectionality and drawing from the recently developed framework of ‘raciolinguistics’, this paper provides the first diasporic narratives of African people in the CR who have varying degrees of Czech language fluency and experience diverse forms of racialisation and racism. Individual multiple life trajectories in the CR suggest that African migrants feel caught in a complex matrix of linguistic and racial discrimination but that they have a sense of reasonable safety and security. This highly ambiguous space also shows that, on the one hand, there are instances where Czech language skills have the capacity to mitigate the challenges in racial discourse and racism, but on the other hand there are clear limits to the power of language in the face of racial Othering and racism.

Going Beyond Affective Polarization: How Emotions and Identities are Used in Anti-Vaccination TikTok Videos

ABSTRACT The rise of social media as a source of science and health information has brought challenges to informed citizenship and social trust due to the spread of misinformation, particularly anti-vaccination messages that incite hatred and discourage necessary health precautions. These messages often employ emotional appeals and identity cues. However, scholarship examining emotional appeals and identity cues in anti-vax messages is still at the nascent stage. Furthermore, most literature on emotions and identities on social media has focused on text-based platforms, despite the increasing popularity of interactive, multimodal platforms. To address these gaps, our paper analyzes recent TikTok anti-vax videos and incorporates the framework of multimodal frame processing, emotion-as-frames model, affective intelligence theory, and social identity theory. Our paper uncovers how different message modalities affect the impact of emotional narratives and identity cues on user engagement. We also investigate sociopolitical identity cues beyond partisan identities, expanding the current terrain of political communication. Our results demonstrate that audiences engage with emotional and identity cues in anti-vax videos differently based on distinct message modalities. We also found that identity cues related to interpersonal relationships (e.g. parental) and conspiracy groups were prevalent, in addition to partisan identity cues. These results offer new insights into sociopolitical identities beyond partisanship and highlight the importance of considering the multi-modal nature of video platforms. Overall, our paper sheds light on the complex relationship between emotions, identities, and message modalities on social media and provides important implications for addressing misinformation and improving science communication on digital platforms.

Self-uncertainty and conservatism during the COVID-19 pandemic predict perceived threat and engagement in risky social behaviors

Two studies ( N = 676) highlight the nuanced relationship between conservatism and adherence to COVID-19 policy and recommendations intended to slow the spread of the pandemic in the United States. Study 1 provided evidence that conservative Americans who felt uncertain about themselves and the future experienced elevated levels of symbolic threat (attacks to sociopolitical identity; e.g., the pandemic threatening American democracy) and realistic threat (concrete attacks to material resources or well-being; e.g., the pandemic threatening physical health) in comparison to their more certain counterparts. In Study 2, the association between this form of uncertainty and frequency of risky social behaviors (behaviors that increase the risk of virus transmission) was partially mediated by threat perception for Americans both low and high in conservatism. We discuss findings as an integration of the motivated social cognition framework and uncertainty-identity theory. While self-uncertainty was more associated with greater overall COVID-19 threat perception for Americans high (vs. low) in conservatism, threat perception and frequency of risky social behaviors were associated with self-uncertainty in a manner that is consistent with prevailing liberal and conservative norms.

Experiences of academic-activists in Ireland: comfortable and uncomfortable activism in the current institutional environment

While there is a lack of academic-activist themed literature within the Irish context, it is evident that academic-activism is becoming an increasingly relevant topic given this period of undoubtable social change. The emergence of literature depicting academia as an unsupportive environment suggests that activism is not supported in a higher educational setting. This paper draws on the experiences of 33 Irish-based academic-activists and investigates the concepts of comfortable and uncomfortable academic-activism which were identified during the analysis. By exploring the experiences of academic-activists at varying career stages, this article argues that an academic’s ability to exercise academic freedom is influenced by the type of activism, the sociopolitical identity of the individual and the institutional environment. Overall, this paper offers interesting comparisons between disadvantaged/marginalised academic-activists in comparison to those in more privileged positions.

Nature-based solutions through collective actions for spatial justice in urban green commons

Urban climate adaptation through nature-based solutions (NBS) requires collective action that incorporates spatial justice considerations. Collective actions reveal new ways of thinking about urban green commons and spatial justice by reframing conventional understandings of NBS, space, and climate adaptation. Three urban green commons examined in Istanbul demonstrate how the grassroots-supported NBS must navigate complex land ownership arrangements, spatial justice, and opposing urban development priorities and socio-spatial reconfigurations spurred by local and national political elites. Using qualitative data collected from fieldwork carried out in 2019, we find critical relationships between activists, academics, professional organizations, and local residents collectively acting to promote urban green commons. NBS do not rely on the dominant techno-political processes that generate primarily infrastructure-based climate adaptation solutions in Istanbul. While spatial justice and collective action scholarship often pays attention to how disadvantaged communities gain recognition and involvement in decision making - such as establishing formal channels to access environmental goods and services - climate adaptation through NBS opens spaces of opportunity for these groups to promote justice and resist the dominant economic development paradigm. Further studies must pay attention to what extent collective actions create new socio-political identities that are harnessed to resist dominant techno-political processes, and when are these emergent identities co-opted by local and national governments.

Law, South African Mothers Living in Poverty and the COVID-19 Pandemic

Sometimes being a mother in tough economic times can be a challenge. Socio-economic demands occasioned by the COVID-19 pandemic have been especially cumbersome for mothers already living under conditions of poverty. Since the beginning of 2020 the pandemic has further exacerbated the daily struggles of the poor during periods of economic uncertainty, disease and death. Conscious of this additional socio-economic pressure and to lessen the financial burden carried by mothers living in poverty, the South African state introduced a COVID-19 relief Child Support Grant to assist during this trying period. This article explores the role played by law in poverty discourse where mothers are concerned. It is suggested here that the conceptualisation of poverty in law, at least where mothers are concerned, is limited by law's neglect of the socio-political identity of women as mothers, which is rooted in history. This failure reaffirms that law is implicated in contemporary socio-economic inequalities

A Feminist Sexology Perspective on the Multifunctional Clitoris: Dispelling the Sole Purpose Myth

The imposition of gender hierarchy has stigmatized and distorted knowledge about the clitoris. In instances when educators and activists resist the status quo by acknowledging and attempting to celebrate the clitoris, they often assert that the clitoris’s sole function is sexual pleasure. Though recognizing the clitoral role in pleasure supports liberatory progress, the sole function premise is inaccurate. The clitoris has multiple functions. The clitoris receives and transmutes sensation into sexual response psychophysiology: desire, arousal, plateau, orgasm, and resolution. Thus, together with the clitoris’s significant role in pleasure, it also functions in bodily protection and safety. Clitoral stimulation can reasonably be acknowledged as a prophylactic health behavior. The clitoris has reproductive functions as well. The clitoris supports reproduction while simultaneously fully functioning outside of reproductive sexuality, i.e., penile vaginal intercourse. The gendered lens through which we view the clitoris had hidden this sexual knowledge. Patriarchal cultures have not been able to conceptualize sexual pleasure, sexual safety, and freedom to participate (or not) in reproductive sexuality as characteristics that might co-occur for women as a sociopolitical identity, be they cisgender, transgender, or intersex women. This article presents evidence of simultaneous clitoral functionality in all these realms.

DYNAMICS OF SITUATIONAL AND LONG-TERM RISKS OF REGIONAL ETHNO-POLITICAL STABILITY (BASED ON THE MATERIALS OF THE KRASNODAR TERRITORY AND OTHER REGIONS OF SOUTHERN RUSSIA)

The purpose of writing a research paper is to substantiate and test specific methods for diagnosing the ethnopolitical situation in a geopolitically significant region of the Russian Federation, taking into account the impact of the most complex foreign policy challenges and global turbulence. On the basis of the riskological paradigm and conflictological diagnostics, the factors causing the danger of escalation of regional tension in the subjects of the Southern Federal District are identified on the materials of the Krasnodar Territory. The research project analyzes the changing vectors of socio-political relations, the causes of regional conflict and their impact on the processes of constructing socio-political identities, with an emphasis on the specifics of interethnic and interfaith relations among young people. The conflictological diagnostics of a number of new factors causing risks of aggravation of ethnic contradictions and regional destabilization is carried out.