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In order to better understand the functional significance of pro-eating disorder (pro-ED) online spaces for users, the current study investigates identity performance as it plays out on pro-ED Tumb...

Using alderman William Beckford (1709–1770) as a microhistorical case study, this essay analyses the interconnectedness of polite masculinity, Englishness, and whiteness in mid-eighteenth-century B...

This classroom discourse study examines how curriculum becomes a resource for identity performance in one ESL classroom. Conceptualizing identity as performance, I adopt a small stories approach to...

This study examines news coverage of an assault upon an interracial couple that happened in Taiwan in 2015. Using narrative analysis from a social identity perspective, the study notes that Taiwane...

This paper explores the experiences and perceptions of parent academics and their colleagues, and argues that in the absence of institutional support and guidance, self and peer assessment of academic identity in relation to performance becomes a measure against which academics assess their own academic careers and the academic careers of others. The context of the study is contemporary neoliberal academia in which competition is encouraged, driving individuals to actively self-manage their own academic careers. In-depth interviews were conducted with 32 senior lecturers and associate professors, both parents and non-parents. Three distinct social identity groups were found among the participants: those who placed parenthood ahead of their career; parents who performed ‘despite’ their children, and a third group of ‘surveillers’ of other academic parents and their careers. Perceptions of parenthood as detrimental to academic careers was enforced through these identity groups, particularly the ‘sur...

Through a discourse-analytic case study, this paper traces the socio-historical development of Singapore to examine how the branding trajectory and discourse of Singapore’s university sector from t...

Telling stories through photographs is certainly not a new or novel concept; however, thinking about image-making as a way of unknowing what we currently know is quite different from traditional approaches to photography. Built on an existing conceptual framework, writings on unknowing, we apply unknowing as a guiding method and heuristic to understand what a group of young people are trying to say and reimagine through the act of image-making. Research reported in this article from the Community Arts Zone visual arts project features a series of photograph projects across high school contexts where students created a Cindy Sherman-style conceptual photograph with an artist statement. The researchers engaged in a process of unknowing to interpret the photographs where they read through the visuals and engaged with modes in play and with observational fieldnotes about participants to draw out implications for such work for literacy teaching and learning.

I examine special educators’ professional identity emergence and tensions within a researcher-facilitated teacher learning community. I introduced tools to evoke and challenge inequities in educational systems and via which participants examined and planned general education instruction for students with dis/abilities. Initially, professional identity, or figured world, emerged as performance of pathologising and relatedly, remediating students. Over time, participants expressed tensions as they engaged tools to examine structural limitations and design more universally accessible instruction; figured worlds shifted to critical sense-making about their positioning by general education colleagues and school structural barriers, and procedural identity performance tied to investigating student assets. Findings suggest potential for purposefully designed artefacts to mediate special educators’ development as (more) inclusive educators.

This article utilizes discourse analysis and an auto-ethnographic approach to explore the impact of US racial and ethnic categorization on the experiences of an individual marked as ‘mixed-race’ in terms of individual identity and familial/cultural group loyalty and obligation(s). This essay focuses on an incidence of public policing through the popular social networking platform Facebook, centring on the invocation of racial obligation by white friends and family members. I analyse how racial loyalty is articulated by friends and family members in their posts on my personal Facebook page and how this ‘loyalty’ is used as means of regulating my mixed-race identity performance. This essay aims to understand several things, namely how identity is mediated through the invocation of racial obligation and how tension around identity plays out in the multiracial family.

Courses: A single class exercise, for use in Group Communication, Interpersonal Communication, Communication and Culture, Basic Course, Relational and Organizational Communication, and any course that addresses individual and group identity.Objectives: After completing this activity, students should be able to (a) critically assess their own presentation of identity; and (b) explain how some parts of their identity contribute to their membership in social groups while other parts remain separate from their membership in those groups. Students will work with metaphors to understand and explain their identity.

Identity studies relating to writing in educational setting have tended to focus on the analysis of non-fiction texts. Aligning a Bakhtinian view of language with the concept of identity as participation in ‘figured worlds' [Holland et al. 1998, Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds. London: Harvard University Press], this research paper puts forward a way of thinking about Year 6 boys' creative writing as identity performance. Undertaking participant observation in a co-educational inner city primary school, the researcher writes the opening of a play script which is completed by two groups of boys. Subsequent analysis of the boys' play scripts indicates the ways in which creative writing can be used to disrupt hegemonic masculinity and potentially refigure localised worlds.

This article examines “piety stories”—Muslim Tatar women’s narratives about adopting daily Islamic practices, such as five prayers or headscarves, in Tatarstan, Russia. I argue that sharing piety stories is a communicative way of performing identities, negotiating group memberships, and reaffirming one’s commitment to Muslim piety. These narratives provide a discursive way for the speaker to practice being a Muslim and for the audience, a blueprint for becoming one. By detailing a way of being where Muslim piety becomes one’s moral compass and source of agency, piety stories illustrate a culturally meaningful relationship among identity, Muslim piety, and local communicative practices.

Youth organizing work benefits young people in myriad ways, equipping them with the skills and dispositions to organize around the systemic inequities and policy decisions that threaten their communities. The findings from this life histories study in the Philadelphia Student Union (PSU) reveal that the organization’s collectivist leadership model engaged young people in developing leadership capacity among the PSU membership, participating in consensus-based decision-making and embodying positive representations of PSU in their daily lives. Together, these activities allowed them to define and redefine the group’s internal and externalized organizational identity. In this cyclical process, young people came together to support a context that sustained individuals’ identity work through an inclusive and mutually empowering model of leadership development.

This article is a report of a critical constructivist study of racial identity and performance among 13 Black, traditional-age students enrolled at three different colleges, two historically Black and one predominantly White. The study’s approach understood identity to be socially constructed and reliant upon community affirmation and validation. The findings highlight (1) the role of internal community pressure, (2) the ways in which racial performance dominated the students’ discussions of their racial identities, and (3) the intersection of internalized racism and sexism. The overarching conclusion points to the need for promoting acceptance of racial heterogeneity within communities of Black young adults. Implications of these findings for research and practice recommend that college administrators and educators pay more attention to the influence of campus student communities on racial identity as by-products of cultural production.

Ladino, the heritage language of cultural affiliation for many Sephardic Jews in Bulgaria and beyond, is often discussed in terms of language endangerment and of cultural loss for this community and humanity more widely. However, for intercultural communication specialists, especially those with a linguistic focus, the Ladino experiences of Sephardic Jews in Bulgaria, as set against the backdrop of their changing political and social realities, provide rich insights regarding the linguistic complexities of identity. Through the Ladino-framed narratives of (often elderly) members of this community, we have learned how they drew, and continue to draw, upon their diverse linguistic and cultural resources to define themselves, to articulate their various identities, and to communicate within and beyond Bulgarian society. In order to connect these insights to current discussions of interculturality, and as informed by intercultural thinking, we developed the following five-zone framework: (1) the (intra-)perso...

Omi and Winant's Racial Formations (1994) and Feagin's Systemic Racism (2006) and White Racial Frame (2010) provide robust analyses of race, racism and racial inequality. Yet, both models hold distinctive, even antagonistic, assumptions on how white racial identities are formed and their relationship to (anti-)racism. We point to a theoretical synthesis of the strengths of both paradigms that centres on ‘hegemonic whiteness’ (Hughey 2010, 2012a) – namely the role that interactional accountabilities and expectations of racial identity performance have to play as both product and cause of the racialized social order. The ongoing pursuit of an idealized white racial self is thus illuminated as the point of suture between Feagin's focus on the relative uniformity of white privilege and Omi and Winant's attention to the political and ideological heterogeneity of whiteness.

The collection of South African urban language phenomena called Tsotsitaal, Scamtho, Ringas (in short ‘Tsotsitaals’) etc, have been described differently as code-switching, mixed languages, or essentially slang vocabulary. These descriptions however, fail to acknowledge the centrality of performance to these phenomena. Tsotsitaals draw on extra-linguistic modes of identity performance such as body language, clothing, and other facets of what could commonly be called ‘style’. This article uses Coupland's (2007) description of style to understand how tsotsitaals can be viewed as discursive practices performed to achieve social meaning. The research draws on fieldwork conducted in Cape Town in 2006–2007 to expand our understanding of tsotsitaals. It considers perceptions of the style associated with tsotsitaals from the viewpoint of both speakers and listeners in a township community in Cape Town. We argue that current terminology used for varieties of this sort is inadequate to describe the combina...

This article explores the ways bisexual identity is made visible outside of explicitly sexual behavior, or outside the bedroom. This article draws on concepts from Goffman's work on identity performance, Lorber's work on gender display, and West and Zimmerman's work on ‘doing gender,’ as well as specifically addressing Miller's concept of ‘doing bisexuality.’ Through the use of gender displays and other visual cues, bisexuals engage with cultural assumptions about straight and gay/lesbian stereotypes, styles, and appearances to try to create a unique bisexual style based on hybridity, a concept the author calls “bisexual display.”

In this study, we draw on three interrelated concepts, i.e. placed resources, multiliteracies and the carnivalesque, to understand how information and communication technology (ICT) resources are taken up within the context of a print-based journalism club. Our research participants attend an under-resourced girls’ residential secondary school in rural Kenya. We used ethnographic methods to document how the 32 club members (aged 14–18 years) used digital cameras, voice recorders and laptops with connectivity to research, conduct interviews, photograph and create texts. Key findings include shifts in identity performance, journalistic competence, and hierarchical distinctions and societal power; growing writer activism and audiences; and the emergence of imagined identities and transformative social futures. Our research challenges current skills-based approaches to introducing new literacies and highlights how the introduction of new ICT resources, when situated within collaborative practices (both resear...

Our essay draws from a study of interaction in a large and active online public forum. Studying rhetorical activity in open forums presents a number of methodological and conceptual challenges because the interactions are persistent and nonlinear in terms of when and how participants engage, and engagement often happens via textual fragments. We take up two related issues in this essay: one is the methodological challenge of how to study engagement in open digital places. We take up that issue by way of the example study featured here. The second issue is more conceptual and concerns how identity is leveraged as a form of rhetorical agency in these conversations. We argue that in the context of open forums like Science Buzz these identity performances are crucial as rhetorical agencies, creating space as they function to move discussion.

This paper considers how Liverpool's year of European Capital of Culture (ECoC) with a focus on altering the image and perceptions of place allowed a heightened sense of awareness of local identity. Drawing on data gathered through ethnographic approaches at a small‐scale arts workshop in the city centre and through considering visual imagery, stereotypes and myths of the city, the paper argues that image and identity are relationally different. Using theories of performativity and performance it finds that local people, due to the rebranding of the city and concerted efforts of promoting Liverpool during this year, are able to cite aspects of their cultural identity whilst leaving space for creativity and improvisation. The emergent process of identity performance and imaging a city are able to reflect upon one another creating a nuanced understanding of lived identities in the midst of a large‐scale cultural event.

This article explores how Barack Obama's oratory positions “the people” as a site of ongoing rhetorical negotiation regarding national identity, ideology, and potentiality. Like the subjects implicated in Charland's consideration of constitutive rhetoric, “the people” of Obama's rhetoric emerge as the choosers, deciders, and accomplishers of collaborative identity performance. Unlike Charland's subjects, however, Obama's rhetoric of imperfection and dissent positions “the people” as never fully constituted but always engaged in the act of constitution. The people, like the country they constitute, are flawed, never perfect, and always in the process of perfecting.

Combining personal narrative and cultural theories by food and performance scholars, this qualitative case study on hunger analyzes the nutritional issues, hegemony, and sanctions that shape race and class identity in the United States. It focuses on the social disparity negotiated by one urban, low-income African-American family from the early 1950s through the 1970s by engaging the harvest metaphor of reapers and gleaners to critique the USDA euphemism of “food insecurity” and to define anticipatory performance.

As I moved through the prison with my cameras, I became fascinated with the tattoos. I saw thousands of them.... A few times, I encountered Justice. She was patterned after the traditional figure, blindfolded and holding her simple scales. I questioned a convict in the gym about his blind Justice, a statuesque figure draped so both full breasts fell free of her gown. "This is as far as it goes," he said, shifting a thirty-pound dumbbell from his right hand to his left and starting to count out a set of slow curls. I asked what he meant. "I mean, man," he grunted, "there is no fucking justice. The bitch's a whore." --Douglas Kent Hall (46) The penitentiary offers an intriguing opportunity to engage the rhetoric of the everyday, to investigate how people make arguments--particularly for specific identities and social selves--in the absence of significant (or even any) face-to-face dialogue. The penitentiary also offers an intriguing opportunity to explore the body's role in visual argumentation. Although visual argument is increasing in popularity and focus among communication scholarship, the role of the body in visual argumentation, particularly the operation of tattooing as visual argument, remains unexplored. Given daily contact with the bodies of others, understanding the ways that bodies argue visually is important to understanding the operations of rhetoric in our lives. Claiming the body as a site for visual argument is not without difficulties and is quite possibly a contentious argument in itself. Scholars traditionally celebrate argument as belonging to the classical public sphere--a wide-reaching construction unhelpful for understanding argumentation as it functions in nonpublic communities. In particular, because the body cannot be fully public (1) and is understood as the antithesis of deliberative discourse, the belief that argument is public axiomatically excludes the body as a site for argumentation. (2) Furthermore, the almost exclusive attention paid to public qualities of argument has obscured the ways in which argument might function in nonpublic but still social settings like the penitentiary. This essay points to some of the ways in which bodies function as argument, operating by way of claims supported by evidence and reasoning. My primary purpose is to explore prison tattooing in men's penitentiaries (3) as visual argumentation. Owing to the limited choices available to prisoners for expression, argumentative or otherwise, prisoners (4) must use nontraditional avenues for social communication. My second purpose is to expand visual argumentation theory by calling on Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca to show how argument functions in the unique social construct of the penitentiary. I begin by briefly discussing penitentiary culture. I then turn to visual argumentation and contextualize this body of scholarship within sociological and ethnographic literature on prison tattooing. Lastly, I explore the particular arguments that prison tattooing makes. This analysis is illustrated with prison tattoos (5) and informed by prisoners' narratives, which explain their experiences with incarceration in a way no outsider's perspective ever could. In so doing, this essay addresses the issue of social arguments in nonpublic spheres, coherently explains why tattoos are so predominant in the penitentiary, and lends a public voice to individuals who are denied one. PENITENTIARY CULTURE As panopticon, the penitentiary is an institution that works to exert total control over the lives of those within its system, a mission easily discerned from its physical structure (Goffman 72). Once having been particularized individuals with autonomy and agency, prisoners are faced with becoming indistinguishable members of a group with no freedom to act. Removing personal possessions that designate identity has acute and wide-reaching effects. …

Over a number of years we have been investigating ways in which e-communication can contribute to children's writing development and how new technology re-frames our understandings of writing in the classroom (Merchant, 2003; Burnett et al, 2004; Burnett et al, 2005; Merchant, 2005). Here we analyse the digital writing of pupils from two linked primary school classes (Year 3–5) in the North of England. Part of the project involved the pupils in communicating about themselves and their interests to email partners of the same age. In this article, we track children's identity performance in informal message exchange and show how this contributed to a final knowledge product. We explore how work that had its origins in representing children's lives and identities reflected their position in wider cultural worlds. This perspective causes us to question whether there are there sufficient opportunities for pupils to explore and express ‘who they are’ in the current content-driven curriculum where public genres are central and personal voice is peripheral.

We inhabit a social world in which identity is complex, no longer closely tied to place or territory, delineated by nationhood, nor simply created, as psychology suggests, through acts of identification. Instead, it is argued, identity is produced through action and performance. Popular digital culture provides a rich context for identity play and performance, but the implications of this for education have only recently been identified. This paper is an exploration of children's identity in computer-mediated communication and draws selectively from texts generated through a series of school-based projects to develop tentative principles for the analysis of identity and impression formation in children's digital writing. I show how children co-construct anchored and transient identities in informal peer-to-peer communication, going on to suggest that this is a valid use of new technology in the classroom and one that can be used to counterbalance a preoccupation with the technical and informational content of ICT.

Waiting in Vain, Colin Channer’s reggae romance, opens up a space for examining the performance of Caribbean masculinities abroad and, more significantly, the possibilities for rewriting the script for masculine identity performance by way of the radical aesthetics of reggae. Using Kwame Dawes’s examination of Channer’s engagement with textual seduction in Natural Mysticism (1999) as my point of departure, I will argue that the very strategies of textual seduction – the authorial excess in the aesthetic use of language, the super-idealized construction of the main character and the staging of audience reception – reinforce rather than rewrite ‘the troubling representations of Caribbean masculinities abroad’ (Coleman 1998: 30). Furthermore, situating Channer’s novel within the romance genre which aestheticizes romance, and within Dawes’s reggae aesthetics which romanticizes the erotic, compromises the attempt at a radical gender politics. If anything, textual self-reflexivity, not textual seduction, provid...

This essay highlights the presence and problems associated with the structure of a dialectic between materiality and virtuality in various discourses regarding body and performance art. I suggest that both the structures and interpretations of body and performance art practices located in various contexts with different relations to technology reproduce the material/virtual dialectic in problematic ways. I propose that an attention to ethical aesthetic engagement provides an escape from the dialectic's reproduction of the separation between the corporeal and the virtual. Through Bakhtin, I posit a framework for producing ethically engaged aesthetic acts.

This article explores the conflicting representations of masculinity and femininity in contemporary travel writing. The workings of power are quite easy to identify in texts that represent 'other' places populated by foreign and exotic people. This article adds another layer to that cartography by exploring how patriarchy is embedded in the representation of foreign lands. Using the insights of postcolonial and feminist research, it is possible to illustrate how intertwining hierarchies of gender and geography continue to reinforce one another in contemporary travelogues. However, locating the ways in which masculine/feminine maps onto familiar/foreign is only part of the project- this article is also concerned with resisting the hegemonies of patriarchy and colonialism. With a performative understanding of identity formulated by Judith Butler, it is possible to interrupt the strict attachments of man = masculine and woman = feminine that are employed in the literary colonization of foreign places. When t...