The discursive construction of place-identity: british lifestyle migrants in the Algarve

Tese dout., Philosophy, Lancaster University, 2011

The discursive construction of Portuguese national identity in the media thirty years after the 1974 revolution

Tese dout., Philosophy, Lancaster University, 2010

Digital unterwegs ohne das virtuelle soziale Netzwerk – qualitative Studie über Facebook-Verweigerung und Virtual Identity Suicide

Das virtuelle soziale Netzwerk Facebook feiert seinen zehnten Geburtstag. Mit über einer Milliarde aktiver Nutzer ist es seit seiner Entstehung zur weltweit größten Internetplattform zur Kommunikation avanciert. Dennoch gibt es in Deutschland eine große Anzahl an Menschen, die sich zwar täglich im Internet bewegt, aber auf eine Mitgliedschaft bei Facebook verzichtet. In dieser Arbeit werden die Gründe untersucht, warum manche Personen Facebook nicht nutzen. Die Leitfrage der Arbeit lautet: „Warum nutzen ausgewählte deutsche Internetnutzer Facebook nicht?“. Es wird zwischen zwei unterschiedlichen Personenkreisen, den Nicht- und den Ex-Nutzern, unterschieden. Basierend auf Leitfadeninterviews mit 25 Befragten, die mittels einer qualitativen Inhaltsanalyse ausgewertet werden, werden elf verschiedene Gründe für eine Verweigerung von Facebook identifiziert. Für die Nicht-Nutzer stellt die Art der Kommunikation den zentralen Grund dar, Facebook nicht zu verwenden. Die Ex-Nutzer wiederum sehen den fehlenden Nutzen der Anwendung als wichtigstes Argument gegen Facebook.

Identity, Well-being and Effectiveness: the Emotional Contexts of Teaching

This paper draws on findings from a four‐year longitudinal research project, commissioned by the Department for Education and Skills (DfES), which investigated Variations in Teachers’ Work, Lives and Effectiveness (VITAE). Drawing on data gathered from 300 teachers working in 100 primary and secondary schools in England, the research identified associations between commitment and effectiveness (perceived and in terms of pupil attainment) and found that there were more, and less, effective teachers in each of six professional life phases. It found that teachers in each of these phases experienced a number of different scenarios that challenged their abilities to sustain their commitment (i.e. remain resilient). This paper discusses how these impact, positively and negatively, on teachers’ capacities for sustaining their initial commitment and associations between identity, well‐being and effectiveness. It finds that teacher identities are neither intrinsically stable nor intrinsically fragmented, but that they can be more, or less, stable and more or less fragmented at different times and in different ways according to the influence of the interaction of a number of personal, professional and situated factors. The extent to which teachers are able to and are supported in managing the scenarios they experience will determine their sense of effectiveness.

Reform, Standards and Teacher Identity: Challenges of Sustaining Commitment

Teacher commitment has been found to be a critical predictor of teachers’ work performance, absenteeism, retention, burnout and turnover, as well as having an important influence on students’ motivation, achievement, attitudes towards learning and being at school (Firestone (1996). Educational Administration Quarterly, 32(2), 209–235; Graham (1996). Journal of Physical Education, Recreation and Dance, 67(1), 45–47; Louis (1998). School Effectiveness and School Improvement, 9(1), 1–27; Tsui & Cheng (1999). Educational Research and Evaluation, 5(3), 249–268). It is also a necessary ingredient to the successful implementation, adaptation or resistance reform agendas. Surprisingly, however, the relationship between teachers’ motivation, efficacy, job satisfaction and commitment, and between commitment and the quality of their work has not been the subject of extensive research. Some literature presents commitment as a feature of being and behaving as a professional (Helsby, Knight, McCulloch, Saunders, & Warburton (1997). A report to participants on the professional cultures of Teachers Research Project, Lancaster University, January). Others suggest that it fluctuates according to personal, institutional and policy contexts (Louis (1998). School Effectiveness and School Improvement, 9(1), 1–27) and identify different dimensions of commitment which interact and fluctuate (Tyree (1996). Journal of Educational Research, 89(5), 295–304). Others claim that teachers’ commitment tends to decrease progressively over the course of the teaching career (Fraser, Draper, & Taylor (1998). Evaluation and Research in Education, 12 (2), 61–71; Huberman (1993). The lives of teachers. London: Cassell). In this research, experienced teachers in England and Australia were interviewed about their understandings of commitment. The data suggest that commitment may be better understood as a nested phenomena at the centre of which is a set of core, relatively permanent values based upon personal beliefs, images of self, role and identity which are subject to challenge by change which is socio-politically constructed.

Changing Professional Identity in the Transition from Practitioner to Lecturer in Higher Education: an Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis

This research explores the experiences of five professional practitioners from disciplines including teaching, youth work, sport and health who had become lecturers in Higher Education. Their experiences are considered using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis and tentative conclusions are reached on the meaning of such experiences for the individuals. The work extends previous studies (Shreeve 2010, 2011; Gourlay 2011a, 2011b; Boyd & Harris 2010) to consider the relationship between knowledge and influence and how institutional preference for knowledge gained from research impacts on the validity of knowledge derived from professional experience. The research finds shared feelings associated with inauthenticity and loss arising from concerns that the contribution of the professional in Higher Education is undervalued. The research challenges the assumption that professional practitioners adopt the professional identity of a lecturer in Higher Education instead finding that they create their own professional identities in the liminal space between the professional and academic domains, but points to difficulties associated with constructed nature of such professional identities within the institutional structure of a Higher Education institution.

Before identity, gender and human rights

This is the beginning of an exploration of before as the thesis ‘before’ (temporally) and ‘be-fore’ (spatially) difference. Before denotes the origin and the desired destination. Before (in the double sense of ‘before’ and ‚be-in-the-fore’) opens up a space of pre-difference, of origin and of forgotten memory, as well as a space of desire, objective, illusion of teleology, unity, completion. Applied to the two domains of Human Rights and Sex/Gender, the space of ‘before’ yields two slightly different vistas: in human rights, a premodern, functionally undifferentiated society which had to invent human rights as its safeguards of functional differentiation. In Sex/Gender, 'before' brings a self-referential construction: that of ipseity, as the form of identity beyond comparison that does not play with id but with ipsum. Ipseity is inoperable but not useless. It is inoperable because it cannot be observed from anywhere without suffering rupture. It is not useless because it offers a ground for the reconceptualisation of difference, both through awe and desire.

Purity of Blood and Caste. Identity Narratives among Early Modern Goan Elites

This essay analyses the roles played by purity of blood and caste in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century identity narratives of Goan clites. Goa and its population are usually excluded from the mainstream literature of Indian social history, and seldom related to the early-modern Atlantic world, making this case study all the more valuable as a place to think the topic of blood and caste. The early establishment and the longevity of the Portuguese imperial presence (1510-1961) in Goa, its location at the crossroads of multiple cultural geographies (Iberian and Indian, and later, also Dutch, British and French), as well as the systematic process of religious conversion of its inhabitants and the questions of legal equality that conversion entailed, all intensified the types, textures, layers and meanings of experiences of social differentiation in this colonial context. This mapping of the experiences of purity of blood and caste in early-modem Goa therefore illuminates from a new angle the role of European imperial powers in the mUltiple expressions of racial classification.

Book review: Jiří Přibáň, legal symbolism: on law, time and European identity

This is a book review of Jiří Přibáň, Legal Symbolism: On Law, Time and European Identity, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2007, 226 pp, ISBN: 978-0-7546-7073-5

(Un)settling the Irish emigrant identity: representation and construction of an Irish emigrant/exile identity in the travel narratives of Kathleen Nevin and William Bulfin

Through an examination of the travel works of William Bulfin, Tales of the Pampas (1900) and Kathleen Nevin's You'll Never Go Back this paper considers the representation of the Irish in Argentina and the contribution of these narratives in the construction of identity and the reconstruction of the emigrant identity into an exilic one. Escaping one colonial framework (Britain/Ireland), travelling to and writing from within another postcolonial construct (Argentina and the Spanish Empire), this paper analyses how Bulfin and Nevin use language as a tool to construct, and even invent, an Irish identity. This identity is inextricably linked to home and the desire to return there. Despite this desire, Argentina becomes internalised to some extent, which in Bulfin can be seen in the mix of the Spanish, English and Irish languages in his stories, highlighting that the Irish were doing with language what they had already done with their lives; trying to adapt it to their new situation. In Nevin, the contrast between us and them (Irish and 'Native') demonstrates her attempts to shape an exilic rather than emigrant mentality. Through these texts I analyse how Argentina never quite becomes a new home, but a place where Irish identity is played out and acquires form.

Jewish Identity in the Modern World: Its Nature and Dynamics, pt. 3

Jewish identity and its development through the Enlightenment, Antisemitism and Zionism.

Jewish Identity in the Modern World: Its Nature and Dynamics, pt. 2

Discussion of Jewish Identity and its development through the Enlightenment, Antisemitism and Zionism.