On the periphery of Europe:an investigation of the construction of Turkish-Cypriot adolescent identities

This research study investigates the identities of a group of adolescent Turkish Cypriot (TC) students in their final year of secondary education in northern Cyprus, which it is argued, lies on the periphery of Europe. The main aim is to explore the linguistic construction of TC youth identities within school contexts but primarily the classroom in a political context in which the uniquely ambiguous status of Turkish Cypriots within the European Union (EU) continues, and where Turkish Cypriots are considered to be Europeans as individuals but not as a separate political entity. A secondary focus is upon the students’ investment in learning the English language. Identity is defined as a lifelong process of 'the social positioning of self and the other' (Bucholtz and Hall, 2005:586) which is endlessly re-created (Tabouret-Keller, 1997) and the distinction between the terms 'identity' and 'identities' is discussed. The study explores the social construction of TC students' identities using an ethnomethodological case study. By using Conversation Analysis of selected extracts from the data collected through observations of classroom interactions, focus group discussions and interviews, the thesis shows that TC students perceive and enact 'in-betweener identities' in terms of their ethnicity, societal values, age, religion, languages and Europeanness. Being on the periphery of the EU, it is argued that the Turkish Cypriots of northern Cyprus are the ‘peripheral members of the EU, remaining present yet absent. They are personally EU citizens but not as a society and cannot be represented within EU institutions. But will they ever acquire full membership, as any peripheral member would aspire to have or will they remain in between occident and orient? The possible answers to this question and the resulting ideological associations will shape how and to what extent these TC students perceive and enact their identities.

The political construction of old age as reflected in online discussions

The present paper examines the political construction of ageing and conflicts between generations. The process of construction is driven not merely by institutional actors and opinion leaders in the media, but also by citizens who talk to each other about politics. In my paper I have focused on the latter by observing online discussions that appear on the political forum Index.hu. Disagreement between old people’ and ‘young people’ evolved mainly about the pension system, thus the examination of ageing constructions is embedded in this context. In spite of its numerous limits, the method used seems to be suitable for providing hypotheses for further research. In the first part of the study I present the applied theoretical approach in which the concept of stereotype is connected with the concept of social construction. After that I focus on investigating the activity, origin and contents of the stereotypes that influence the construction of ageing. In the third part of the study the components of the constructions are demonstrated.

Social construction of economic exchanges: A Weberian approach

The subject-matter of this dissertation is the social construction of economic exchanges, with an emphasis on market transactions. Applying a Weberian approach, the dissertation analyzes the social construction of economic exchanges at the following analytical levels: the agency-level, the institutional-structural level and the comparative-historical level. At the agency-level, the dissertation explores the role that human actors and social actions play in economic exchanges, especially market transactions. Theoretically elaborated and empirically examined is the assumption of market-economic exchanges as particular types of social action. At the institutional-structural level, the dissertation examines the relations of society and culture to market-economic exchanges. The assumption that the market economy is situated in and influenced by a broader social-cultural framework is advanced and evaluated in light of empirical findings. At the comparative-historical level, the dissertation engages in an analysis of the social construction of economic exchanges across various societies and over time. The assumption of the historical specificity of the market economy is reexamined, and the social construction of economic exchanges in traditional, capitalist and post-socialist societies is subject to comparative investigation. In the conclusion, further theoretical, methodological and empirical implications as well as directions for future analyses are discussed. ^

Disease and hygiene in the construction of a nation: The public sphere, public space, and the private domain in Buenos Aires, 1871–1910

The maturation of the public sphere in Argentina during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a critical element in the nation-building process and the overall development of the modern state. Within the context of this evolution, the discourse of disease generated intense debates that subsequently influenced policies that transformed the public spaces of Buenos Aires and facilitated state intervention within the private domains of the city’s inhabitants. Under the banner of hygiene and public health, municipal officials thus Europeanized the nation’s capital through the construction of parks and plazas and likewise utilized the press to garner support for the initiatives that would remedy the unsanitary conditions and practices of the city. Despite promises to the contrary, the improvements to the public spaces of Buenos Aires primarily benefited the porteño elite while the efforts to root out disease often targeted working-class neighborhoods. The model that reformed the public space of Buenos Aires, including its socially differentiated application of aesthetic order and public health policies, was ultimately employed throughout the Argentine Republic as the consolidated political elite rolled out its national program of material and social development.

History education and the construction of national identity in Iran

This study examined the representation of national and religious dimensions of Iranian history and identity in Iranian middle school history textbooks. Furthermore, through a qualitative case study in a school in the capital city of Tehran, teachers' use of textbooks in classrooms, students' response, their perceptions of the country's past, and their definitions of national identity is studied. The study follows a critical discourse analysis framework by focusing on the subjectivity of the text and examining how specific concepts, in this case collective identities, are constructed through historical narratives and how social actors, in this case students, interact with , and make sense of, the process. My definition of national identity is based on the ethnosymbolism paradigm (Smith, 2003) that accommodates both pre-modern cultural roots of a nation and the development and trajectory of modern political institutions. Two qualitative approaches of discourse analysis and case study were employed. The textbooks selected were those published by the Ministry of Education; universally used in all middle schools across the country in 2009. The case study was conducted in a girls' school in Tehran. The students who participated in the study were ninth grade students who were in their first year of high school and had just finished a complete course of Iranian history in middle school. Observations were done in history classes in all three grades of the middle school. The study findings show that textbooks present a generally negative discourse of Iran's long history as being dominated by foreign invasions and incompetent kings. At the same time, the role of Islam and Muslim clergy gradually elevates in salvaging the country from its despair throughout history, becomes prominent in modern times, and finally culminates in the Islamic Revolution as the ultimate point of victory for the Iranian people. Throughout this representation, Islam becomes increasingly dominant in the textbooks' narrative of Iranian identity and by the time of the Islamic Revolution morphs into its single most prominent element. On the other hand, the students have created their own image of Iran's history and Iranian identity that diverges from that of the textbooks especially in their recollection of modern times. They have internalized the generally negative narrative of textbooks, but have not accepted the positive role of Islam and Muslim clergy. Their notion of Iranian identity is dominated by feelings of defeat and failure, anecdotal elements of pride in the very ancient history, and a sense of passivity and helplessness.

The discursive construction of Japanese identity and its haunting others

This dissertation examined the formation of Japanese identity politics after World War II. Since World War II, Japan has had to deal with a contradictory image of its national self. On the one hand, as a nation responsible for colonizing fellow Asian countries in the 1930s and 1940s, Japan has struggled with an image/identity as a regional aggressor. On the other hand, having faced the harsh realities of defeat after the war, Japan has seen itself depicted as a victim. By employing the technique of discourse analysis as a way to study identity formation through official foreign policy documents and news media narratives, this study reconceptualized Japanese foreign policy as a set of discursive practices that attempt to produce renewed images of Japan's national self. The dissertation employed case studies to analyze two key sites of Japanese postwar identity formation: (1) the case of Okinawa, an island/territory integral to postwar relations between Japan and the United States and marked by a series of US military rapes of native Okinawan girls; and (2) the case of comfort women in Japan and East Asia, which has led to Japan being blamed for its wartime sexual enslavement of Asian women. These case studies found that it was through coping with the haunting ghost of its wartime past that Japan sought to produce "postwar Japan" as an identity distinct from "wartime imperial Japan" or from "defeated, emasculated Japan" and, thus, hoped to emerge as a "reborn" moral and pacifist nation. The research showed that Japan struggled to invent a new self in a way that mobilized gendered dichotomies and, furthermore, created "others" who were not just spatially located (the United States, Asian neighboring nations) but also temporally marked ("old Japan"). The dissertation concluded that Japanese foreign policy is an ongoing struggle to define the Japanese national self vis-à-vis both spatial and historical "others," and that, consequently, postwar Japan has always been haunted by its past self, no matter how much Japan's foreign policy discourses were trying to make this past self into a distant or forgotten other.

Design and construction of a portable force-reflecting manual controller for teleoperation systems

A man-machine system called teleoperator system has been developed to work in hazardous environments such as nuclear reactor plants. Force reflection is a type of force feedback in which forces experienced by the remote manipulator are fed back to the manual controller. In a force-reflecting teleoperation system, the operator uses the manual controller to direct the remote manipulator and receives visual information from a video image and/or graphical animation on the computer screen. This thesis presents the design of a portable Force-Reflecting Manual Controller (FRMC) for the teleoperation of tasks such as hazardous material handling, waste cleanup, and space-related operations. The work consists of the design and construction of a prototype 1-Degree-of-Freedom (DOF) FRMC, the development of the Graphical User Interface (GUI), and system integration. Two control strategies - PID and fuzzy logic controllers are developed and experimentally tested. The system response of each is analyzed and evaluated. In addition, the concept of a telesensation system is introduced, and a variety of design alternatives of a 3-DOF FRMC are proposed for future development.

Vulnerable children, stigmatised smokers : The social construction of target audiences in media debates on policies regulating smoking in vehicles

Acknowledgements S.H., S.S. and S.D. developed the study concept and gained funding for the work. S.H. developed the study design. J.B. and H.W. drafted the manuscript. J.B. and H.W. developed the coding frame and coded the articles. S.H., S.S. and S.D. critically revised the manuscript. Funding The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This project was funded by Cancer Research UK (C47682/A16930) and the Scottish School of Public Health Research. Sheila Duffy is Chief Executive of ASH Scotland. Heide Weishaar and Shona Hilton are funded by the UK Medical Research Council as part of the Informing Healthly Public Policy programme (MC_UU12017-15) at the MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit, University of Glasgow. The authors declare no additional conflicting interest.

Who Do You Say I Am?: African American Women Clergy and the Construction of Ministerial Identity

The purpose of this study was to examine how African American women in ordained ministry construct and develop ministerial identity in the context of the Black Church. This study employed a qualitative multicase study methodology and the purposive participant sample was comprised of 13 women who were ordained or pursuing ordination in the Baltimore or Washington conferences of the AME Church. Semistructured in-depth interviews were conducted with the participants, and member checks were employed as a triangulation method. This study reveals that the primary factor impacting ministerial identity development is the relationship with the senior pastor and explores the various ways in which that impact is felt. This study also connects aspects of that relationship and its resulting impact to African American cultural traditions and values, as well as offers several suggestions to women cultivating ministerial identity and the organizational systems within which that process occurs.

The geographies of encounter: investigating the spatiality and construction of 'meaningful' encounters with difference through the experiences of international students at University College Cork, Ireland

The purpose of this research is to investigate how international students negotiate encounters with Irish students and construct ‘meaning’ from those encounters in the spaces of the university and city. As cities are increasingly characterised by a multiplexity of diversity, the issue of living with difference is becoming more and more pertinent. In the wake of escalating socio-spatial polarisation, inter-cultural tension, racism, and xenophobia, the geographies of encounter seek to untangle the interactions that occur in the quotidian activities and spaces of everyday life to determine whether such encounters might reduce prejudice, antipathy and indifference and establish common social bonds (Amin 2002; Valentine 2008). Thus far, the literature has investigated a number of sites of encounter; public space, the home, neighbourhoods, schools, sports clubs, public transport, cafes and libraries (Wilson 2011; Schuermans 2013; Hemming 2011; Neal and Vincent 2011; Mayblin, Valentine and Anderrson 2015; Laurier and Philo 2006; Valentine and Sadgrove 2013; Harris, Valentine and Piekut 2014; Fincher and Iveson 2008). While these spaces produce a range of outcomes, the literature remains frustrated by a lack of clarity of what constitutes a ‘meaningful’ encounter and how such encounters might be planned for. Drawing on survey and interview data with full-time international students at University College Cork, Ireland, this study contributes to understanding how encounters are shaped by the construction and reproduction of particular identities in particular spaces, imbuing spaces with uneven power frameworks that produce diverse outcomes. Rather than identifying a singular ‘meaningful’ outcome of encounter as a potential panacea to the issues of exclusion and oppression, the contention here is to recognise a range of outcomes that are created by individuals in a range of ways. To define one outcome of encounter as ‘meaningful’ is to overlook the scale of intensity of diverse interactions and the multiplicity of ways in which people learn to live with difference.

Financial media, globalisation, and China’s economic integration: comparing narrative construction of the Economist and Caijing

In June 2015, legal frameworks of the Asian Infrastructural Investment Bank were signed by its 57 founding members. Proposed and initiated by China, this multilateral development bank is considered to be an Asian counterpart to break the monopoly of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. In October 2015, China’s Central Bank announced a benchmark interest rate cut to combat the economic slowdown. The easing policy coincides with the European Central Bank’s announcement of doubts over US Fed’s commitment to raise interest rates. Global stock markets responded positively to China’s move, with the exception of the indexes from Wall Street (Bland, 2015; Elliott, 2015). In the meantime, China’s ‘One Belt, One Road’ (or New Silk Road Economic Belt) became atopic of discourse in relation to its growing global economy, as China pledged $40 billion to trade and infrastructure projects (Bermingham, 2015). The foreign policy aims to reinforce the economic belt from western China through Central Asia towards Europe, as well as to construct maritime trading routes from coastal China through the South China Sea (Summers, 2015). In 2012, The Economist launched a new China section, to reveal the complexity of the‘meteoric rise’ of China. John Micklethwait, who was then the chief editor of the magazine, said that China’s emergence as a global power justified giving it a section of its own(Roush, 2012). In July 2015, Hu Shuli, the former chief editor of Caijing, announced the launch of a think tank and financial data service division called Caixin Insight Group, which encompasses the new Caixin China Purchasing Managers Index (PMI). Incooperation with with Markit Group, a principal global provider of PMI, the index soon became a widely cited economic indicator. One anecdote from November’s Caixin shows how much has changed: in a high-profile dialogue between Hu Shuli and Kevin Rudd, Hu insisted on asking questions in English; interestingly, the former Prime Minister of Australia insisted on replying in Chinese. These recent developments point to one thing: the economic ascent of China and its increasing influence on the power play between economics and politics in world markets. China has begun to take a more active role in rule making and enforcement under neoliberal frameworks. However, due to the country’s size and the scale of its economy in comparison to other countries, China’s version of globalisation has unique characteristics. The ‘Capitalist-socialist’ paradox is vital to China’s market-oriented transformation. In order to comprehend how such unique features are articulated and understood, there are several questions worth investigating in the realms of media and communication studies,such as how China’s neoliberal restructuring is portrayed and perceived by different types of interested parties, and how these portrayals are de-contextualised and re-contextualised in global or Anglo-American narratives. Therefore, based on a combination of the themes of globalisation, financial media and China’s economic integration, this thesis attempts to explore how financial media construct the narratives of China’s economic globalisation through the deployment of comparative and multi-disciplinary approaches. Two outstanding elite financial magazines, Britain’s The Economist, which has a global readership and influence, and Caijing, China’s leading financial magazine, are chosen as case studies to exemplify differing media discourses, representing, respectively, Anglo-American and Chinese socio-economic and political backgrounds, as well as their own journalistic cultures. This thesis tries to answer the questions of how and why China’s neoliberal restructuring is constructed from a globally-oriented perspective. The construction primarily involves people who are influential in business and policymaking. Hence, the analysis falls into the paradigm of elite-elite communication, which is an important but relatively less developed perspective in studying China and its globalisation. The comparing of characteristics of narrative construction are the result of the textual analysis of articles published over a ten-year period (mid-1998 to mid-2008). The corpus of samples come from the two media outlets’ coverage of three selected events:China becoming a member of the World Trade Organization, its outward direct investment, and the listing of stocks of Chinese companies in overseas exchanges, which are mutually exclusive in sample collection and collectively exhaustive in the inclusion of articles regarding China’s economic globalisation. The findings help to understand that, despite language, socio-economic and political differences, elite financial media with globally-oriented readerships share similar methods of and approaches to agenda setting, the evaluation of news prominence, the selection of frame, and the advocacy of deeply rooted neoliberal ideas. The comparison of their distinctive features reflects the different phases of building up the sense of identity in their readers as global elites, as well as the different economic interests that are aligned with the corresponding readerships. However, textual analysis is only relevant in terms of exploring how the narratives are constructed and the elements they include; textual analysis alone prevents us from seeing the obstacles and the constrains of the journalistic practices of construction. Therefore, this thesis provides a brief discussion of interviews with practitioners from the two media, in order to understand how similar or different narratives are manifested and perceived, how the concept of neoliberalism deviates from and is justified in the Chinese context, and how and for what purpose deviations arise from Western to Chinese contexts. The thesis also contributes to defining financial media in the domain of elite communication. The relevant and closely interlocking concepts of globalisation, elitism and neoliberalism are discussed, and are used as a theoretical bedrock in the analysis of texts and contexts. It is important to address the agenda-setting and ideological role of elite financial media, because of its narrative formula of infusing business facts with opinions,which is important in constructing the global elite identity as well as influencing neoliberal policy-making. On the other hand, ‘journalistic professionalism’ has been redefined, in that the elite identity is shared by the content producer, reader and the actors in the news stories emerging from the much-compressed news cycle. The professionalism of elite financial media requires a dual definition, that of being professional in the understanding of business facts and statistics, and that of being professional in the making sense of stories by deploying economic logic.

Public narratives and the construction of memory among European Muslims

This chapter draws on group and individual interviews with 735 European Muslims in 5 European countries and explores some key aspects of the politics of memory that form an inextricable component of European Muslim self-definitions, discourses and narratives deployed in the attempt to negotiate their inclusion in European societies.