Understandings of transnational families in debates on Migration and development

International migration sets in motion a range of significant transnational processes that connect countries and people. How migration interacts with development and how policies might promote and enhance such interactions have, since the turn of the millennium, gained attention on the international agenda. The recognition that transnational practices connect migrants and their families across sending and receiving societies forms part of this debate. The ways in which policy debate employs and understands transnational family ties nevertheless remain underexplored. This article sets out to discern the understandings of the family in two (often intermingled) debates concerned with transnational interactions: The largely state and policydriven discourse on the potential benefits of migration on economic development, and the largely academic transnational family literature focusing on issues of care and the micro-politics of gender and generation. Emphasizing the relation between diverse migration-development dynamics and specific family positions, we ask whether an analytical point of departure in respective transnational motherhood, fatherhood or childhood is linked to emphasizing certain outcomes. We conclude by sketching important strands of inclusions and exclusions of family matters in policy discourse and suggest ways to better integrate a transnational family perspective in global migration-development policy.

Narrative Deliberation? On Storytelling as a Necessary Component of Public Deliberation

This paper deals with the place of narrative, that is, storytelling, in public deliberation. A distinction is made between weak and strong conceptions of narrative. According to the weak one, storytelling is but one rhetorical device among others with which social actors produce and convey meaning. In contrast, the strong conception holds that narrative is necessary to communicate, and argue, about topics such as the human experience of time, collective identities and the moral and ethical validity of values. The upshot of this idea is that storytelling should be a necessary component of any ideal of public deliberation. Contrary to recent work by deliberative theorists, who tend to adopt the weak conception of narrative, the author argues for embracing the strong one. The main contention of this article is that stories not only have a legitimate place in deliberation, but are even necessary to formulate certain arguments in the fi rst place; for instance, arguments drawing on historical experience. This claim, namely that narrative is constitutive of certain arguments, in the sense that, without it, said reasons cannot be articulated, is illustrated by deliberative theory’s own narrative underpinnings. Finally, certain possible objections against the strong conception of narrative are dispelled.

Sherman Alexie’s "The Toughest Indian in the World": Amalgamating the Oral and the Written Traditions

This article argues that The Toughest Indian in the World (2000) by Native-American author Sherman Alexie combines elements of his tribal (oral) tradition with others coming from the Western (literary) short-story form. Like other Native writers — such as Momaday, Silko or Vizenor — , Alexie is seen to bring into his short fiction characteristics of his people’s oral storytelling that make it much more dialogical and participatory. Among the author’s narrative techniques reminiscent of the oral tradition, aggregative repetitions of patterned thoughts and strategically-placed indeterminacies play a major role in encouraging his readers to engage in intellectual and emotional exchanges with the stories. Assisted by the ideas of theorists such as Ong (1988), Evers and Toelken (2001), and Teuton (2008), this article shows how Alexie’s short fiction is enriched and revitalized by the incorporation of oral elements. The essay also claims that new methods of analysis and assessment may be needed for this type of bicultural artistic forms. Despite the differences between the two modes of communication, Alexie succeeds in blending features and techniques from both traditions, thus creating a new hybrid short-story form that suitably conveys the trying experiences faced by his characters.

Faulkner revisited : narrating property, race, gender and history in William Faulkner's Go Down, Moses, Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and Gloria Naylor's Mama Day

My thesis explores the formation of the subject in the novels of Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, and Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day. I attach the concept of property in terms of how male protagonists are obsessed with materialistic ownership and with the subordination of women who, as properties, consolidate their manhood. The three novelists despite their racial, gendered, and literary differences share the view that identity and truth are mere social and cultural constructs. I incorporate the work of Judith Butler and other poststructuralist figures, who see identity as a matter of performance rather than a natural entity. My thesis explores the theme of freedom, which I attached to the ways characters use their bodies either to confine or to emancipate themselves from the restricting world of race, class, and gender. The three novelists deconstruct any system of belief that promulgates the objectivity of truth in historical documents. History in the three novels, as with the protagonists, perception of identity, remains a social construct laden with distortions to serve particular political or ideological agendas. My thesis gives voice to African American female characters who are associated with love and racial and gender resistance. They become the reservoirs of the African American legacy in terms of their association with the oral and intuitionist mode of knowing, which subverts the male characters’ obsession with property and with the mainstream empiricist world. In this dissertation, I use the concept of hybridity as a literary and theoretical devise that African-American writers employ. In effect, I embark on the postcolonial studies of Henry Louise Gates, Paul Gilroy, W. E. B Du Bois, James Clifford, and Arjun Appadurai in order to reflect upon the fluidity of Morrison’s and Naylor’s works. I show how these two novelists subvert Faulkner’s essentialist perception of truth, and of racial and gendered identity. They associate the myth of the Flying African with the notion of hybridity by making their male protagonists criss-cross Northern and Southern regions. I refer to Mae Gwendolyn Henderson’s article on “Speaking in Tongues” in my analysis of how Naylor subverts the patriarchal text of both Faulkner and Morrison in embarking on a more feminine version of the flying African, which she relates to an ex-slave, Sapphira Wade, a volatile female character who resists fixed claim over her story and identity. In dealing with the concept of hybridity, I show that Naylor rewrites both authors’ South by making Willow Springs a more fluid space, an assumption that unsettles the scores of critics who associate the island with authenticity and exclusive rootedness.

Positive Identity Construction: Insights from Classical and Contemporary Theoretical Perspectives

This chapter develops a more comprehensive theory of positive identity construction by explicating proposed mechanisms for constructing and sustaining positive individual identities. The chapter offers a broad, illustrative sampling of mechanisms for positive identity construction that are grounded in various theoretical traditions within identity scholarship. Four classical theories of identity—social identity theory, identity theory, narrative-as-identity, and identity work—offer perspectives on the impetus and mechanisms for positive identity construction. The Dutton et al. (2010) typology of positive identity is revisited to highlight those sources of positivity that each classical theory explains how to enhance. As a next step in research, positive organizational scholarship (POS) scholars and identity scholars are encouraged to examine the conditions under which increasing the positivity of an identity is associated with generative social outcomes (e.g., engaging in prosocial practices, being invested in others’ positive identity development, and deepening mutual understanding of the complex, multifaceted nature of identity).

Persons : their identity and individuation

This study is about the nature of persons and personal identity. It belongs to a tradition that maintains that in order to understand what it is to be a person we must clarify what personal identity consists in. In this pursuit, I differentiate between the problems (i) How do persons persist? and (ii) What facts, if any, does personal identity consist in? Concerning the first question, I argue that persons persist three-dimensionally (the endurance view), and not four-dimensionally (the perdurarne view), on the ground that objects must always fall under some substance sortal concept S (the sortal dependency of individuation), and that the concept person entails that objects falling under it are three-dimensional. Concerning the second question, I differentiate between Criterianists, who maintain that it is possible to specify a non-circular and informative criterion for personal identity, and Non-Criterianists, who deny that such a specification is possible. I argue against Criterianist accounts of personal identity on the ground that they are either (i) circular, (ii) violate the intrinsicality of identity or (iii) do not adequately represent what we are essentially. I further criticise three Psychological Non-Criterianist accounts of personal identity on the ground that they wrongly assume that 'person' refers to mental entities. Instead I formulate the Revised Animal Attribute View where person is understood as a basic sortal concept which picks out a biological sort of enduring animals. In this, I claim that the real essence of a person is determined by the real essence of the kind of animal he is, without thereby denying that persons have a real essence as persons.

Shakespeare and the Re/Vision of Indian Heritage in the Postcolonial British Context

As part of the 2012 World Shakespeare Festival, the Royal Shakespeare Company staged a production of Much Ado About Nothing set in India. Shakespeare’s Messina in sixteenth century Italy was transposed to twenty-first century Delhi and with a company of actors who were all of Indian heritage. The casting of individual British Asian actors in mainstream UK productions of Shakespeare is no longer unusual. What was unprecedented here, however, was that not only was the entire cast ‘Asian’ but the director was not, as is standard practice, a leading member of the white British theatrical establishment. Instead the director, Iqbal Khan, is the son of a Pakistani father who migrated to England in the 1960s. I use the term ‘Indian heritage’ with great caution conscious that what began under the British Raj in nineteenth century India led through subsequent economic imperatives and exigencies, and political schism to a history of migratory patterns which means that today’s British Asian population is a complex demographic construct representing numerous different languages and cultural and religious affiliations. The routes which brought those actors to play imagined Indian Shakespeare in Stratford-upon-Avon in July 2012 were many and various. I explore in this chapter the way in which that complexity of heritage has been brought to bear on the revisioning of Shakespeare by British Asian theatre makers operating outside the theatrical mainstream. In general because of the social, economic and institutional challenges facing British Asian theatre artists, the number of independent professional companies is comparatively small and for the most part, their work has focused on creating drama which interrogates thorny questions of identity formation and contemporary cultural practices within the ‘new’ British Asian communities. Nevertheless for artists born and/or educated in the UK the Western classical canon, including of course Shakespeare, is as much part of their heritage as the classical Indian narratives and performance traditions which so powerfully evoke collective memories of the lost ‘home’ of their elders. By far the most consistent engagement with Shakespeare has been seen in the work of Tara Arts which was the first British Asian theatre company set up in 1977. The artistic director Jatinder Verma brings his own ‘transformed and translated’ heritage as an East African-born, Punjabi-speaking, English-educated, Indian migrant to the UK to plays as diverse as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Troilus and Cressida , The Tempest and The Merchant of Venice. I discuss examples of Tara productions in the light of the way Shakespeare’s plays have been used to forge both creative synergies between parallel cultures and provide a means of addressing the ontological ruptures and dislocations associated with the colonial past.

Lo que sé de los hombrecillos de Juan José Millás: la ficción psicótica de la sociedad perfecta.

This short essay deals with literary representations of identity and of social reality, especially in relation to the novelistic works published by the Spanish writer Juan José Millás. The article is divided into three parts. The first section is dedicated to a general overview of the new perspectives brought by the contemporary ‘linguistic turn’ in culture, which is currently considered as the product of different discourses and not as an ontological datum. The postmodern condition, on the other hand, is described as the age in which it has become radically difficult to rely on such ideas as “nation” and “people” for the construction of personal identity. The second part of the article identifies Millás’ poetics as an excellent example of describing the neurotic symptoms produced by the urban way of life in Western communities. Millás recognizes the separateness between language and material reality as the origin of the subject's isolation, especially in contemporary life. Finally, the third part handles with Lo que sé de los hombrecillos, the last novel by Millás, in which we witness a significant switch from neurosis to psychosis in the mind of the protagonist who offers us a distorted realisation of his idea of community and plenitude.

Global citizenship: an education or an identity?

This paper considers the recent focus on citizenship within education by taking curricular reform within Scottish secondary schooling and its linkage with higher education as a case study. In Scotland the Curriculum for Excellence reform places citizenship as one of four main capacities that pupils must work towards as part of their education. Likewise, there has been a move in within the Scottish higher education Enhancement Themes framework to include citizenship as part of graduate attributes that students work towards as they progress through their courses. A unifying theme in these reforms is the need for students to take a global perspective and work across different disciplines by, for example, considering how knowledge relates to wider issues such as in relation to sustainable development, e-democracy or human rights. One feature that unites these disparate areas is that, above all, students must learn to be active through the acquisition of appropriate knowledge and skills. In this model of citizenship education, learners are enabled to develop their sense of citizenship identity in response to a fast-paced world of innovation and change. Citizenship is therefore linked to a futurist agenda, where the learner-citizen is positioned as an ongoing project, as something to be worked at or perhaps worked on. However, this kind of notion of agency is an expression of an ideological construction of the citizen as a flexible resource for society. Such citizens are active in the sense of being adaptive to change through utilizing intellectual skills but without a sense of identity grounded in one’s commitments or reflexive engagement with different forms of understanding. The paper offers a critical assessment of this learner-citizen discourse as focusing on ratiocination rather than relational identity.

A VOICE OF THEIR OWN: MUSIC AND SOCIAL COHESION IN TURKISH ALEVI LIFE

This dissertation examines the role that music has played in the expression of identity and revitalization of culture of the Alevis in Turkey, since the start of their sociocultural revival movement in the late 1980s. Music is central to Alevi claims of ethnic and religious difference—singing and playing the bağlama (Turkish folk lute) constitutes an expressive practice in worship and everyday life. Based on research conducted from 2012 to 2014, I investigate and present Alevi music through the lens of discourses on the construction of identity as a social and musical process. Alevi musicians perform a revived repertoire of the ritual music and folk songs of Anatolian bards and dervish-lodge poets that developed over several centuries. Contemporary media and performance contexts have blurred former distinctions between sacred and secular, yet have provided new avenues to build community in an urban setting. I compare music performances in the worship services of urban and small-town areas, and other community events such as devotional meetings, concerts, clubs, and broadcast and social media to illustrate the ways that participation—both performing and listening—reinforces identity and solidarity. I also examine the influence of these different contexts on performers’ musical choices, and the power of music to evoke a range of responses and emotional feelings in the participants. Through my investigation I argue that the Alevi music repertoire is not only a cultural practice but also a symbol of power and collective action in their struggle for human rights and self-determination. As Alevis have faced a redefined Turkish nationalism that incorporates Sunni Muslim piety, this music has gained even greater potency in their resistance to misrecognition as a folkloric, rather than a living, tradition.

Faulkner revisited : narrating property, race, gender and history in William Faulkner's Go Down, Moses, Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and Gloria Naylor's Mama Day

My thesis explores the formation of the subject in the novels of Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, and Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day. I attach the concept of property in terms of how male protagonists are obsessed with materialistic ownership and with the subordination of women who, as properties, consolidate their manhood. The three novelists despite their racial, gendered, and literary differences share the view that identity and truth are mere social and cultural constructs. I incorporate the work of Judith Butler and other poststructuralist figures, who see identity as a matter of performance rather than a natural entity. My thesis explores the theme of freedom, which I attached to the ways characters use their bodies either to confine or to emancipate themselves from the restricting world of race, class, and gender. The three novelists deconstruct any system of belief that promulgates the objectivity of truth in historical documents. History in the three novels, as with the protagonists, perception of identity, remains a social construct laden with distortions to serve particular political or ideological agendas. My thesis gives voice to African American female characters who are associated with love and racial and gender resistance. They become the reservoirs of the African American legacy in terms of their association with the oral and intuitionist mode of knowing, which subverts the male characters’ obsession with property and with the mainstream empiricist world. In this dissertation, I use the concept of hybridity as a literary and theoretical devise that African-American writers employ. In effect, I embark on the postcolonial studies of Henry Louise Gates, Paul Gilroy, W. E. B Du Bois, James Clifford, and Arjun Appadurai in order to reflect upon the fluidity of Morrison’s and Naylor’s works. I show how these two novelists subvert Faulkner’s essentialist perception of truth, and of racial and gendered identity. They associate the myth of the Flying African with the notion of hybridity by making their male protagonists criss-cross Northern and Southern regions. I refer to Mae Gwendolyn Henderson’s article on “Speaking in Tongues” in my analysis of how Naylor subverts the patriarchal text of both Faulkner and Morrison in embarking on a more feminine version of the flying African, which she relates to an ex-slave, Sapphira Wade, a volatile female character who resists fixed claim over her story and identity. In dealing with the concept of hybridity, I show that Naylor rewrites both authors’ South by making Willow Springs a more fluid space, an assumption that unsettles the scores of critics who associate the island with authenticity and exclusive rootedness.

Punks and believers An ethnographic study of subcultural, religious and non-religious identities in Indonesian punk scenes

Punk subculture is often assumed to have an antagonistic disposition towards religion. In this thesis, I examine this relationship in the Indonesian context, where the level of religious devotion is higher than in Western societies. I concentrate on how Indonesian punks who belong to secular punk communities negotiate the relationship between their religious or non-religious and subcultural identities. In addition, I examine the status of religion on the collective level in the punk communities. I collected the ethnographic data on Java in 2012. In addition to semi-structured interviews and participant observation, the analyzed data consists of social media sites, punk records and an online enquiry. I utilized thematic analysis in the study. The notion of identity is understood the way Stuart Hall has conceptualized it. Another essential concept, affect, is derived from Lawrence Grossberg’s theorization. The religious participants separated punk and religion in their lives. Many Muslim informants used an Islamic typology to separate one’s personal relationship with Allah and one’s relationship with other people. While some participants filtered away certain elements of “Western punk”, the majority of them saw ideological similarities between punk and Islam. This relationship was negotiated using both affective and ideological rationalizations. Non-religious punks respected religious people, but criticized radical forms of religiosity. Some of them described the difficulties of maintaining a non-religious identity in Indonesia, and that they have felt less marginalized in the punk community. Almost all of the participants stated that punk scenes should be religiously neutral and viewed integrating punk and religion as a problematic phenomenon.

Women Creators: Artistry and Sacrifice in the Novels of Virginia Woolf

This thesis examines different facets of feminine artistry in Virginia Woolf's novels with the purpose of defining her conception of women artists and the role sacrifice plays in it. The project follows characters in "Mrs. Dalloway," "To the Lighthouse," and "Between the Acts" as they attempt to create art despite society's restrictions; it studies the suffering these women experience under regimented institutions and arbitrary gender roles. From Woolf’s earlier texts to her last, she embraces the uncertainty of identity, even as she portrays the artist’s sacrifice in the early-to-mid twentieth century, specifically as the creative female identity fights to adapt to male-dominated spaces. Through a close-reading approach coupled with biographical and historical research, this thesis concludes that although the narratives of Woolf's novels demand the woman artist sacrifice for the sake of pursuing creation, Woolf praises the attempt and considers it a crueler fate to live with unfulfilled potential.

Making life choices : facilitating identity formation in young adults

This dissertation makes a contribution to the growing literature on identity formation by formulating, implementing, and testing the effectiveness of a psychosocial intervention, the Making Life Choices (MLC) Workshops, designed to facilitate the process of identity formation. More specifically, the MLC Workshops were designed to foster the development and use of critical cognitive and communicative skills and competencies in choosing and fulfilling life goals and values. The MLC Workshops consist of a psychosocial group intervention that includes both didactic and group experiential exercises. The primary research question for this study concerned the effectiveness of the MLC Workshop relative to a control condition. Effectiveness was evaluated on two levels: skills development and reduction of distress. First, the effectiveness of MLC in fostering the development of critical competencies was evaluated relative to a control condition, and no statistically significant differences were found. Second, the effectiveness of MLC in decreasing life distress was also evaluated relative to the control condition. While participants in the MLC workshop had no significant decrease in distress, they did have statistically significant improvement in life satisfaction in the Personal Domain.

Rational choice, social identity, and beliefs about oneself

Social identity poses one of the most important challenges to rational choice theory, but rational choice theorists do not hold a common position regarding identity. On one hand, externalist rational choice ignores the concept of identity or reduces it to revealed preferences. On the other hand, internalist rational choice considers identity as a key concept in explaining social action because it permits expressive motivations to be included in the models. However, internalist theorists tend to reduce identity to desire—the desire of a person to express his or her social being. From an internalist point of view, that is, from a viewpoint in which not only desires but also beliefs play a key role in social explanations as mental entities, this article rejects externalist reductionism and proposes a redefinition of social identity as a net of beliefs about oneself, beliefs that are indexical, robust, and socially shaped.