Discourse Resistance And Identity Formation

Aimed at academics & students working at all levels of education & for policy-makers & managers, this book examines identity formation. It argues that teachers & learners are pressed to conform their professional identity to a model imposed by distant policy makers who have wholly different concerns.

This fifth volume in the Discourse, Power, Resistance series considers how teachers and learners are under relentless pressure to conform their professional identity to a model imposed by policymakers. The book deals with the fundamental question facing teachers and learners worldwide: who are we, what are we supposed to be doing, why. Policymakers offer stultifying answers to these questions, based on a narrow, instrumental view of education that is viewed by teachers and learners with growing anger and dismay. What is to be done? The official view - and the discourse through which that view is articulated - is shown in this book to be weighty and vacuous at the same time - a massively ponderous discursive absurdity. Consequently, this book goes on to offer wide ranging and serious strategies of resistance The book encourages faculty and students in universities and partner institutions involved in teaching, training, and/or carrying out research in all areas of education. It will appeal to staff and students involved in training for compulsory and post-compulsory/vocational education and lifelong learning, and to lecturers in all areas of Higher Education with an interest in issues of policy and identity formation. The contributors are David Selby, Cheryl Hunt, Christina Schwabenland, Eileen Honan, Mhairi Mackie, James Avis, Anne-Marie Bathmaker, Yota Dimitriadi, and Michael Watts.

Identity Trouble assembles contributions from a variety of discourse fields to discuss the pressures on traditional understandings of identity. The focus is on failures and uncertainties in people's construction of their identities when faced change and the contributors raise critical questions about identity and how it may be reconfigured.

'Identity' is a central organizing feature of our social world. Across the social sciences and humanities, it is increasingly treated as something that is actively and publicly accomplished in discourse. This book defines identity in its broadest sense, in terms of how people display who they are to each other. Each chapter examines a different discursive environment in which people do 'identity work': everyday conversation, institutional settings, narrative and stories, commodified contexts, spatial locations, and virtual environments. The authors describe and demonstrate a range of discourse and interaction analytic methods as they are put to use in the study of identity, including 'performative' analyses, conversation analysis, membership categorization analysis, critical discourse analysis, narrative analysis, positioning theory, discursive psychology and politeness theory. The book aims to give readers a clear sense of the coherence (or otherwise) of these different approaches, the practical steps taken in analysis, and their situation within broader critical debates. Through the use of detailed and original 'identity' case studies in a variety of spoken and written texts in order, the book offers a practical and accessible insight into what the discursive accomplishment of identity actually looks like, and how to go about analyzing it.

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.

This unique book analyzes the discourse of organizations affiliated with al-Qaeda. It interrogates the discourse of these extremist organizations, which publish their own newspapers. These publications, widely distributed to the local population, play a critical role in securing and maintaining public support for the militant organizations. The book examines how these organizations discursively construct the socio-political reality of their world, in the process defining the Self and the Other. The Self becomes umma, or the global Muslim community, while the Other becomes the West, including the United States, Israel, and India. This book presents an analysis of three historical moments—the assassination of al-Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden, the controversial YouTube video Innocence of the Muslims, and the shooting of the Pakistani child activist and Nobel Laureate Malala Yousafzai. This analysis reveals the discursive strategies used by the militant organizations to create what Foucault calls regimes of truth and articulate identities of the Self and the Other. The first of its kind, this book provides an insight into the mind-set of extremists. It presents a picture of the world that extremists construct through their own discourse and explains how extremists try to win the hearts and minds of mainstream Muslims in order to expand their support base, seek donations, and find new recruits. Understanding extremist narratives and the ways they feed the broader militant discourse may yield more meaningful and effective strategies for the West to communicate with mainstream Muslims.

The papers in this book explore language use in a broad range of discourse fields. They provide theoretical perspectives on global orientations to social, political and economic transformations in the “New World Order” (NWO), and extend these with studies on the impacts of such transformations at the local, national, regional and global levels. The discussions highlight current concerns among academics and political commentators about the potential social impact of representations of the NWO in language and discourse. The present work is important in raising social consciousness towards the central role that language and discourse play in the construction of shifting/multiple identities. In this way, the roles of critical discourse analysis and indeed that of the analysts themselves are emancipative and socially transformative. The value of such consciousness-raising for potential social action in language user empowerment terms cannot be overstressed, particularly given the ascendant position of the English language in the NWO. This collection is a significant contribution to the ongoing critical discussion on global order discourse.

Whilst current research into teaching and learning offers many insights into the experiences of academics and students in higher education, it has two significant shortcomings. It does not highlight the dynamic ways in which students and academics impact on each other in teaching-learning interactions or the ways in which these interactions are shaped by wider social processes. This book offers critical insight into existing perspectives on researching teaching and learning in higher education and argues that alternative perspectives are required in order to account for structure and agency in teaching-learning interactions in higher education. In considering four alternative perspectives, it examines the ways in which teaching-learning interactions are shaped by teaching-learning environments, student and academic identities, disciplinary knowledge practices and institutional cultures. It concludes by examining the conceptual and methodological implications of these analyses of teaching-learning interactions and provides the reader with an invaluable guide to alternative ways of conceptualising and researching teaching and learning in higher education.