Coastal Yorubaland: Habitability, Inhabitance, and Inheritances

Although the conference from which this Special Issue derives was convened by two prominent historians, this article is multi-disciplinary; both within and outside the boundaries of history. The purpose is to merge various ideas in different disciplines to argue that the study of Coastal Yorubaland as an important unit of analysis should, on the one hand, stand alone, and, on the other, be integrated into larger studies in all fields from Art to Zoology. For thousands of years, people have been living along the coast, experiencing interactions with the sea: they were shaped by the lagoon and sea, and they in turn shaped the coastline and waterways. The past of the coastal Yoruba people shapes their present, and this present will shape their future.In this article, I speak to the impact of the consciousness of history, the consciousness of the past, and the consciousness of self and identity on coastal Yorubaland.

Pieces of the puzzle: Stories from EFL Thai university students' language learning motivation, experiences, and self-identities in their imagined communities

<p>Despite the growth of English, the lingua franca of today’s world, most Thai undergraduates struggle to attain a high level of communicative skills in environments where English is a Foreign Language (EFL). This thesis explores and reinterprets Thai students’ language learning motivation, experiences, and their identity formation and development. The person-in-context relational view of motivation was used to complement Dörnyei’s theory of L2 Motivational Self System (L2MSS). These frameworks were used to analyse the multifaceted aspects of individual and contextual influences on the participants’ L2 self and identity. This study employs a research methodology with a focus on a narrative qualitative approach. Quantitative data were collected from 356 first-year students at a public and private university in Thailand and four Thai students were purposively selected. These four participants were formally interviewed three to four times about their English learning motivation and experiences. The narrative data were generated by a series of individual interviews and supplemented by stimulated recall interviews, an English diary, and other person-family-and-social artefacts. Their L2 learning motivation and experiences from school to university were presented as unique individual narratives. The interview transcripts were then analysed across the cases to create themes. The findings indicated that the rote-memorisation, grammar-translation, and examination-orientated methods practised by their secondary and tertiary EFL teachers impacted the participants’ language learning motivation and the development of their L2 self-identities. The Thai participants prioritised speaking skills and felt highly motivated to attain communicative English for their future career. Their ideal L2 self appeared to be strengthened by their sustained efforts to communicate in English in both formal and informal learning contexts. Nonetheless, their ideal L2 self and ought-to L2 self seemed to be interconnected and worked together in their motivational system. The participants regulated themselves by using motivational strategies in association with the promotion-focused and prevention-focused instrumentality to maximise their intended effort in learning English. The inclusion of self-efficacy into the L2MSS model yields insights into how the participants actualised their self system in their motivational orientation. They pushed themselves to gain more exposure to a variety of learning experiences in both face-to-face and virtual communication in their imagined communities. By investing their effort and time in majoring in English and Business English, they envisioned themselves after graduation improving their parents’ and extended family’s social status and well-being. Their ideal L2 self and transportable identities were developed to meet Thailand’s integration within the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC). For instance, two participants at a public university were able to envision themselves studying English at a Malaysian university. Narrative approaches shed light on the participants’ individual motivational orientations and the effects of these on the formation and development of their L2 self and identity in the past, present, and future. This study allows teachers and educators to understand the interplay between in-class and out-of-class learning experiences and the implication of the local, social, and global learning experiences of EFL Thai learners that may have been unexplored and unheard.</p>

Pieces of the puzzle: Stories from EFL Thai university students' language learning motivation, experiences, and self-identities in their imagined communities

<p>Despite the growth of English, the lingua franca of today’s world, most Thai undergraduates struggle to attain a high level of communicative skills in environments where English is a Foreign Language (EFL). This thesis explores and reinterprets Thai students’ language learning motivation, experiences, and their identity formation and development. The person-in-context relational view of motivation was used to complement Dörnyei’s theory of L2 Motivational Self System (L2MSS). These frameworks were used to analyse the multifaceted aspects of individual and contextual influences on the participants’ L2 self and identity. This study employs a research methodology with a focus on a narrative qualitative approach. Quantitative data were collected from 356 first-year students at a public and private university in Thailand and four Thai students were purposively selected. These four participants were formally interviewed three to four times about their English learning motivation and experiences. The narrative data were generated by a series of individual interviews and supplemented by stimulated recall interviews, an English diary, and other person-family-and-social artefacts. Their L2 learning motivation and experiences from school to university were presented as unique individual narratives. The interview transcripts were then analysed across the cases to create themes. The findings indicated that the rote-memorisation, grammar-translation, and examination-orientated methods practised by their secondary and tertiary EFL teachers impacted the participants’ language learning motivation and the development of their L2 self-identities. The Thai participants prioritised speaking skills and felt highly motivated to attain communicative English for their future career. Their ideal L2 self appeared to be strengthened by their sustained efforts to communicate in English in both formal and informal learning contexts. Nonetheless, their ideal L2 self and ought-to L2 self seemed to be interconnected and worked together in their motivational system. The participants regulated themselves by using motivational strategies in association with the promotion-focused and prevention-focused instrumentality to maximise their intended effort in learning English. The inclusion of self-efficacy into the L2MSS model yields insights into how the participants actualised their self system in their motivational orientation. They pushed themselves to gain more exposure to a variety of learning experiences in both face-to-face and virtual communication in their imagined communities. By investing their effort and time in majoring in English and Business English, they envisioned themselves after graduation improving their parents’ and extended family’s social status and well-being. Their ideal L2 self and transportable identities were developed to meet Thailand’s integration within the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC). For instance, two participants at a public university were able to envision themselves studying English at a Malaysian university. Narrative approaches shed light on the participants’ individual motivational orientations and the effects of these on the formation and development of their L2 self and identity in the past, present, and future. This study allows teachers and educators to understand the interplay between in-class and out-of-class learning experiences and the implication of the local, social, and global learning experiences of EFL Thai learners that may have been unexplored and unheard.</p>

Hideous progeny? The future of growing humans

Today’s biotechnologies are not simply providing powerful new possibilities in medicine; they are transforming our view of what it can mean to be human. In particular, the discovery of the extreme plasticity of cells – the possibility of changing one tissue type for another, and of regenerating the embryonic cell state from which we all grew – forces us to confront our status as a contingent community of living cells, and challenges traditional notions of self and identity. Here I discuss some of these technologies and their broader social, ethical and philosophical implications.

“I STARTED THE DAY JUST CRYING FOR 2 HOURS STRAIGHT.” ECHO-LOCATING THE VULNERABLE SELF ON INSTAGRAM.

Building on previous online-ethnographic fieldwork on the #strokesurvivor-community on Instagram, this contribution dives deeper into practices of echo-locating (Markham 2020) the vulnerable self on Instagram. This paper aims to reconstruct practices of adapting to a new body, identity and self through communicating on Instagram from a symbolic-interactionist perspective. I build on Goffman’s concept of stigma, Charmaz’ studies on adapting to illness and impairment and use the lens of Markham’s (2020) concept of echo-locating the self through online connection, Based on close readings and interpretations of postings, including pictures, captions and comments, as well as interviews with active community members, two critical antipodes of sense- and self-making in the #strokesurvivor-community emerged: First, mourning the loss of the familiar body, self, and identity and related identity goals. Users seek permission to mourn and also validation for their grief through their postings and comments. Second, and probably oppositional, perseverance, or in its extreme form, toxic positivity - this concept refers to a (more or less forced) attitude of optimism while ignoring valid reasons to actually not be positive, a mindset that seems to be embedded in a “contemporary cult of happiness” (Wright 2014) and cruel optimism (Berlant 2010). In the #strokesurvivor-community, a positive mindset and belief in the possibility of regaining physical and mental functions is a recurring theme and strong imperative. The contribution focuses on the reconstruction of patterns and practices of mourning and perseverance and their relevance to the echo-location of the vulnerable self.

Implicit Self and Identity

We provide an overview of research on the implicit social cognition of self and identity. We limit our coverage to aspects of the self that emerge when (1) viewed in the context of social group memberships and (2) measured via thoughts and feelings that are not consciously controllable or within awareness. We begin with research paradigms that link the study of self with social group and proceed to specific analyses of basic preference for the ingroup and other attributes associated with the self. We then include analyses of implicit self and identity processes as viewed in research on self-evaluation, performance and behavior, and goal pursuit. In the next major section, we attend to the top-down influence of societal and cultural factors on the construction of implicit self and identity. Together, the research we review reveals the plasticity of the self as it is shaped by the demands of social group and culture