Deep identity, shallow time : sustaining a future in Victorian fishing communities

Like commercial fishers everywhere, it seems, those living in coastal communities of Victoria perceive themselves to be under threat from recreational fishers, environmentalists, imposed management regimes, and modernisation and globalisation of the industry. In responding to these threats they appeal to conventional props of tradition--to continuity in genealogical time, affiliation with place and specialised knowledge and practice. This seems paradoxical, given that most established fishers in Victoria are first or second generation members of an industry that, through its 150-year history, has been characterised by innovation and mobility. That paradox, we argue, is more apparent than real. Fisher identity is grounded primarily in engagement with an environment that is not familiar to outsiders. The paradox arises because fishers, like others who seek to sustain a future in the face of threat from outsiders, reshape strongly felt identity as tradition.

Professional identity in the global sports entertainment industry : regulating the body, mind and soul of Australian Football League footballers

In this article we discuss the ways in which the professional identity of Australian Football League (AFL) footballers — in a physical, high body contact sport — is shaped by concerns to develop different aspects of the body, mind and soul of the young men who want to become AFL footballers. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s later work on the care of the self we argue that narratives of identity necessarily involve a struggle for the body, mind and soul of these young men. Foucault’s work enables us to identify and analyse how relations of power, forms of regulation and arts of governing interact in ongoing attempts to develop the professional footballer. The article explores these issues via an analysis of the rationalities and techniques that inform talent identification and player management practices; and risk management in relation to these practices and processes in the AFL.

Cross-cultural assumptions about perception and identity in western socio-legal frameworks

Socio-legal analysis has relied heavily on Mnookin and Kornhauser's "bargaining in the shadow of the law" and Galanter's "litigotiation" concepts. These concepts provide a framework for examining the relationship between formal legal rules and other normative sources in out-of-court activity. In this paper we explore the extent to which these frameworks' Western assumptions about individualism, conflict and the rule of law would require adaptation if they were to be used to examine such phenomena in Chinese culture or in Australian-Chinese negotiations. In particular, we focus on the "difference" between: i) China and Confucian culture; and ii) Western society in terms of the Confucian principles relating to hierarchy, harmony, collectivism and face. These principles have fundamental implications for Chinese perceptions of appropriate dispute resolution behaviour. Western researchers who omit consideration of these perceptions and neglect the defining characteristics of Chinese identity will emerge with flawed projects.

Ko Un and the poetics of postcolonial identity

Ko Un is one of South Korea's most important writers of the past 50 years, and a poet whose work provides important insights into crucial linkages between language, identity and community. He lived through, chronicled and critically engaged most of the traumatic events his nation faced during the last century: a brutal colonial occupation by Japan; the division of the peninsula into communist North and capitalist South; an unusually devastating fraternal war; the integration of the divided peninsula into global Cold War politics; periods of authoritarian rule on both sides; and the more recent challenge to promote reconciliation. Some of these episodes challenged the very existence of Korea as a people, nation and state. Ko Un's poetry was part of a larger effort to regain a sense of being and national identity in the face of turmoil, war and globalisation. We argue that by engaging with these highly political issues Ko Un's work provides important clues about how to articulate notions of identity and community in a way that empathetically portrays other people and their identities. In doing so he offers an alternative to the prevailing inside/outside logic that often leads to problematic forms of nationalism.

Westphalia and the Taiwan conundrum : a case against the exclusionist construction of sovereignty and identity

It is often argued that at the root of the Taiwan question are the myriad differences in politics, ideology, identity, and economy between mainland China and Taiwan. Any prospect for its peaceful resolution, it seems, hinges on bridging those differences through economic and/or political integration. Although the Taiwan conundrum has much to do with wide-ranging cross-strait divergence, this article argues that it cannot be disconnected from one important commonality between Beijing and Taipei, namely, a cross-strait normative convergence on the Westphalian notion of state sovereignty. Encompassing an exclusionary understanding of final authority, territory, and identity, Westphalian sovereignty provides both Beijing and Taipei with a common meaning that Taiwan is an issue of sovereignty, central to their respective national identity and political survival and hence not subject to compromise. As a consequence, it argues that this common meaning is paradoxically responsible for much of the mistrust, tension, and deadlock in cross-strait relations. In order to find a long-term solution to the Taiwan impasse, we need to pay attention to this particular normative convergence as well as to the many differences across the Taiwan Strait.

You can spend your life dying or you can spend your life living : identity transition in people who are HIV-positive

This article examines, through the lenses of HIV-positive people, the unique phenomenon of identity transition. This research proposes that life-changing illnesses, such as HIV, are an undesired 'possession' that people accept to varying degrees, which we refer to as 'ownership'. While illnesses, such as HIV compel individuals to undergo a transformation process that usually begins with a deep feeling of detachment, and then proceeds to acceptance of their illness, and to feeling empowered and in control of their HIV status and lives, this process is very complex and non-linear as it involves many iterative progressions in identity transition. These transitions are highly individualistic; however, the underlying theme is that the more positive trajectories were those of people who focus on their new lives, living with HIV (i.e. taking ownership of their illness), rather than focusing on what they have lost when they became HIV-positive. The findings demonstrate that identity transition is a result of the ways that individuals rework, negotiate and transform their roles, actions and behaviours through their active engagement with support mechanisms. This study suggests that it is vital to promote positive interactions with support mechanisms to ensure that those with HIV view themselves positively.

Knowing schooling, identity and pedagogy visually

This research produced in one region in Ghana examines the production of educational practices, relations of power and student experiences within teaching and non-teaching spaces in junior secondary settings. The strength of the visual approach in interrogating school cultural norms and the problematising of the tangled complexities of knowing about schooling, identity and pedagogy are outlined. An important aspect of the study is the foregrounding of educational practice as a social act occurring in response to historical circumstances and changing social contexts (Brown & Jones, 2001). We see this work as an important step towards democratization of the research relationship and empowerment of students to contribute to the way they are educated. But also we are wary of how representation through visual methods also can 'frame' participants and the researchers. We recognise that one way to uncover how school practices are exemplified in Ghana is to put students in the middle of researching their experiences. In this way, our research moved from constructing students as simply consumers of adult designed and managed products to practices based on democratic participation (Thomson & Gunter, 2007). Throughout the research journey we were guided by the fact that knowledge is not neutral or to be discovered. Culture and communicative processes are essential determinants of reality. In this study the students as researchers, produced photographs that trigger dialectical conversations of students’ perspectives that foreground their experiences at school. This enabled us to digress from dominant positivistic empiricism to a more legitimate ethical practice, and understanding of the intricacies of educational practice, the norms and structures that underpin everyday actions in schools.

The entrepreneurial self and youth at-risk : exploring the horizons of identity in the 21st century

This paper argues that a particular form of selfhood has come to dominate the horizons of identity in the Western democracies at this time - I refer to this form of personhood as the entrepreneurial self. The paper argues that the figure (population) of ‘Youth at-risk’, in its negativity, illuminates the positivity that is the entrepreneurial Self. That is, the discourses that construct Youth at-risk reveal the truths about whom we should, as adults, become. The paper engages with Foucault’s theories of government, of (Neo)Liberalism as a problematisation of the practise of Liberal welfare government, and of the ways in which certain psychological discourses articulate with (Neo)Liberal views of enterprise to produce a view of the Self as the entrepreneurial Self.

Defining national identity? Visiting the architectural spaces of the Museum of Scotland

National Cultures construct identities by producing meanings about the nation with which we can identify, meanings which are contained in the stories which are told about it, memories which connect its present within its past, and images which are constructed of it. A museum, the repository of a nation’s culture, which connects the past to the present through recounting stories about the artefacts of past cultures is clearly significant in representing the culture of a nation.

This paper explores the architectural spaces of the new Museum of Scotland, which opened in Edinburgh in November 1998. The museum has opened at a crucial time in Scottish history. The Scottish cultural renaissance is manifested in the increase in cultural production and call for Scottish cultural institutions. Parallel to this renaissance are political developments with the re-creation of a Scottish Parliament in 1999. When the idea of ‘Scotland’ is itself in a state of flux, the stories of the nation told in the museum, which attempt to give a sense of location, a connection between the individual and the nation are especially important.

Thus, issues of identity and ‘self’ are crucially important in understanding the contemporary museum. Within this, the relations between the production of these narratives and their consumption by the public are little understood. The majority of studies have concentrated, although not exclusively, on the production of museum displays, primarily with the "politics and poetics" of display. This paper analyses the relationship between producer and consumer within the Museum of Scotland, attempting to reconnect the forces of production and consumption. In doing so, it focuses primarily on the differing conceptions of the ability of the Museum to be able to narrate the nation.

Based on interviews both with museum staff and with visitors to the museum, it argues that an understanding of the relationship between the museum and Scottish national identity can only be considered through an understanding of the tension between the producers’ intentions and the way in which consumers conceptualise the museum as a space for "telling the nation".

We close towns for a living : spatial transformation and the Tour de France

This paper explores the ways in which the passage of the Tour de France bicycle race through France produces a distinctive cultural cartography or social map of France. Drawing on Lefebvre's (1991) conceptual triad of spatial practice, representations of space and representational spaces, the paper argues that the Tour de France both represents and is a space that is annually reordered and structured by very particular cultural practices. Through an analysis of the process (and politics) of route selection, the incorporation of iconic landscape and the transformation of civic space as the race moves across the country, the paper foregrounds the socially constructed nature of map making and the role of human intervention in producing and reproducing key cultural cartographies of France through the Tour de France.

The inner nana, the list mum and me : knitting identity

Here we present young knitters’ reflections on their acquisition of textile skills and we review media images of women and knitting. While the image of the grandmother as teacher is clear, the mother is absent or obscure. This absence is also reflected in knitting groups, blogs and in one of the authors’ false memories. We propose further investigation of the construction of identity through craft and of both the materiality and the ethereality of nostalgic references.

Reaping identity meanings from an agrarian past : southern harvesters of commercially cultivated regional heritage

Extending knowledge of the cultural shaping and variegating of white identity that occurs through the commercial diffusion of identity myths, we examine the reception of Southern identity myths promoted in the oppositional narratives of New South commercial media. We characterize oppositional narratives as texts which operate by eliciting an interpretive reading that devalues rather than supports the surface narrative, and explain the duplicitous text as one intended to seduce a dominant power, while empowering and bolstering identity of a marginalized group. After elaborating how oppositional discourse can serve to reinforce the identity frame constructed by regional media producers, we report on a study examining how urban and rural Southerners read and respond to this discourse. Our findings highlight mediators in the relationship between individuals’ oppositional readings and their alignment of identity in a manner responsive to it.

Reconstructing the south : how commercial myths compete for identity value through the ideological shaping of popular memories and countermemories

This study explicates the coconstitutive relationships between commercial myth- making and popular memory that arise through myth market competitions for identity value. We develop a genealogical analysis of the representational strategies and ideological rationales that two prominent New South mythmakers use to shape popular memories in relation to their competitive goals and to efface counter- memories that contradict their mythologized representations. We then derive a conceptual model that highlights competitive, historical, and ideological influences on commercial mythmaking and their transformative effects on popular memory, which have not been addressed by prior theorizations of the meaning transfer process.

When, where and how am I now? Researching identity in university communities of practice

The establishment of communities of practice (CoPs) has emerged nationally as a strategy to promote ‘excellence’ in teaching and learning in Australian universities. CoPs in Australian universities have been reported as fostering the development of identity in practice and collegial academic identity. In these accounts identity development is associated with storytelling around everyday practice, although the relationship between narrative and identity development has not been explored or described in detail. Similarly, although the complex and changeable university contexts in which these CoPs operate is noted and described in the literature, there is currently no detailed account published of the relationship between the broader discourses that shape these contexts and the process of identity development in university CoPs. We argue in this paper that there is a need for a new way of researching identity formation in university CoPs. Drawing on Trinh Minh Ha’s work (1992), we propose that fragmentation be used as a working metaphor for thinking about and researching identity development in university CoPs, with direct reference to the contexts in which they operate. 
The proposed new approach takes into account the complexities and variety of discourses that influence identity formation in CoPs and the changeable and sometimes contradictory Enterprise University contexts in which Australian CoPs operate. In this paper fragmentation is described and applied to the process of researching identity formation in university CoPs. This paper also describes how fragmentation guides the combined narrative research and discourse analysis methods used in the proposed approach. This paper argues that fragmentation provides the means for developing practical (or experiential) insights as well as conceptually structuring a useful method for investigating discursive factors, to open up a variety of potential new understandings about identity formation in university CoPs.

The use of molecular and morphological characters to resolve the taxonomic identity of cryptic species : the case of Miniopterus manavi (Chiroptera, Miniopteridae)

Based on recent molecular phylogenetic studies, the Old World bat family Miniopteridae, composed of species in the genus Miniopterus, has been shown to contain complex paraphyletic species, many of which are cryptic based on convergent morphological characters. Herein we resolve the phylogenetic relationships and taxonomy of the species complex M. manavi on Madagascar and in the Comoro Archipelago, where these animals occur in different bioclimatic zones. First using mitochondrial cytochrome-b sequence data to define clades and then morphology to corroborate the molecular data, including comparisons to type specimens, we demonstrate that animals identified as this taxon are a minimum of three species: M. manavi sensu stricto occurs in at least the central portion of the Central Highlands; M. griveaudi has a broad distribution in lowland northern and central western Madagascar and the Comoros (Anjouan and Grande Comore), and M. aelleni sp. n. has been found in northern and western Madagascar and the Comoros (Anjouan). In each case, these three clades were genetically divergent and monophyletic and the taxa are diagnosable based on different external and craniodental characters. One aspect that helped to define the systematics of this group was isolation of DNA from one of the paratypes of M. manavi collected in 1896 and new topotypic material. Miniopterus manavi is most closely allied to a recently described species, M. petersoni. At several localities, M. griveaudi and M. aelleni have been found in strict sympatry, and together with M. manavi sensu stricto show considerable convergence in morphological characters, but are not immediate sister taxa. In defining and resolving the systematics of cryptic species, such as miniopterid bats, the process of defining clades with molecular tools, segregating the specimens accordingly, and identifying corroborative morphological characters has been notably efficient.