Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 22 of 22

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Identity, Discourse, And Rehabilitation In Parole Hearings In The United States, Danielle Lavin-Loucks, Kristine M. Levan May 2018

Identity, Discourse, And Rehabilitation In Parole Hearings In The United States, Danielle Lavin-Loucks, Kristine M. Levan

Journal of Prison Education and Reentry (2014-2023)

Research on parole in the United States has primarily followed a deterministic approach, favoring an examination of variables contributing to release. However, a great deal of prior research neglects a central aspect of the parole process: mainly the hearing. Adopting an ethnographically informed conversation analytic approach, this article addresses one tactic offenders utilize to appeal to a state parole board for release– claiming rehabilitated status. Offenders appealing for parole attempt to establish, in a performative space, their identity as rehabilitated. More globally, this article addresses how individual manage, assert, and negotiate identity in the course of interaction. The achievement of …


Identity And The Legislative Decision Making Process: A Case Study Of The Maryland State Legislature, Nadia Brown Jan 2011

Identity And The Legislative Decision Making Process: A Case Study Of The Maryland State Legislature, Nadia Brown

Ethnic Studies Review

Both politicians and the mass public believe that identity influences political behavior yet, political scientists have failed to fully detail how identity is salient for all political actors not just minorities and women legislators. To what extent do racial, gendered, and race/gendered identities affect the legislation decision process? To test this proposition, I examine how race and gender based identities shape the legislative decisions of Black women in comparison to White men, White women, and Black men. I find that Black men and women legislators interviewed believe that racial identity is relevant in their decision making processes, while White men …


Structuring Liminality: Theorizing The Creation And Maintenance Of The Cuban Exile Identity, Jaclyn Colona, Guillermo J. Grenier Jan 2010

Structuring Liminality: Theorizing The Creation And Maintenance Of The Cuban Exile Identity, Jaclyn Colona, Guillermo J. Grenier

Ethnic Studies Review

In this article, we examine the exilic experience of the Cuban-American community in South Florida through the dual concepts of structure and liminality. We postulate that in the case of this exilic diaspora, specific structures arose to render liminality a persistent element of the Cuban-American identity. The liminal, rather than being a temporal transitory stage, becomes an integral part of the group identity. This paper theorizes and recasts the Cuban-American exile experience in Miami as explicable not only as the story of successful economic and political incorporation, although the literature certainly emphasizes this interpretation, but one consisting of permanent liminality …


Chang-Rae Lee's A Gesture Lite: The Recuperation Of Identity, Matthew Miller Jan 2009

Chang-Rae Lee's A Gesture Lite: The Recuperation Of Identity, Matthew Miller

Ethnic Studies Review

In Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life, the elderly, wellrespected and fastidious Franklin "Doc" Hata begins an introspective journey toward a revitalized and reimagined identity. For Lee, this journey affords the chance to address ethnicity and immigration under a unique transnational context. The novel chronicles how an identity can be recuperated (i.e., healed) through personal and cultural reconnections to the body and to memory. I purposefully use the word "recuperate" in both the traditional and theoretical senses. "Recuperation" results from Hata's moving back into his past to grow forward in self. Simultaneously, he "heals" his self, physically and psychologically, from various …


Sacred Hoop Dreams: Basketball In The Work Of Sherman Alexie, David S. Goldstein Jan 2009

Sacred Hoop Dreams: Basketball In The Work Of Sherman Alexie, David S. Goldstein

Ethnic Studies Review

The game of basketball serves as a fitting metaphor for the conflicts and tensions of life. It involves both cooperation and competition, selflessness and ego. In the hands of a gifted writer like Sherman Alexie, those paradoxes become even deeper and more revealing. In his short story collections, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven and The Toughest Indian in the World, his debut novel, Reservation Blues, and his recent young adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Alexie uses basketball to explore the ironies of American Indian reservation life and the tensions between traditional lifeways …


Memories Of Home: Reading The Bedouin In Arab American Literature, Anissa J. Wardi, Katherine Wardi-Zonna Jan 2008

Memories Of Home: Reading The Bedouin In Arab American Literature, Anissa J. Wardi, Katherine Wardi-Zonna

Ethnic Studies Review

In an urban neighborhood with a large Jewish population near my home, there is an Arabic restaurant. Name, menu and ownership mark its ethnic identification, yet its politics are otherwise obscured. An American flag, permanently placed in the restaurant's window since 9/11, greets American customers with a message of reconciliation. I am one of you, it says: come; eat; you are welcome here. In a climate where "Arabs, Arab-Americans and people with Middle Eastern features, everywhere are struggling to merely survive the United States' aggressive drive to 'bring democracy to the Middle East'" (Elia 160) and where the hostility toward …


Fire In De Cane: Metaphors Of Indo Trinidadian Identity In Ramabai Espinet's The Swinging Bridge, Rosanne Kanhai Jan 2008

Fire In De Cane: Metaphors Of Indo Trinidadian Identity In Ramabai Espinet's The Swinging Bridge, Rosanne Kanhai

Ethnic Studies Review

The evolution of identity is on-going, yet to articulate identity is the self analysis of a people's understanding of who they are at a particular time. Perhaps in more stable societies, identity has not been a preoccupation, not the "stuff" of literature and other types of art. However, for us, in the western hemisphere, where indigenous populations have been brutally decimated and room made for more brutality in the uprootment, transportation and relocation of peoples from different parts of the globe, we find it a crucial to pause and understand who we are as we connect with each other. In …


Signing And Signifyin': Negotiating Deaf And African American Identities, Heather D. Clark Jan 2007

Signing And Signifyin': Negotiating Deaf And African American Identities, Heather D. Clark

Ethnic Studies Review

For individuals who are both African American and Deaf finding a place to belong is a process of navigating their many cultural identities. In this paper I explore the following questions: where do individuals who are African American and Deaf find and make community? To which communities do they perceive they belong? Is their primary identity African American, Deaf or something else? Does belonging to one community negate membership in another? Does the presence of African American Deaf individuals have an impact on either community or are they forced to create an entirely new one for themselves?


Tongues United: Polyphonic Identities And The Hispanic Family, José Medina Jan 2006

Tongues United: Polyphonic Identities And The Hispanic Family, José Medina

Ethnic Studies Review

In this paper I will use the Bakhtinian notion of polyphony,1 of a choral dialogue of multiple and heterogeneous voices, to elaborate a pluralistic account of cultural identity in general and of Hispanic identity in particular. I will complicate and further pluralize the Bakhtinian notion by talking about the overlapping and criss-crossing dialogues of heterogeneous voices that go into the formation of cultural identities. My pluralistic view emphasizes that cultural identity is bound up with differences and opposes those homogeneous models that try to impose a unique articulation of collective identity on the members of a group. Although I will …


Being Ourselves: Immigrant Culture And Self-Identification Among Young Haitians In Montréal, Scooter Pégram Jan 2005

Being Ourselves: Immigrant Culture And Self-Identification Among Young Haitians In Montréal, Scooter Pégram

Ethnic Studies Review

Since the early 1960s, large numbers of Haitians have emigrated from their native island nation. Changes in federal immigration legislation in the 1970s in both the United States and Canada enabled immigrants of colour a facilitated entry into the two countries, and this factor contributed to the arrival of Haitians to the North American continent. These newcomers primarily settled in cities along the eastern seaboard, in Boston, Miami, Montréal and New York. The initial motivator of this two-wave Haitian migration was the extreme political persecution that existed in Haiti under the iron-fisted rule of the Duvalier dictatorships and their secret …


Multiple Identities, Citizenship Rights And Democratization In Africa, 'Lai Olurode Jan 2005

Multiple Identities, Citizenship Rights And Democratization In Africa, 'Lai Olurode

Ethnic Studies Review

This particularistic and exclusionary form of identity politics has intensified in recent years within and among nations..... It is responsible for some of the most egregious violations of international humanitarian law and, in several instances, of elementary standards of humanity.... Negative forms of identity politics are a potent and potentially explosive force. Great care must be taken to recognise, confront and restrain them lest they destroy the potential for peace and progress that the new era holds in store (Kofi Annan, The Guardian, (Nigeria) 1997:8).


Time Is Not A River' The Implications Of Mumbo Jumbo's Pendulum Chronology For Coalition Politics, Tamiko Fiona Nimura Jan 2003

Time Is Not A River' The Implications Of Mumbo Jumbo's Pendulum Chronology For Coalition Politics, Tamiko Fiona Nimura

Ethnic Studies Review

Ismael Reed's 1972 novel, Mumbo Jumbo, proposes a unique chronological theory that requires a multiple-grounded understanding of time. An analysis of what could be called this "pendulum" chronology leads to a more complete understanding of the novel and has important implications for a coalition of American ethnic studies and other identity-related work in the academy.


Ethnic And Racial Definitions As Manifestations Of American Public Policy, Ashton Wesley Welch Jan 2003

Ethnic And Racial Definitions As Manifestations Of American Public Policy, Ashton Wesley Welch

Ethnic Studies Review

Official definitions of race and ethnicity in American law reveal a great deal about public policy in an environment of ethnic pluralism. Despite some ambiguity over who is black or Hispanic or an Aleut, relatively few people fall between the wide cracks in the American patchwork of identity classifications. Those cracks, however, tell us a great deal about the ambivalence of the American polity toward ethnicity.1


[Review Of] John M. Coward. The Newspaper Indian: Native American Identity In The Press, 1820-90, Cynthia R. Kasee Jan 2000

[Review Of] John M. Coward. The Newspaper Indian: Native American Identity In The Press, 1820-90, Cynthia R. Kasee

Ethnic Studies Review

It will not come as news to people familiar with Native American history the role the print medium has played in costructing [constructing] public images of indigenous Americans. What is refreshing is the way in which Coward offers his insights on the matter. He has chosen the period of the United States' most feverish expansion into "the West," a time when newspapers and related print sources were most active in defining now-common stereotypes of both sides in the ensuing conflicts.


[Review Of] Wendy S. Hesford. Framing Identities: Autobiography And The Politics Of Pedagogy, Helen Lock Jan 2000

[Review Of] Wendy S. Hesford. Framing Identities: Autobiography And The Politics Of Pedagogy, Helen Lock

Ethnic Studies Review

Drawing on her experiences as a teacher of writing for six years at Oberlin College, Wendy S. Hesford in Framing Identities: Autobiography and the Politics of Pedagogy addresses important and timely questions, such as "How do historically marginalized groups expose the partiality and presumptions of institutional histories and truths through autobiographical acts?"(xx)


[Review Of] Ray Allen And Lois Wilken, Island Sounds In The Global City: Caribbean Popular Music And Identity In New York, Kenneth Dossar Jan 1998

[Review Of] Ray Allen And Lois Wilken, Island Sounds In The Global City: Caribbean Popular Music And Identity In New York, Kenneth Dossar

Ethnic Studies Review

In putting together Island Sounds in the Global City: Caribbean Popular Music and Identity in New York, editors Ray Allen and Lois Wilcken were undaunted by the enormity of their tasks of contextualizing and capsulizing the breadth of Latin American and Caribbean popular music, and exploring the complex nexus between these musics and ethnic identity in New York City. By eliding these tasks the editors facilitated their work.


[Review Of] Lean'tin L. Bracks. Writings On Black Women Of The Diaspora: History, Language, And Identity. Crosscurrents In African American History, Vol I, Helen Lock Jan 1998

[Review Of] Lean'tin L. Bracks. Writings On Black Women Of The Diaspora: History, Language, And Identity. Crosscurrents In African American History, Vol I, Helen Lock

Ethnic Studies Review

In her "Preface" to this study, Lean'tin Bracks describes her purpose as being "to describe a model which may provide for today's black woman a means to take control of her destiny by retrieving her Afrocentric legacy from the obscured past" (xi). This model, which she applies through discussions of The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Related by Herself (1831), Toni Morrison's Beloved (1988), Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982, and Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow (1984), is tripartite: "historical awareness, attention to linguistic pattern, and sensitivity to stereotypes in the dominant culture" (xi).


[Review Of] Elionne Belden. Claiming Chinese Identity, Russell Endo Jan 1997

[Review Of] Elionne Belden. Claiming Chinese Identity, Russell Endo

Ethnic Studies Review

Thirty years ago, when the field of Asian American studies was in its infancy, identity was one of the subjects that received much attention. Since then, a good deal of research on or related to identity has been conducted, and, in the past few years, several significant pieces of work have been published. Claiming Chinese Identity is not among the latter.


[Review Of] Karen Christian. Show And Tell: Identity As Performance In U.S. Latino/A Fiction, J. Alemán Jan 1997

[Review Of] Karen Christian. Show And Tell: Identity As Performance In U.S. Latino/A Fiction, J. Alemán

Ethnic Studies Review

Christian's crucial contribution to ethnic studies is her book's argument that ethnic identity is more performance than essence. Of course, this is an unresolved and essentialized issue, but Christian summarizes the debate well, situating her study in the performance camp as she relies on Judith Butler's theory of performativity to examine the inter-related performances of ethnicity and gender in Chicano/a, U.S. Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Dominican texts. As Christian explains, static U.S. Latino/a identity categories create "collective fictions" that "regulate performances of gender, sexuality, and cultural identity," but alternative performances of ethnicity and sexuality, Christian argues, subvert these "collective fictions" …


[Review Of] Manuel De Jesus Hemandez-Gutierrez And David William Foster, Eds. Literatura Chicana, 1965-1995: An Anthology In Spanish, English, And Calo, Phillipa Kafka Jan 1997

[Review Of] Manuel De Jesus Hemandez-Gutierrez And David William Foster, Eds. Literatura Chicana, 1965-1995: An Anthology In Spanish, English, And Calo, Phillipa Kafka

Ethnic Studies Review

The works included in this anthology, many of them previously printed, reflect six characteristic themes of Chicana/o contemporary literature: "the search for identity, feminism, conservatism, revisionism, homoeroticism, and internationalism" (xix). Organized chronologically according to various literary genres and replete with many useful notes, the anthology contains no index. Further, Literatura Chicana could also be assigned as required reading in American Studies courses, specifically in contemporary American literature courses, even though the editors suggest that the anthology be adopted for university level humanities, Spanish, ethnic, Chicana/o literature courses, in women's studies programs and social science departments.


Affect, Identity, And Ethnicity: Towards A Social-Psychological Mode Of Ethnic Attainment, Jack David Eller Jan 1996

Affect, Identity, And Ethnicity: Towards A Social-Psychological Mode Of Ethnic Attainment, Jack David Eller

Ethnic Studies Review

Since the days of Shils and Geertz it has been common to refer to ethnicity as a bond, a tie, or an attachment. Shils used the term "tie" in the title of his seminal 1957 article to refer to a set of social relationships, including what he called "civil," "kinship," "sacred," and "primordial." The primordial tie was notable for the "ineffable significance" which social actors attribute to it and to the relationship which it engenders: "the attachment [is] not merely to the other ... as a person, but as a possessor of certain especially 'significant relational' qualities, which could only …


[Review Of] Verad Amit-Talai And Caroline Knowles, Eds. Re-Situating Identities: The Politics Of Race, Ethnicity, And Culture, David Covin Jan 1996

[Review Of] Verad Amit-Talai And Caroline Knowles, Eds. Re-Situating Identities: The Politics Of Race, Ethnicity, And Culture, David Covin

Ethnic Studies Review

While the lead title of this book, Re-Situating Identities, is entirely on target, the subtitle, The Politics of Race, Ethnicity, and Culture, is far off the mark. The book is primarily about identity. It has precious little to do with politics. This might be apparent from the contributors, whom the editors identify as sociologists, anthropologists, and cultural theorists. There is not a political scientist among them. The omission, however, is not necessarily indicative of an absence of politics, because sociologists, anthropologists, and cultural theorists often write good politics. That is not the case in this instance. Though the editors make …