scholarly journals Diverse Learners, Diverse Texts: Exploring Identity and Difference through Literary Encounters

1998 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 273-296 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Z. Athanases
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
Ethnically Diverse ◽  
Ethnic Literature ◽  
English Classes ◽  
The Social ◽  
Identity And Difference ◽  
Diverse Groups ◽  
Constructing Meaning ◽  
Sexual Identity Formation ◽  
Literary Encounters

This article reports from a yearlong ethnography that examined two urban loth-grade English classes of ethnically diverse students in which the teachers diversified literature selections for newly designed ethnic literature curricula. The study reports texts students found most memorable and meaningful and analyzes the values students found in their encounters with these literary works. When students identified with characters and texts, they reflected on personal concerns, including family nostalgia and loss; adolescent challenges; and culture, gender, and sexual-identity formation. Literary encounters also fostered discoveries about diverse groups (identified by race, ethnicity, gender, religion, and sexual orientation) that helped students move past stereotyped notions of others. Choices of meaningful works were often tied integrally to ways in which the texts were treated during class time-particularly to activities involving the social processes of constructing meaning, exploring interpretation, and openly discussing issues of culture and identity. The results remind researchers of the need to include in cur-ricular theorizing the importance of instruction that fosters students' thinking about literature, identity, and diversity.

From the Synergy to the Discrimination - Analysis of Attitudes and Decisions of the Prison Staff Towards Muslim Prisoners in the Context of Multicultural Education

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 81
Author(s):  
Arkadiusz Urbanek
Keyword(s):  
Multicultural Education ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Ethnically Diverse ◽  
Prison Staff ◽  
Professional Activities ◽  
Personal Attitudes ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Pragmatic Aspects ◽  
Diverse Groups

The aspiration to keep the synergy in relations between majorities and minorities repeatedly emerges as the cause of conflicts in social relations. It is also a subject of the interest of the multicultural education, particularly in countries of Eastern Europe, building contacts with the culturally and ethnically diverse groups to a wider scale. Relations in culturally, religiously and ethnic diverse societies, are becoming more and more related to the personal attitudes and a given policy. These issues acquire in the prison circumstances even greater significance, as given moods and personal attitudes of the prison staff create the pragmatic aspects of the professional activities addressed to the sentenced. Additionally, the key role is played by the quality of the penitentiary policy and the legal culture. The article presents the comparative analysis of the research carried out in 2016 amongst the prison staff in Poland. The subject of the research concerned attitudes that influence the decisive processes. The personal relations have been analyzed in the context of the relation with the sentenced Muslims. The aim of the research was not only to reveal the quality of the decisions concerning the sentenced Muslims, but also the sources of such decisions. The latter, in consequence, may shift, as the research results prove, towards synergy or discrimination. The diversification of the discrimination was one of the intriguing aspects, disclosed at various levels that not always explicitly concerned the discrimination of the minority.

scholarly journals The Tenuous Attachments of Working-Class Men

2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn Edin ◽  
Timothy Nelson ◽  
Andrew Cherlin ◽  
Robert Francis
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Child Support ◽  
Ethnic Difference ◽  
Metropolitan Areas ◽  
Ethnically Diverse ◽  
White Men ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Work Family ◽  
Diverse Groups

In this essay, we explore how working-class men describe their attachments to work, family, and religion. We draw upon in-depth, life history interviews conducted in four metropolitan areas with racially and ethnically diverse groups of working-class men with a high school diploma but no four-year college degree. Between 2000 and 2013, we deployed heterogeneous sampling techniques in the black and white working-class neighborhoods of Boston, Massachusetts; Charleston, South Carolina; Chicago, Illinois; and the Philadelphia/Camden area of Pennsylvania and New Jersey. We screened to ensure that each respondent had at least one minor child, making sure to include a subset potentially subject to a child support order (because they were not married to, or living with, their child's mother). We interviewed roughly even numbers of black and white men in each site for a total of 107 respondents. Our approach allows us to explore complex questions in a rich and granular way that allows unanticipated results to emerge. These working-class men showed both a detachment from institutions and an engagement with more autonomous forms of work, childrearing, and spirituality, often with an emphasis on generativity, by which we mean a desire to guide and nurture the next generation. We also discuss the extent to which this autonomous and generative self is also a haphazard self, which may be aligned with counterproductive behaviors. And we look at racial and ethnic difference in perceptions of social standing.

scholarly journals Narratives of Change: Identity and Recognition Dynamics in the Process of Moving Away From a Life Dominated by Drug Use

2021 ◽  
pp. 009145092110270
Author(s):  
Inger Eide Robertson ◽  
Hildegunn Sagvaag ◽  
Lillian Bruland Selseng ◽  
Sverre Nesvaag
Keyword(s):  
Drug Use ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Recovery Process ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Positive Identity ◽  
The Social ◽  
Changing Practices ◽  
Struggle For Recognition ◽  
Depth Interviews

The concepts of identity and recovery capital are recognized as being an embedded part of moving away from a life dominated by drug use. However, the link between these two concepts and the effect of broader social structures, and the normative assumptions underpinning the condition of recovery, is less explored. This article focuses on the social practices of everyday life in the foreground of identity formation, meaning that “who I am” is an inseparable part of “what I do.” A narrative approach was employed to analyze qualitative follow-up data extracted from 48 in-depth interviews with 17 males and females with drug-using experience that were conducted posttreatment on three separate occasions over a period of 2.5 years. Theories of identity formation were employed to analyze the interdependent dynamic between social structure, persona and social resources, and way of life and identity. The analyses identified four narratives related to how people present themselves through the process of changing practices. Following the work of Honneth, we argue that the positive identity formation revealed in these narratives is best understood as a struggle for recognition via the principle of achievement. However, the participants’ self-narratives reflected cultural stories—specified as formula stories—of “normality,” “addiction,” and the “addict,” which work into the concepts of self and confine options of storying experiences during the recovery process. This study demonstrate that the process of recovery is culturally embedded and constitutes a process of adaption to conventional social positions and roles. We suggest challenging dominant discourses related to “addiction as a disease” and “normality” in order to prevent stigma related to drug use and recovery. In so doing, it may contribute to broaden conditions for identity (trans)formation for people in recovery.

Exchange Systems in Late Postclassic Mesoamerica: Comparing Open and Restricted Markets at Tlaxcallan, Mexico, and Santa Rita Corozal, Belize

2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 780-799
Author(s):  
Marc D. Marino ◽  
Lane F. Fargher ◽  
Nathan J. Meissner ◽  
Lucas R. Martindale Johnson ◽  
Richard E. Blanton ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Action Theory ◽  
Ethnically Diverse ◽  
Market Development ◽  
Economic Systems ◽  
Open Market ◽  
Projectile Points ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Postclassic ◽  
Open Markets ◽  
Social Sectors

In premodern economic systems where the social embedding of exchange provided actors with the ability to control or monopolize trade, including the goods that enter and leave a marketplace, “restricted markets” formed. These markets produced external revenues that could be used to achieve political goals. Conversely, commercialized systems required investment in public goods that incentivize the development of market cooperation and “open markets,” where buyers and sellers from across social sectors and diverse communities could engage in exchange as economic equals within marketplaces. In this article, we compare market development at the Late Postclassic sites of Chetumal, Belize, and Tlaxcallan, Mexico. We identified a restricted market at Chetumal, using the distribution of exotic goods, particularly militarily and ritually charged obsidian projectile points; in contrast, an open market was built at Tlaxcallan. Collective action theory provides a useful framework to understand these differences in market development. We argue that Tlaxcaltecan political architects adopted more collective strategies, in which open markets figured, to encourage cooperation among an ethnically diverse population.

The white mirror: Face to face with racism in group analysis part 1—mainly theory

2021 ◽  
pp. 053331642199231
Author(s):  
Anne Aiyegbusi
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
Group Analysis ◽  
Ethnically Diverse ◽  
Individual Group ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Unconscious ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Trauma Response

Group analysis privileges the social and political, aiming to address individual distress and ‘disturbance’ within a representation of the context it developed and persists in. Reproducing the presence and impact of racism in groups comes easily while creating conditions for reparation can be complicated. This is despite considerable contributions to the subject of racism by group analysts. By focusing on an unconscious, defensive manoeuvre I have observed in groups when black people describe racism in their lives, I hope to build upon the existing body of work. I will discuss the manoeuvre which I call the white mirror. I aim to theoretically elucidate the white mirror. I will argue that it can be understood as a vestigial trauma response with roots as far back as the invention of ‘race’. Through racialized sedimentation in the social unconscious, it has been generationally transmitted into the present day. It emerges in an exacerbated way within the amplified space of analytic groups when there is ethnically-diverse membership. I argue it is inevitable and even essential that racism emerges in groups as a manifestation of members’ racialized social unconscious including that of the conductor(s). This potentially offers opportunities for individual, group and societal reparation and healing. However, when narratives of racism are instead pushed to one side, regarded as a peripheral issue of concern only to minority black or other members of colour, I ask whether systems of segregation, ghettoization or colonization are replicated in analytic groups. This is the first of two articles about the white mirror. The second article which is also published in this issue highlights practice implications.

scholarly journals Academic Identity and Communities of Practice: Narratives of Social Science Academics Career Decisions in Taiwan

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (8) ◽  
pp. 388
Author(s):  
Gregory Siy Ching
Keyword(s):  
Communities Of Practice ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Doctoral Education ◽  
Academic Career ◽  
Career Decisions ◽  
Academic Identity ◽  
Hiring Practices ◽  
Role Conflicts ◽  
The Social

Academic identity is an important aspect of organizing an academic career. An academic identity is distinct and unique and can be defined as the core attitudes that determine how individuals approach the concept of work. In the current era of neoliberalism, changes to university governance in Taiwan have transformed working conditions and hiring practices in academia. Inevitably, role conflicts have emerged, and work stress within higher education institutions has increased. The current study summarizes the narratives of nine academics from the social sciences. The study is anchored in the concept that academic identity formation is rooted in the doctoral education stage. Using a qualitative narrative inquiry lens, interactions between different communities of practice during the doctoral education stage are analyzed, along with later career decisions and the role communities of practice play in those decisions. The findings show that doctoral mentors and fellows all contributed to the formation of a core academic identity, while later career decisions were equally affected by neoliberal policies. It is hoped that by recognizing the role of academic identity, administrators may be able to influence how academics adapt amidst the competing pressures within the academe.

Tusslers, Beatdowns, and Brothers: A Sociohistorical Overview of Video Game Arcades and theStreet FighterCommunity

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 742-762
Author(s):  
Michael Ryan Skolnik ◽  
Steven Conway
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
Moral Panics ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Historical Movement

Alongside their material dimensions, video game arcades were simultaneously metaphysical spaces where participants negotiated social and cultural convention, thus contributing to identity formation and performance within game culture. While physical arcade spaces have receded in number, the metaphysical elements of the arcades persist. We examine the historical conditions around the establishment of so-called arcade culture, taking into account the history of public entertainment spaces, such as pool halls, coin-operated entertainment technologies, video games, and the demographic and economic conditions during the arcade’s peak popularity, which are historically connected to the advent of bachelor subculture. Drawing on these complementary histories, we examine the social and historical movement of arcades and arcade culture, focusing upon the Street Fighter series and the fighting game community (FGC). Through this case study, we argue that moral panics concerning arcades, processes of cultural norm selection, technological shifts, and the demographic peculiarities of arcade culture all contributed to its current decline and discuss how they affect the contemporary FGC.

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