scholarly journals Becoming Backpack: Towards a Counter-Inscription of Young Adult Collegian Identity Work

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 158-179
Author(s):  
Kelly Clark/Keefe
Keyword(s):  
Young Adult ◽  
Identity Development ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Student Identity ◽  
Development Models ◽  
Adult Identity ◽  
Prose Narratives ◽  
Poetic Prose ◽  
Participatory Arts ◽  
Opening Up

This article invites readers to encounter the author’s early attempts at engaging creatively with data produced during a research project called Life Lines: The Art of Being Alive to Young Adulthood. Launched in January 2019, the Life Lines project was conceived as a critical participatory arts-engaged research endeavor aimed at opening up conventional theoretical wisdom about the nature of young adult college student identity formation. In addition to providing details of the inquiry project’s design and aims, a series of visual and poetic prose narratives open and become threaded throughout the article. These multimodal expressive forms function as a type of creative counter-inscription device, working both to complicate identity development models that limit subjectivity to human consciousness and agency, and to illustrate a more expansive, somatically attuned, and materially-entangled set of practices and productions of young adult identity work’s work and its study.

scholarly journals How do adult twins experience and view their identity?

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 16-30
Author(s):  
Madhuri Fichtmüller
Keyword(s):  
Identity Development ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Personal Experience ◽  
Ego Development ◽  
Research Literature ◽  
Intuitive Inquiry ◽  
Transpersonal Development ◽  
Adult Identity ◽  
Adult Twins ◽  
Participant Perspectives

Adult identity formation and individuation have been well documented in psychological and world spiritual literature. Identity and individuation differ for twins because of their physiological and psychological connection. Although the literature has to some extent explored twin identity at prepersonal and personal stages of ego development, little research literature exists which looks to unravel transpersonal phases of twins’ individuation. With a focus on transpersonal development, this research used intuitive inquiry to investigate “How adult twins experience and view their identity.” Individual twins derived from a single ovum (monozygotic) and from two separate ova (dizygotic), were interviewed to understand their personal experience of their identity development. The researcher’s own experience of twin identity was reported through embodied writing and poetry. Results allowed for the formation of an emerging model of Twin Identity Development, which outlined a possible trajectory for twin identity development, introducing the transpersonal as a connecting thread between the prepersonal and personal twin identity. Participant perspectives on identity development indicated the possibility for twins to embrace both an individual and a joint identity and in some cases, transcend both. Embracing all aspects of both identities created a sense of wholeness for twins. Further investigation into different twin identities and parenting of twins could validate the research.

What Happens to a Dream Deferred? Identity Formation and DACA

2020 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 275-299
Author(s):  
Jessica Rosenberg ◽  
Sally Robles ◽  
Marlon O. Agustín-Méndez ◽  
Emma Cathell ◽  
Astrid Casasola
Keyword(s):  
Identity Development ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Development Model ◽  
Transformative Experience ◽  
Qualitative Research Study ◽  
Adult Identity ◽  
Future Success ◽  
High Degree ◽  
Latinx Youth

This article reports on a qualitative research study that explored the lived experience of seven Latinx DACA recipients. Using narrative inquiry, the study tests the Undocumented Adult Identity Development Model (Robles, 2015), a five-stage identity development model of undocumented Latinx youth. The study gives voice to the hopes, dreams, and challenges these young adults face. Findings revealed that participants demonstrated a high degree of resiliency. Ultimately, participants were able to fashion their struggles into a transformative experience that gave them hope and a positive vison for their future. Success in school and in their career was a means of protesting against the limitations placed upon them. Meaning and purpose was achieved through creating community and by taking ownership of their immigration status, through fighting for their rights and for the rights of other immigrants.

scholarly journals The Journey to My Student Identity: A Grounded Theory Study on Supported Education for Young Adults with Mental Health Problems

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ulrika Liljeholm ◽  
Elisabeth Argentzell ◽  
Helene Hillborg ◽  
Veronica Lövgren ◽  
David Rosenberg ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Young Adults ◽  
Grounded Theory ◽  
Identity Development ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Mental Health Problems ◽  
Recovery Process ◽  
Health Problems ◽  
Student Identity ◽  
Supported Education

AbstractSupport for developing a work identity has been shown to be essential for the recovery process of young adults with mental health problems. Since research shows that the development of a student role during the educational years for these young adults may be interrupted, this time period may be relevant to explore in order to support career development and the critical transition to adulthood for this target group. To explore young adults’ experiences of participating in supported education that is integrated with vocational and mental health services, reflecting the process of developing a student identity while struggling with mental health problems. A grounded theory design was used. The material consists of 17 individual interviews with young adults aged 18–29 years who were receiving supported education. Young adults who study while having mental health problems encountered structural barriers and challenged engagement in education that created a gap between the students and the regular education system. Access to supported education was reported to decrease this gap and formed a bridge that to facilitate educational achievements. The achievements were related to several personal benefits that were important for the experience of meaning and identity development in the future. Supported education can contribute to enabling the development of student identity for young adults with mental health problems. This involves an engagement process and positive identity formation that may reduce stigma and is therefore important for the personal recovery process and career advancement.

Creating a ‘Masala’ Self: Bicultural Identity in Desi Young Adult Novels

2010 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-133 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle Superle
Keyword(s):  
Young Adult ◽  
Young People ◽  
Identity Development ◽  
Small Body ◽  
The United States ◽  
Young Adult Fiction ◽  
Bicultural Identity ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Institutional Forces ◽  
Cultural Identity Development

In the past two decades, the previously silent voices of diasporic Indian writers for young people have emerged, and a small body of texts has begun to develop in the United States and the United Kingdom. One of the major preoccupations of these texts is cultural identity development, especially in the novels published for a young adult audience, which often feature protagonists in the throes of an identity crisis. For example, the novels The Roller Birds of Rampur (1991) by Indi Rana, Born Confused (2002) by Tanuja Desai Hidier, and The Not-So-Star-Spangled Life of Sunita Sen (2005) by Mitali Perkins all focus on an adolescent girl coping with her bicultural identity with angst and confusion, and delineate the ways her self-concept and relationships are affected. The texts are empowering in their suggestion that young people have the agency to explore and create their own balanced bicultural identities, but like other young adult fiction, they ultimately situate adolescents within insurmountable institutional forces that are much more powerful than any individual.

‘On some precipice in a dream’: Representations of Guilt in Contemporary Young Adult Gay and Lesbian Fiction

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 184-194
Author(s):  
Kate Norbury
Keyword(s):  
Young Adult ◽  
Identity Development ◽  
Gay And Lesbian ◽  
Early Age ◽  
Survivor Guilt ◽  
Sexual Identities ◽  
Best Friend ◽  
Positive Identity ◽  
The Family ◽  
Depressive Episodes

This article explores the representation of guilt in six recent young adult novels, in which it is suggested that teen protagonists still experience guilt in relation to their emerging non-normative sexual identities. The experience of guilt may take several different forms, but all dealt with here are characterised by guilt without agency – that is, the protagonist has not deliberately said or done anything to cause harm to another. In a first pair of novels, guilt is depicted as a consequence of internalised homophobia, with which protagonists must at least partly identify. In a second group, protagonists seem to experience a form of separation guilt from an early age because they fail to conform to the norms of the family. Certain events external to the teen protagonist, and for which they cannot be held responsible, then trigger serious depressive episodes, which jeopardise the protagonist's positive identity development. Finally, characters are depicted as experiencing a form of survivor guilt. A gay protagonist survives the events of 9/11 but endures a breakdown, and, in a second novel, a lesbian protagonist narrates her coming to terms with the death of her best friend.

Criss-Cross: Identity and Transformation in Re-reading Billy Elliot

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 536-551
Author(s):  
Jacqui Miller
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Central Character ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Liberal Politics ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Opening Up

Billy Elliot (2000) has been widely recognised as an important British film of the post-Thatcher period. It has been analysed using multiple disciplinary methodologies, but almost always from the theoretical frameworks of class and gender/sexuality. The film has sometimes been used not so much as a focus of analysis itself but as a conduit for exploring issues such as class deprivation or neo-liberal politics and economics. Such studies tend to use the film's perceived shortcomings as a starting point to critique society's wider failings to interrogate constructions of gender and sexuality. This article argues that an examination of the identity formation of some of the film's subsidiary characters shows how fluidity and transformation are key to the film's opening up of a jouissance which is enabled by but goes beyond its central character.

Out in Time

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Perry N. Halkitis
Keyword(s):  
Identity Development ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Sexual Identity ◽  
Gay Men ◽  
Coming Out ◽  
Generational Differences ◽  
Life Experiences ◽  
Sexual Identity Development ◽  
Three Generations ◽  
American Society

The life experiences and sexual identity development of three generations of gay men, the Stonewall, AIDS, and Queer generations, are explored. While there are generational differences in the lived experiences of young gay men shaped by the sociopolitical contexts of the historical epoch in which they emerged into adulthood, and a crisis that has come to define each generation, there also are consistencies across generations and across time in the psychological process of coming out that defines identity formation of gay men, as these individuals transition from a period of sexual identity awareness to sexual identity integration. The life experiences are also shaped by conceptions of hypermasculinity, racism and discrimination, substance use, and adventurous sexuality. Despite the many challenges that have defined the lives of gay men across time and that are informed by the homophobia of American society, the vast majority of the population also has demonstrated resilience and fortitude in achieving both pride and dignity. These ideas are explored through the life narratives of fifteen diverse gay men, across the three generations.

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