Discourse and Identity


Book Description

The relationship between language, discourse and identity has always been a major area of sociolinguistic investigation. In more recent times, the field has been revolutionized as previous models - which assumed our identities to be based on stable relationships between linguistic and social variables - have been challenged by pioneering new approaches to the topic. This volume brings together a team of leading experts to explore discourse in a range of social contexts. By applying a variety of analytical tools and concepts, the contributors show how we build images of ourselves through language, how society moulds us into different categories, and how we negotiate our membership of those categories. Drawing on numerous interactional settings (the workplace; medical interviews; education), in a variety of genres (narrative; conversation; interviews), and amongst different communities (immigrants; patients; adolescents; teachers), this revealing volume sheds light on how our social practices can help to shape our identities.




Discourses of Identity in Liminal Places and Spaces


Book Description

This collection highlights the interplay between language and liminal places and spaces in building distinct narratives of selfhood. The book uses an interdisciplinary approach to examine linguistic and social phenomena in places shaped by displacement and social inequality. The book also looks at chronotopes, the Bakhtinian-inspired concept of the interconnectedness of time and space in identity. The volume demonstrates how studying liminal places and spaces can offer unique insights into how people construct language and selfhood in these spaces, making this key reading for researchers in sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, geography, and linguistic anthropology.




Discourse, the Body, and Identity


Book Description

The 'body' and 'discourse' seem diametrically opposed, but we interact with our bodies and represent ourselves and our relationships in bodily terms. This volume integrates new studies by leading researchers in sociolinguistics, sociology, social psychology and cultural theory. It explores the many interfaces of body and discourse, organized under three main themes: the body as an interactional resource; ideological representations of the body; and discursive constructions of the body in normal and pathological contexts.




Discourses on Nations and Identities


Book Description

The third volume of the collected papers of the ICLA congress "The Many Languages of Comparative Literature" includes contributions that focus on the interplay between concepts of nation, national languages, and individual as well as collective identities. Because all literary communication happens within different kinds of power structures - linguistic, economic, political -, it often results in fascinating forms of hybridity. In the first of four thematic chapters, the papers investigate some of the ways in which discourses can establish modes of thinking, or how discourses are in turn controlled by active linguistic interventions, whether in the context of the patriarchy, war, colonialism, or political factions. The second thematic block is predominantly concerned with hybridity as an aspect of modern cultural identity, and the cultural and linguistic dimensions of domestic life and in society at large. Closely related, a third series of papers focuses on writers and texts analysed from the vantage points of exile and exophony, as well as theoretical contributions to issues of terminology and what it means to talk about transcultural phenomena. Finally, a group of papers sheds light on more overtly violent power structures, mechanisms of exclusion, Totalitarianism, torture, and censorship, but also resistance to these forms of oppression. In addition to these chapters, the volume also collects a number of thematically related group sections from the ICLA congress, preserving their original context.




Identity in Narrative


Book Description

This volume presents both an analysis of how identities are built, represented and negotiated in narrative, as well as a theoretical reflection on the links between narrative discourse and identity construction. The data for the book are Mexican immigrants' personal experience narratives and chronicles of their border crossings into the United States. Embracing a view of identity as a construct firmly grounded in discourse and interaction, the author examines and illustrates the multiple threads that connect the local expression and negotiation of identity to the wider social contexts that frame the experience of migration, from material conditions of life in the United States to mainstream discourses about race and color. The analysis reveals how identities emerge in discourse through the interplay of different levels of expression, from implicit adherence to narrative styles and ways of telling, to explicit negotiation of membership categories.




Migration and Media


Book Description

The socio-discursive landscape surrounding the migration debate is characterised by a growing sense of crisis in both personal and collective identities. From this viewpoint, discourses about immigration are also always attempts at reconstructing the threatened ‘home identity’ of the respective host society. It is such attempts at reasserting identity-in-crisis (due to migration) that are the focus of the volume Migration and Media: Discourses about identities in crisis. This four-part book explores the representational strategies used to frame current migration debates as crises of identity, collective and individual. It features fourteen case-studies of varying sets of data including print media texts, TV broadcasts, online forums, politicians’ speeches, legal and administrative texts, and oral narratives, drawn from discourses in a range of languages – Croatian, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, and Ukrainian – , and it employs different discourse-analytical methods, such as Argumentation and Metaphor Analysis, Gendered Language Studies, Corpus-assisted Semantics and Pragmatics, and Proximization Theory. Such a diverse range of sources, languages, and approaches provides innovative methodological and theoretical analysis on migration and identity which will be of interest to scholars, students, and policy makers working in the fields of migration studies, media studies, identity studies, and social and public policy. As of January 2023, this e-book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.




Discourse Constructions of Youth Identities


Book Description

This volume sets out to foreground the issues of youth identity in the context of current sociolinguistic and discourse research on identity construction. Based on detailed empirical analyses, the twelve chapters offer examinations of how youth identities from late childhood up to early twenties are locally constructed in text and talk. The settings and types of social organization investigated range from private letters to graffiti, from peer group talk to video clips, from schoolyard to prison. Comparably, a wide range of languages is brought into focus, including Danish, German, Greek, Japanese, and Turkish. Drawing on various discourse analytic paradigms (e.g. Critical Discourse Analysis, Conversation Analysis), the contributions examine and question notions with currency in the field, such as young people's linguistic creativity and resistance to mainstream norms. At the same time, they demonstrate the embeddedness of constructions of youth identities in local activities and communities of practice where they interact with other social identities and factors, in particular gender and ethnicity.




Teacher Identity Discourses


Book Description

Addresses the various types of discourse within the process of professional identity development. This work emphasizes that the intersection of the personal and professional in teacher identity formation is more complex, and accents the need for teacher educators to take steps to facilitate such integration.




Selves and Identities in Narrative and Discourse


Book Description

The different traditions that have inspired the contributors to this volume can be divided along three different orientations, one that is rooted predominantly in sociolinguistics, a second that is ethnomethodologically informed, and a third that came in the wake of narrative interview research. All three share a commitment to view self and identity not as essential properties of the person but as constituted in discursive practices and particularly in narrative. Moreover, since self and identity are held to be phenomena that are contextually and continually generated, they are defined and viewed in the plural, as selves and identities. In the attempt of moving closer toward a process-oriented approach to the formation of selves and identities, this volume sets the stage for future discussions of the role of narrative and discourse in this generation process and for how a close analysis of these processes can advance an understanding of the world around us and within this world, of identities and selves.




Contesting Culture


Book Description

A vivid 1996 ethnographic account of an aspect of contemporary British life, and a challenge to the conventional discourse of community studies.