Contesting Europe's Eastern Rim:cultural identities in public discourse

Since 1989, Europe's eastern rim has been in constant flux. This collection focuses on how political and economic transformations have triggered redefinitions of cultural identity. Using discursive modes of identity construction (deconstruction, reconstruction, reformulation, and invention) the book focuses on the creation of opposition to old and new outsidersA" and insidersA" in Europe. The linguistic study of discourse elements in connection with an exploration of the significance of metaphors in anchoring individual and collective identity is innovative and allows for a unique analysis of public discourse in Europe.

White identities:a critical sociological approach

The study of white ethnicities is becoming increasingly important in the social sciences. This book provides a critical introduction to the topic. Whiteness has traditionally been seen as "ethnically transparent" - the marker against which other ethnicities are measured. This analysis is clearly incorrect, but only recently have many race and ethnicity scholars moved away from focusing on ethnic minorities and instead oriented their studies around the construction of white identities. Simon Clarke and Steve Garner's book is designed to guide students as they explore how white identities are forged using both sociological and psycho-social ideas. Including an excellent survey of the existing literature and original research from the UK, this book will be an invaluable guide for sociology students taking modules in race and ethnicity. Show More Show Less

Empirical research into white racialized identities in Britain

The intellectual project of using whiteness as an explicit tool of analysis is not one that has taken root in Britain. However, there are a number of empirical studies that investigate the racialization of white identities. In this article, I look at some empirical sociological fieldwork carried out on white identities in Britain since the early 1990s and identify the key themes arising. These themes are (in)visibility, norms and values, cultural capital and integration, contingent hierarchies and Empire in the present. In Britain, a pertinent distinction is between rural and urban settings for the enactment of white identities vis-a`-vis those of minorities, and there is an exploration of some of the contingency that draws the boundary between ‘white’ and ‘Other’ in different places. Areas of commonality and distinctiveness are noted in terms of the American work. In the last section, I argue that there are a number of issues to resolve around continuing such studies, including linking the micro-level to the macro-level analysis, and expanding to international comparative work.

Immigrant dislocated identities:Rachid Nini’s Diario de un ilegal

This article describes the process through which the subjectivity of the illegal immigrant is deconstructed and later reconstructed, as revealed by the Moroccan journalist and intellectual Rachid Nini in his book Diario de un ilegal/Diary of an Illegal Immigrant (2002), an account of the author's perils as an illegal immigrant in Spain. The analysis focuses firstly on the narrative form that Nini employs to give an account of his story, and secondly on the spatial displacement to which the subject and his subjectivity are exposed, which leads to the obliteration of his identity. The abrupt changes that the subject faces in a new location are paramount and impel him to a constant quest for self-definition and of negotiation with the new Other. Thus, the privileges that Nini enjoyed while in Morocco, those of a male journalist, poet, translator and intellectual with a university degree, disappear altogether once his plane has landed on the Canary Islands. In this new location, the place of origin and/or race are now what define his identity; he is now simply a moro - a Moor - he is not considered as an individual but, as will be shown, as a member of a homogenizing category which resists definition. The article finishes by addressing how Nini, in his quest to destroy homogenizing stereotypes, employs other stereotypes as though this were the only escape from the schizophrenic state the illegal immigrant identity had been forced into.

Critical approaches to care:understanding caring relations, identities and cutures

What does ‘care’ mean in contemporary society? How are caring relationships practised in different contexts? What resources do individuals and collectives draw upon in order to care for, care with and care about themselves and others? How do such relationships and practices relate to broader social processes? Care shapes people’s everyday lives and relationships and caring relations and practices influence the economies of different societies. This interdisciplinary book takes a nuanced and context-sensitive approach to exploring caring relationships, identities and practices within and across a variety of cultural, familial, geographical and institutional arenas. Grounded in rich empirical research and discussing key theoretical, policy and practice debates, it provides important, yet often neglected, international and cross-cultural perspectives. It is divided into four sections covering: caring within educational institutions; caring amongst communities and networks; caring and families; and caring across the life-course. Contributing to broader theoretical, philosophical and moral debates associated with the ethics of care, citizenship, justice, relationality and entanglements of power, Critical Approaches to Care is an important work for students and academics studying caring and care work in the fields of health and social care, sociology, social policy, anthropology, education, human geography and politics.

Assuming identities:the workings of intertextual metaphors in dating ads

In this article I propose an augmented pragmatic framework for interpreting metaphors of identity, built upon Grice's co-operative principle and incorporating Levinson's concept of uptake and Austin's notion of felicity. The framework is applied to a selection of intertextual identity metaphors drawn from The Guardian's dating ad column, ‘Soulmates’. First I provide a detailed exposition of the textual and discursive workings of a small selection of typical fictional metaphors in these dating ads, to show how co-textual selections steer interpretation and contribute to a metaphor's success, or felicity. Then discussion turns to consideration of how these textual and discursive processes might be mapped onto the proposed pragmatic framework of recognition, uptake and felicity.

Weak Polynomial Identities for M1,1(E)

* Partially supported by Universita` di Bari: progetto “Strutture algebriche, geometriche e descrizione degli invarianti ad esse associate”.

Neither security nor development? Czech and Hungarian identities and interests in the provincial reconstruction teams in Afghanistan

This article builds on the securitisation and post-development literature and it scrutinises the Czech and Hungarian legitimising discourses of the two countries’ respective Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in the Logar and Baghlan provinces of Afghanistan from 2007 to 2013. In spite of the hybrid civil–military character of the PRTs, their security–development nexus was absent and they were respectively securitised and “developmentalised” only indirectly and to a varying extent. The PRTs were mostly justified by the Czech Republic's NATO membership as an identity issue and they were justified as a Hungarian national interest and as both an obligation and an opportunity. Rather than merely importing NATO's arguments as suggested by the previous literature, the depoliticisation and positive connotation of the intervention in Afghanistan was constructed by the domestic NATO-related identities and interests in the Czech Republic and Hungary.

A Basis for Z-Graded Identities of Matrices over Infinite Fields

2000 Mathematics Subject Classification: 16R10, 16R20, 16R50

Z2-Graded Polynomial Identities for Superalgebras of Block-Triangular Matrices

000 Mathematics Subject Classification: Primary 16R50, Secondary 16W55.

Involution Matrix Algebras – Identities and Growth

2000 Mathematics Subject Classification: 16R50, 16R10.

Assuming identities online:experimental linguistics applied to the policing of online paedophile activity

This article uses a research project into the online conversations of sex offenders and the children they abuse to further the arguments for the acceptability of experimental work as a research tool for linguists. The research reported here contributes to the growing body of work within linguistics that has found experimental methods to be useful in answering questions about representation and constraints on linguistic expression (Hemforth 2013). The wider project examines online identity assumption in online paedophile activity and the policing of such activity, and involves dealing with the linguistic analysis of highly sensitive sexual grooming transcripts. Within the linguistics portion of the project, we examine theories of idiolect and identity through analysis of the ‘talk’ of perpetrators of online sexual abuse, and of the undercover officers that must assume alternative identities in order to investigate such crimes. The essential linguistic question in this article is methodological and concerns the applicability of experimental work to exploration of online identity and identity disguise. Although we touch on empirical questions, such as the sufficiency of linguistic description that will enable convincing identity disguise, we do not explore the experimental results in detail. In spite of the preference within a range of discourse analytical paradigms for ‘naturally occurring’ data, we argue that not only does the term prove conceptually problematic, but in certain contexts, and particularly in the applied forensic context described, a rejection of experimentally elicited data would limit the possible types and extent of analyses. Thus, it would restrict the contribution that academic linguistics can make in addressing a serious social problem.

Religious and sexual identities:a multi-faith exploration of young adults

Presenting qualitative and quantitative findings on the lived experiences of around seven hundred young adults from Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh and mixed-faith backgrounds, Religious and Sexual Identities provides an illuminating and nuanced analysis of young adults' perceptions and negotiations of their religious, sexual, youth and gender identities. It demonstrates how these young adults creatively construct meanings and social connections as they navigate demanding but exciting spaces in which their multiple identities intersect. Accessible quantitative analyses are combined with rich interview and video diary narratives in this theoretically-informed exploration of religious and sexual identities in contemporary society. © Andrew Kam-Tuck Yip and Sarah-Jane Page 2013. All rights reserved.