Musical life stories coherence through musicking in the prison setting

2022 ◽  
pp. 174165902110591
Author(s):  
Kjetil Hjørnevik ◽  
Leif Waage ◽  
Anita Lill Hansen
Keyword(s):  
Personal Development ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Identity Work ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Processes Of Change ◽  
Prison Inmates ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
Prison Life ◽  
The Past

Despite the strong relationships evidenced between music and identity little research exists into the significance of music in prisoners’ shifting sense of identity. This article explores musicking as part of the ongoing identity work of prisoners in light of theory on musical performance, narrative and desistance and discusses implications for penal practice and research. Through the presentation of an ethnographic study of music therapy in a low security Norwegian prison we show how participation in music activities afforded congruence between the past, the present and the projected future for participants by way of their unfolding musical life stories. Complementing existing conceptualisations of music as an agent for change, our study suggests that musicking afforded the maintenance of a coherent sense of self for participating prison inmates, whilst offering opportunities for noncoercive personal development. We argue that research into musicking in prison offers fruitful ways of tracing how the complexities inherent in processes of change are enacted in everyday prison life, and that it can advance our knowledge of relationships between culture, penal practice and desistance.

scholarly journals “I Am Like a Lost Child”: L2 Writers' Linguistic Metaphors as a Window Into Their Writer Identity

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shizhou Yang ◽  
Yinyin Peng
Keyword(s):  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Descriptive Analysis ◽  
Identity Work ◽  
Pedagogical Practices ◽  
Writing Teachers ◽  
Writer Identity ◽  
The Past ◽  
Chinese University ◽  
Felt Sense ◽  
The Impact

The past two decades have witnessed a burgeoning literature on L2 writers' identities, especially their discoursal identities. In contrast, little attention is paid to the writers' felt sense of self when they write in an L2, which is an integral dimension of their autobiographical self. In this article, we provide empirical evidence of the nature of this aspect of L2 writer identity. To illustrate, we analyzed linguistic metaphors elicited from three groups of L2 writers (N = 83), majoring respectively in Thai, Japanese, and English in a Chinese university. Descriptive analysis shows that, due to challenges in content, language, organization, and cultural differences, a majority of L2 writers, especial Thai and Japanese L2 writers, experience a diminishing sense of self when they write in L2. In contrast, some L2 writers, especially English L2 writers, find writing in an L2 liberating, revealing the impact of their individual learning trajectories and pedagogical practices on L2 writers' felt sense of self. Findings suggest that L2 writers' identity work is both complex and dynamic. L2 writing teachers can utilize the metaphor questionnaire as a tool to facilitate their learner needs analysis and to raise L2 writers' metacognition.

scholarly journals Taking Lead for Sustainability: Environmental Managers as Institutional Entrepreneurs

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (7) ◽  
pp. 4022
Author(s):  
Pernilla Gluch ◽  
Stina Månsson
Keyword(s):  
Sustainable Development ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Phenomenological Study ◽  
Organizational Structures ◽  
Critical Events ◽  
Institutional Entrepreneurship ◽  
Institutional Practices ◽  
Institutional Entrepreneurs ◽  
The Past

Over the past two decades, sustainability professionals have entered the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry. However, little attention has been given to the actual professionalization processes of these and the leadership conducted by them when shaping the pace and direction for sustainable development. With the aim to explore how the role of sustainability professionals develops, critical events affecting everyday sustainability work practices were identified. Based on a phenomenological study with focus on eight experienced environmental managers’ life stories, and by applying the theoretical lens of institutional entrepreneurship, the study displays a professionalization process in six episodes. Different critical events both enabled and disabled environmental managers’ opportunity to engage in institutional entrepreneurship. The findings indicate how agency is closely interrelated to temporary discourses in society; they either serve to support change and create new institutional practices towards enhanced sustainability or disrupt change when agency to act is temporarily “lost”. To manage a continually changing environment, environmental managers adopt different strategies depending on the situated context and time, such as finding ambassadors and interorganizational allies, mobilizing resources, creating organizational structures, and repositioning themselves.

Understanding attendees’ transformative experiences following Tony Robbins’s Unleash the Power Within seminars

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 47-59
Author(s):  
Sue Bradley
Keyword(s):  
Personal Development ◽  
Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Phenomenological Analysis ◽  
American Life ◽  
Transformative Experiences

Tony Robbins is an American life coach and entrepreneur who claims his motivational workshop, Unleash the Power Within (UPW) can transform people’s lives. This article is based on an interpretative phenomenological analysis of eight participants who had attended different UPW seminars and explored their experiences of transformation. Eight themes were identified: (1) a change in their sense of self, (2) the development of new skills, (3) changes in lifestyle, (4) transformation/conversion, (5) changes in relationships, (6) permanency of change, (7) feelings of fear versus anticipation and (8) loss versus gain. The research concluded that participants had undergone transformation involving significant, valued and enduring changes centred on new meaning in their lives. Further research was suggested to examine both a wider and more in-depth approach, as personal development workshops offer a large and potentially rich field of transpersonal study focused on human meaning-making and change.

School Notes: Committee on Historical Studies

1987 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-236
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Processes Of Change ◽  
Graduate Faculty ◽  
New School ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Historical Moment

The Committee on Historical Studies was established in the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research in 1984. The Graduate Faculty has long emphasized the contribution of history to the social sciences. Committee on Historical Studies (CHS) courses offer students the opportunity to utilize social scientific concepts and theories in the study of the past. The program is based on the conviction that the world changes constantly but changes systematically, with each historical moment setting the opportunities and limiting the potentialities of the next. Systematic historical analysis, however, is not merely a diverting luxury. Nor is it simply a means of assembling cases for present-oriented models of human behavior. It is a prerequisite to any sound understanding of processes of change and of structures large or small.

scholarly journals EXPRESS: Questing for meaningfulness through narrative identity work: The helpers, the heroes, and the hurt

2021 ◽  
pp. 001872672110430
Author(s):  
Sarah-Louise Weller ◽  
Andrew D. Brown ◽  
Caroline A Clarke
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Identity ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
Identity Work ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Search And Rescue ◽  
Negative Consequences ◽  
Master Narratives ◽  
Identity Narratives ◽  
Primary Contribution ◽  
Meaningful Lives

What identity narratives do those engaged in dangerous volunteering fabricate and how do they help satisfy their quest for meaningful lives? Based on a three-year ethnographic study of QuakeRescue, a UK-based voluntary, search and rescue charity, we show that volunteers worked on identity narratives as helpers, heroes and hurt. The primary contribution we make is to analyse how meaningfulness (the sense of personal purpose and fulfilment) that people attribute to their lives, is both developed through and a resource for individuals’ narrative identity work. We show how organizationally based actors attribute significance to their lives through authorship of desired identities which are sanctioned and supplied by societal (master) narratives embedded in and constitutive of local communities. In our case, the helper and hero identities dangerous volunteering offered members were seductive. However, their pursuit had ambiguous and sometimes, arguably, negative consequences for volunteers who had seen action overseas, and our study adds to understanding of how organizational members’ quest for meaningful identities may falter and sometimes fail.

scholarly journals Appropriating Stereotypes of Kin, Romance and Gender: An Ethnographic Study of Filipina Migrants  Married to or in De-Facto Relationships with New Zealand Men

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Hollie Alexandria Doar
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Identity Work ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Marriage Migration ◽  
Negative Stereotypes ◽  
Area Of Interest ◽  
Mail Order Brides ◽  
Transnational Marriage ◽  
And Gender

<p>Transnational marriage migration is an emerging area of interest in anthropology, and contemporary scholars have written extensively on the international movements of Filipina women who have married non-Filipino men. Extending this research into an antipodean context, this thesis is based on interviews with Filipina migrants married to or in de-facto relationships with New Zealand men. Through an examination of narratives of love and romance, identity, and kinship, this work highlights the ways participants undertook identity work in their interviews. In particular, this thesis reveals the strategies employed by Filipina migrants in constructing narratives in which they distance themselves from negative stereotypes, while incorporating more positive typologies into their identities. Stereotypes included Filipina women as mail-order brides, domestic workers, subservient wives, and good family members. These narrative strategies demonstrated the ways participants sought to control and manipulate stereotypes in order to present themselves as successful and virtuous migrants. This thesis applies current scholarship on identity work and stereotypes. It also contributes to literature on marriage migration by expanding a contemporary focus on participant agency through acknowledging how migrants utilise identity resources, in this case stereotypes, available in their host society.</p>

scholarly journals The Linguistic Heritage of Industry

2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 33-54
Author(s):  
Leena Kolehmainen ◽  
Anna Sivula
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Identity Work ◽  
Linguistic Landscape ◽  
Cultural Resources ◽  
Industrial Heritage ◽  
The Past ◽  
Industrial Community ◽  
Language Studies ◽  
Eastern Finland

The goal of this article is to introduce the notion of industrial linguistic heritage into the study of industrial heritage. By combining viewpoints of cultural heritage research and language studies, the article opens new insights into the identities and cultural resources of industrial communities. The linguistic heritage of industry is investigated in the light of two case studies from selected linguistic landscapes of Varkaus, a small industrial community in eastern Finland. The case studies illuminate both multilingualism of the industrial community as industrial linguistic heritage and language as a means to verbalize and commemorate the industrial past of the community. The examination of the linguistic landscape data shows that language is an important strategic means to verbalize the past, to restore shared histories and participatory experiences, and to carry out commemorative identity work in the industrial heritage community.

scholarly journals Dynamically remembered present: Virtual memory as a basis for the stories we live

2013 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Cornelius W. Du Toit
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Living Organism ◽  
Virtual Memory ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Human Consciousness ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Universe

In this article memory was viewed as a crucial key to the discovery of reality. It is the basis of historical research at all levels, hence it is not confined to a function of human consciousness (brain operations): its physical vestiges are discernible in the universe, in fossils, in the DNA of species. Memory inscribes information in various ways. On a human level it is not recalled computer-wise: imagination, emotion and tacit motives play a role in how we remember. The article investigated the way in which memory underlies the operation of every cell in any living organism. Against this background the role of memory in humans and its decisive influence on every level of human life are examined. Gerald Edelman’s work in this regard was considered. Marcel Proust’s focus on memory is an underlying thread running through his novels, unrivalled in literary history. Some prominent examples were analysed in this article. In light of the foregoing the role of memory in religious experience was then discussed. The virtuality of memory is encapsulated in the statement that we remember the present whilst reliving the past. Memory characterised by virtuality is basic to our autobiographic narratives. The nature of memory determines our life stories, hence our perception of the human self as dynamically variable and open to the future.

scholarly journals Emotions and identity work: Emotions as discursive resources in the constitution of junior professionals’ identities

2018 ◽  
Vol 72 (5) ◽  
pp. 988-1009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sumati Ahuja ◽  
Helena Heizmann ◽  
Stewart Clegg
Keyword(s):  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Identity Work ◽  
Professional Service ◽  
Service Firms ◽  
Professional Identities ◽  
Professional Service Firms ◽  
Professional Careers ◽  
Work Strategies ◽  
Work First ◽  
Discursive Resources

For junior professionals, notions of professional identity established during their education are often called into question in the early stages of their professional careers. The workplace gives rise to identity challenges that manifest in significant emotional struggles. However, although extant literature highlights how emotions trigger and accompany identity work, the constitutive role of emotions in identity work is under-researched. In this article, we analyse how junior professionals mobilize emotions as discursive resources for identity work. Drawing on an empirical study of junior architects employed in professional service firms, we examine how professional identities, imbued with varying forms of discipline and agency, are discursively represented. The study makes two contributions to the literature on emotions and identity work. First, we identify three key identity work strategies ( idealizing, reframing and distancing) that are bound up in junior architects’ emotion talk. We suggest that these strategies act simultaneously as a coping mechanism and as a disciplinary force in junior architects’ efforts to constitute themselves as professionals. Second, we argue that identity work may not always lead to the accomplishment of a positive sense of self but can express a sense of disillusionment that leads to the constitution of dejected professional identities.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document