Digital Commons Network^™

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 …

Indigenous Self-Determination And Research On Human Genetic Material: A Consideration Of The Relevance Of Debates On Patents And Informed Consent, And The Political Demands On Researchers, Constance Macintosh

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Genetic research involving indigenous populations provokes many legal, ethical and cultural issues. Arguably, of these issues, two dominate the literature. The first is whether human genetic materials are or ought to be patentable, which is often argued against on the basis that such patents offend human dignity generally and are culturally offensive to many indigenous peoples. The second is whether researchers must obtain informed consent from representatives of indigenous groups as a whole before attempting to obtain consent for participation from individual members of that group. I argue that there is limited benefit in continuing to debate the patentability of …

Hearing Whiteness, Seeing Race: Women Leaders Give Visibility To Their White Identity: A Dissertation, Ann Moritz

Educational Studies Dissertations

This study investigates what it means for women leaders to identify as White. The purpose is to examine a sense of racial identity and how that identity affects a sense of self as a leader. Twelve women answered questions from a designed interview protocol in two settings that occurred approximately four weeks apart.

“The State Turning To Language”: Power And Identity In Russian Language Policy Today, Lara Ryazanova‐Clarke

Russian Language Journal

The first years of the twenty‐first century in Russia saw a considerable rise in the state’s regulation of language. In the words of one of the agents of this regulation, Natalia Liashchenko, a Consultant for the Committee for the Nationalities, “Определенный поворот к проблемам русского языка произошел и в органах государственной власти России.” The engagement of the state by way of regulations in the national discussion of the nature and quality of the Russian language demonstrates ‘the state power turning to language’.

The Import Of The Sensation Of The Abyss, David J. Prescott-Steed

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This research argues the significance of the concept of the abyss as a means to understanding key contemporary ideas such as the self, identity, reflexivity, indeterminacy, ideology, radical doubt, lack, and xenophobia. Proposing the analysis of interpretations of the abyss as informative in developing an understanding of ourselves in terms of our cultural, geographical and historical contexts, I draw on a range of visual images, explorations of language use, research into cultural constructs, religious practices and historical events. The reflections on the abyss contained in this thesis contribute to broader research by connecting the developing concept of the abyss to …

Towards A Hermeneutics Of Narrative Identity: A Ricoeurian Framework For Exploring Narratives (And Narrators) Of Strategy, Steven Sonsino

Organization Management Journal

With notable exceptions, the organization studies literature has tended to exclude a consideration of time from considerations of narrative identity. Building on the work of Ricoeur, and starting from the position that narrative identity is dynamic and rests on a temporal structure, it is suggested that narrative identity emerges from the poetic composition of one or many narrative texts. Drawing upon Ricoeur’s conception of narrative identity, an analytic framework is developed and encompasses a dialectic where narrative is described as the path of character, and character as the path of narrative. Narrative identity, in conclusion, is a reflexive consideration of …

Towards A Hermeneutics Of Narrative Identity: A Ricoeurian Framework For Exploring Narratives (And Narrators) Of Strategy, Steven Sonsino

Organization Management Journal

With notable exceptions, the organization studies literature has tended to exclude a consideration of time from considerations of narrative identity. Building on the work of Ricoeur, and starting from the position that narrative identity is dynamic and rests on a temporal structure, it is suggested that narrative identity emerges from the poetic composition of one or many narrative texts. Drawing upon Ricoeur’s conception of narrative identity, an analytic framework is developed and encompasses a dialectic where narrative is described as the path of character, and character as the path of narrative. Narrative identity, in conclusion, is a reflexive consideration of …

Rhetorical Holy War: Polygamy, Homosexuality, And The Paradox Of Community And Autonomy, Gregory C. Pingree

ExpressO

The article explores the rhetorical strategies deployed in both legal and cultural narratives of Mormon polygamy in nineteenth-century America. It demonstrates how an understanding of that unique communal experience, and the narratives by which it was represented, informs the classic paradox of community and autonomy – the tension between the collective and the individual. The article concludes by using the Mormon polygamy analysis to illuminate a contemporary social situation that underscores the paradox of community and autonomy – homosexuality and the so-called culture wars over family values and the meaning of marriage.

Balagan And The Politics Of Israel/Palestinian "Identity", Terri Ginsberg

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

No abstract provided.

Infallible Texts And Righteous Interpretations: Don Quijote And Religious Fundamentalism, Matthew D. Stroud

Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research

Religion in Don Quijote has been a frequent subject of inquiry over the past century. As a "vehicle for religious expression," to use Ziolkowski's terminology (1), Cervantes's masterpiece has been studied as an analogy of the relationship between religious faith and the world around it (Ziolkowski 8), as a manifestation of the historic clash between the secularization of the modern era and the waning medieval domination by "religious institutions and symbols" (Ziolkowski 9, citing Berger 107), as a vessel of both the spirit and the letter of selected pronouncements of the Council of Trent (Descouzis 479), as a text that …

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).

Stranger Within, Anniina Suominen

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

I base my teaching philosophy on the continuous self-directed learning of an individual. My goal is to help my students to learn to problematize their perception, their ways of thinking, their understanding of themselves, and their satisfaction with achieved learning goals. I support my students in their journeys of becoming critical searchers and inquirers of knowledge, visuality, and perceived reality. Although it is apparent they have learned to question authority and pre-given role and behavior models, I watch them searching for shortcuts for the answers within the complex structure of too many potential solutions.

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 …

The Art Of Living - The Marketing Of Identity Through Nationality And Spirituality, Shirisha Shankar

LSU Master's Theses

Spirituality has been a term that has always been associated with the East and more specifically with India. Spirituality has been revamped and repackaged in glossy packages by various spiritual groups and organizations in India. One among these organizations is the Art of Living, a non-governmental spiritual organization that has risen in popularity since 1996. This thesis concentrates on the Art of Living as an organization and of the dissemination of the new spirituality through this institution. This research study pertains to the identity of self and of the sense of nationhood through the discourse and the practice of certain …

Sites Of Resistance: Language, Intertextuality, And Subjectivity In The Poetry Of Diane Wakoski, Cordelia Maxwell Hanemann

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the interconnectedness of language and related cultural texts and women’s subjectivity. The poststructuralist feminist enterprise of examining and critiquing language and signifying practices for the ways in which they impose social values and of interrogating and undermining the fixity of meanings in cultural texts will serve as my primary frame. Concerned with the individual (gendered) consciousness, poststructuralist feminist theory of subject formation posits that while language, along with ideologically biased texts of the culture, construct subjects, language and the cultural texts also serve as sites of resistance for the deconstruction and reconception of individual and collective subjectivities. …

Race And Class In Political Science, Jennifer Hochschild

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

As a discipline, political science tends to have a split personality on the issue of whether the driving force behind political action is material or ideational. Put too crudely, White scholars tend to focus on structural conditions as the cause of group identity and action, whereas scholars of color tend to focus on group identity and conflict in order to explain structural conditions. More generally, the relevant debate within political science revolves less around Jacques Demrda versus Karl Marx (as in critical race studies) than around W. E. B. DuBois versus Thomas Hobbes-that is, whether "the problem of the twentieth …

The Infinite Plasticity Of The Digital: Posthuman Possibilities, Embodiment And Technology In William Gibson's Interstitial Trilogy, Tama Leaver

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editors' Introduction]

Ever since William Gibson coined the term cyberspace in his debut novel Neuromancer, his work has been seen by many as a yardstick for postmodern and, more recently, posthuman possibilities. This article critically examines Gibson's second trilogy (Virtual Light, Idoru and All Tomorrow's Parties), focusing on the way digital technologies and identity intersect and interact, with particular emphasis on the role of embodiment. Using the work of Donna Haraway, Judith Butler and N. Katherine Hayles, it is argued that while William Gibson's second trilogy is infused with posthuman possibilities, the role of embodiment is …

Examining The Lived Experiences Of Out Gay And Lesbian K-12 Educators, William Dejean Edd

Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to examine the lived experience of gay and lesbian K-12 educators who consider themselves out within the classrooms in which they teach. With gay and lesbian issues receiving increased visibility within the K-12 setting, researchers have begun to examine the experiences of gay and lesbian K-12 educators (Harbeck, 1992; Letts IV & Sears, 1999; Jennings, 1994; Kissen, 1996; Parker, 2001; Sanlo, 1999) within this context. Yet few research studies have specifically examined gay and lesbian educators who consider themselves out in the classroom in which they teach. Five gay male teachers and five lesbian …

From Butler To Buffy: Notes Towards A Strategy For Identity Analysis In Contemporary Television Narrative, Rob Cover

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Given the increasing significance of questions of identity, subjectivity and selfhood in contemporary postmodern western cultures, it is important to begin acknowledging how these questions are reflected in contemporary media and television and to develop new strategies by which to analyse television characters in terms of identity and subjectivity. The scope for analysing television series' characterizations through recent postmodern and poststructuralist theories of non-essentialist, non-foundationalist subject/identity performativity has not yet been considerably explored. It is my contention here, however, that such a method both reflects the representation of self and identity transformation in new television series as well …

Piero Chiara E La Tradizione, Stefano Giannini

Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics - All Scholarship

Piero Chiara (Luino 1913- Varese 1986) wrote many novels and short stories that immediately met great public success. Critics devoted mixed attention to him but his works deserve a new critical assessment to analyze the rich and sophisticated web of cultural and literary references that permeate them. Through readings of Il piatto piange, “L’uovo al cianuro” and other novels and short stories, this paper analyses the complex textual relations Chiara entertains with Pirandello’s Il fu Mattia Pascal. Chiara investigates the themes of identity and the double. His narrative depicts an apparently lighthearted reality that in fact reveals despair. …

Schooled In Silence, Patricia M. Amburgy, Wanda B. Knight, Karen Keifer-Boyd

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

What is not said, is often more powerful than what is spoken about diversity, difference, and identity in U.S. classrooms. Examples are everywhere: Although no students of color may be enrolled in a course at a prominent research university, members of the class do not believe there is such a thing as institutional racism. A handful of women are discussed in course textbooks, all authored by men, but no one thinks it odd that only men have written accounts of women's achievements that appear on the syllabus. Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people do not speak for themselves, either, in …

Paradoxes Of Health And Equality: When A Boy Becomes A Girl, Noa Ben-Asher

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

In the fall of 2000, six-year-old male Zachary from a small town in Ohio, claimed that s/he was a girl and requested, from now on, to be called Aurora. When the child's parents honored this unusual wish and made efforts to make official the child's feminine identity, the case turned into a custody battle between the parents and the state of Ohio. Although the child was occasionally treated as a girl at home from the age of two, the attempt to register the child in public school as a girl motivated the state dissolution of this family. At the …

Joke-Making Jews /Jokes Making Jews: Essays On Humor And Identity In American Jewish Fiction, Jason Paul Steed

UNLV Retrospective Theses & Dissertations

Beginning from the premise that humor plays a prominent role in the construction of group and individual identities, as a social phenomenon and a simultaneously alienating and assimilating force, these essays explore and examine humor and its construction of American Jewish identity within the context of various works of American Jewish fiction. Though organized as "chapters," the essays do not build upon one another progressively, nor do they center on a unified thesis; rather, each is written to stand alone; however, each approaches the general subject of humor and identity in American Jewish fiction, and as a collection it is …

Language, Conflict And Identity: The Hispanic Experience, Jan Henry Oller

UNLV Retrospective Theses & Dissertations

This thesis is an attempt to create a theoretical model which could be applied to the study of any situation where a history of ongoing migration and asymmetrical power relationships in constant flux between two or more groups, nation states, or other entities is present. It is the conception and application of a theoretical framework with which to view transnational identity on a different level, one focusing on the historical antecedents of current situations, pan-identities, and language as the main identity marker among transnationals.

Text, Context, And Identities In Pointe Coupee, Louisiana: Six Young Women Positioned As Writers, Patricia Meeks Smith

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Texts are contextualized¡Xtied to times, tied to places, and tied to the people who live in those times and places. This dissertation is based on a study of writing and identity set at Catholic High School in Pointe Coupee, Louisiana. For their senior English class, the six young women participating in the study produced a number of pieces of writing of various types, contrasting in genre, length, content, and register. These kinds of writing represent varying discourse practices, and it was within these practices that the young women positioned themselves or were positioned by influences in their social context. The …

Musical Play Across Ethnic Boundaries In Western Jamaica, Ronald Eric Dickerson

LSU Master's Theses

An ethnography of music, ritual, and festival in western Jamaica, this thesis reports on fieldwork performed in St. Elizabeth and St. James Parishes between June 2002 and January 2003. Featured field sites include rural dancehall events, Kumina performances, Accompong Town's Maroon Heritage Festival, and a Rastafarian music and nutrition festival called "The Supper of Rastafari." Building an account of these and other sites of cultural performance, this study focuses on social connections between groups of participants, traced through poetic, historical, and personal relationships among performers, especially across boundaries of ethnic, stylistic, or religious difference within Jamaica's national cultural identity.

Genetic Information And The Importance Of Context: Implications For The Social Meaning Of Genetic Information And Individual Identity, Ken M. Gatter

Saint Louis University Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Feathers And Tuxedos: An Analysis Of Political Cartoons About Indian Gaming, Michael Stephan Nasirov

LSU Master's Theses

Feathers and Tuxedos: An Analysis of Political Cartoons About Indian Gaming is an exploration into the changing stereotypes of Indians in illustrated media. Beginning with general issues such as poverty and media coverage, this thesis continues to cover chronologically the origins of modern Indian gaming and the resulting expenditure of profits into social welfare of the tribes and the continuous three-way battle between state, federal, and Indian sovereign rights. Normative U.S. societal reactions to Indian gaming are contrasted with their Indian counterpoints. Cartoons allow for a visual representation of contested relationships, including recent imagery of well-to-do entrepreneurs profiting at the …

Reticent Romans: Silence And Writing In La Vie De Saint Alexis, Le Conte Du Graal, And Le Roman De Silence, Evan J. Bibbee

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Apart from discourse and yet somehow part of it, silence is a powerfully ambiguous linguistic phenomenon that blurs the lines between presence and absence. Eluding the material aspects of oral and written language, it is only perceptible as the gaps or spaces between words. Nonetheless, it plays a role in all linguistic productions: although silence itself cannot be directly communicated, it can influence communication. In a literary text, silence may takes on many different guises, including rhythmic hesitations, rhetorical omissions, and poetic oppositions that mimic the audible gaps of spoken language. The visual, aural, and fictional interaction of all these …

L'Incipit Dans L'Œuvre D'Ahmadou Kourouma, Sélom Komlan Gbanou

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

The literary work can develop an internal identity as a particular mark. Several African writers incorporate into their novels indications of culture that derive from verbal arts. This method gives to the writing a particular aesthetic in between two cultures, creating in the writing an individuality of certain writers such as Ahmadou Kourouma. For him the question is not only to distort the French language to express his Malinke identity, but also to develop a method of incipit that belongs to verbal art.