Identity Investments

After Pinochet's dictatorship ended in Chile in 1990, the country experienced a rapid decline in poverty along with a quickly growing economy. As a result, Chile's middle class expanded dramatically, echoing trends seen across the Global South as neoliberalism took firm hold in the 1990s and the early 2000s. Identity Investments examines the politics and consumption practices of this vast and varied fraction of the Chilean population, seeking to better understand their value systems and the histories that informed them. Using participant observation, interviews, and photographs, Joel Stillerman develops a unique typology of the middle class, made up of activists, moderate Catholics, pragmatists, and youngsters. This typology allows him to unearth the cultural, political, and religious roots of middle-class market practices in contrast with other studies focused on social mobility and exclusionary practices. The resultant contrast in backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives of these four groups animates this book and extends an emerging body of scholarship focused on the connections between middle-class market choices and politics in the Global South, with important implications for Chile's recent explosive political changes.

This book is about education, ideology, power and identity investment and concerns an influential East Asian expatriate community. Specifically, it seeks to understand particular ways in which the Japanese white-collar elite live as a closed and self-referentially defined in-group, despite the manifestly multicultural ethos of their Singaporean domicile. The study attends to issues regarding schooling, unity, diversity and community based on grounded anthropological observations. Specific observations centre around the particularities of Japanese nation-state schooling practices set in cosmopolitan Singapore, a contrastingly non-Japanese setting. The insights therein are made possible by way of seeing education as an ideological domain and powerful discursive platform. Using this framework, cultural and identity-related practices are viewed dynamically and appreciated for their fluidic reflection of identity praxes. Readers will gain fresh insights into the role of education and ideology in reproducing asymmetry and the value of sociohistorical analyses in surfacing hidden power relations. Researchers, educators and decision makers will appreciate the transparency of grounded ethnographic observation yielding insights into practices which imbricate inclusion-exclusion and privilege-marginalization debates within a neoliberal hegemony. Students of the social politics of education and the cultural politics of language, ideology and identity will find the book a provocative read.

​This book investigates how social identity relates to financial investment behavior of the German-Turkish diaspora. The author approaches this study using qualitative research and multiple semi-structured in-depth interviews with a strong philosophical and methodological basis. Taking a phenomenological stance, the empirical results reveal many nuanced shades of bi-cultural identity. Key findings include a range of social creativity behaviors, also offering an extension to social identity theory by means of re-defining relevant in-groups. Financial investments are considered a family affair, with children being heavily involved and support of (extended) family is defined as investment. Within that realm, German social identity prevails with regard to financial investments.

This book describes the experiences of a group of students in Chicago, Illinois, who are attending one of the first Spanish-English dual immersion schools in the United States. The author follows the group during two school years, documenting their Spanish use and proficiency, as well as how their two languages intersect with the ongoing production of their identities.

Identity of Chinese Heritage Language Learners in a Global Era enriches the current research on heritage language (HL) learner identity by examining how identity is constructed, negotiated, and performed in the narratives of university Chinese HL (CHL) learners in Hong Kong. This monograph has identified three sub-categories of CHL learners: domestic-born Chinese, ‘third culture’ Chinese, and overseas Chinese sojourners. Through systematically examining these CHL learners’ life-history narratives about language learning, language use, and social experiences from early childhood to university time, this monograph shows how CHL learner identity is dynamically constructed and changed through self and social positioning across a wide range of spatio-temporal contexts. It also adopts investment, agency, and imagined communities to examine the shared discourses which reflect the relationship between identity and the larger social processes that involve transnational or postcolonial encounters. This monograph contributes to reflections on the emerging discourses of HL learner identity in the context of multilingualism and transnational migration. It challenges the stigmatised image of CHL learners as ‘diasporic subjects’ or ‘language minority students’ in the literature and conceptualises CHL learners as transformative linguistic and social actors in processes of transnational migration and institutional change. This monograph is targeted toward educators, researchers, and professionals working in the fields of heritage language, overseas Chinese studies, migrant studies, and intercultural studies.

Through an innovative and interdisciplinary approach that combines critical sociolinguistic ethnography, multi-modality, reflexivity, and discourse analysis, this groundbreaking book reveals the multiple (and sometimes simultaneous) ways in which individuals engage and invest in representations of languages and identities.This timely work is the first to consider the significance of multilingualism and its relationship to citizenship as well as the development of linguistic repertoires as an essential component of language education in a globalized world. While examining the discourses and interconnections between multilingualism, globalization, and identity, the author draws upon a unique case study of the experiences, voices, trajectories, and journeys of Canadian youth of Italian origin from diverse social, geographical, and linguistic backgrounds, participating in university French language courses as well as training to become teachers of French in the urban, multicultural and global landscape of Toronto, Canada. In doing so, Byrd Clark skilfully illustrates the multidimensional ways that youth invest in language learning and socially construe their multiple identities within diverse contexts while weaving in and out of particularistic and universalistic identifications. This invaluable resource will not only shed light on how and why people engage in learning languages and for which languages they choose to invest, but will offer readers a deeper understanding of the complex interrelationships between multilingualism, identity, and citizenship. It will appeal to researchers in a variety of fields, including applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, language acquisition and linguistic anthropology.

Addressing the critical issue of teacher identity tensions, this edited volume looks at the tensions between teachers’ instructional beliefs, values, and priorities, and the contextual constraints and requirements. It examines how teachers deal with these tensions to avoid demotivation and burnout, which play a significant role in identity construction. Tensions are inseparable from growth and transformation but have the potential to disrupt teacher identity construction. Therefore, continual efforts to resolve tensions in teaching are inevitable. The process of resolution or reconciliation might be extended, and teachers could need support in that process to minimize the possible negative impacts on their identities. This process can simultaneously generate positive outcomes for teachers’ growth and learning. Therefore, how teachers perceive, respond to, and grapple with tensions are critical experiences that offer windows into the complexities of teacher identity negotiation. The volume paints a picture of the personal, professional, and political dimensions of teacher identity tensions in various international contexts. The chapters draw on empirical studies with clear pedagogical implications to illustrate what identity tensions language teachers face in and outside the classroom during their career trajectory, how language teachers cope with identity tensions in their professional life, and how teacher educators can integrate identity tensions into teacher learning activities. This book is beneficial for students and lecturers in applied linguistics, educational linguistics, and educational psychology. It will also be helpful of interest to teacher educators, teacher education researchers, teacher supervisors, and MA and doctoral students interested in research on language teacher identity.

This book brings together the current theory, research and practical perspectives from different parts of the world on language teacher identity in an attempt to better understand the nature of identities teachers in different contexts develop. By linking theory to pedagogy, the book examines how second language teacher identities are shaped and explores the various links between teacher identities and variables that affect the formation of identities. Theory and Practice in Second Language Teacher Identity includes a foreword by Jack Richards (University of Sydney and RELC), an afterword by Peter de Costa (Michigan State University) and holds 20 invited chapters by established and active scholars and teacher educators to discuss the various aspects of in-service and pre-service second language teacher identity development. It also addresses the way the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted teacher identities and examines under-researched issues, such as the intersection between gender and race in second language teacher identity development and identity construction in second languages other than English. What does it mean to be a teacher of English as a second language in an age of globalization, new media, technological revolution and de-institutionalized knowledge? How do teachers gain pre-service and in-service expertise, a sense of professional identity, and educational integrity? And how have they dealt with the extra-burden imposed by the pandemic? This thought-provoking volume offers valuable perspectives on these important issues in the professional development of English teachers worldwide. — Prof. Claire Kramsch, University of California, Berkeley, USA. The way we see ourselves and are seen by others influences our social and professional interactions. Teacher identity and sense of agency is therefore not merely a matter of research interest for it impacts learners and learning, which makes the topic of this book extremely important. With chapters located in a wide range of countries – from USA to Australia via UAE, Thailand and others – and drawing on a variety of research methods, the book synthesizes extant research and develops many new research avenues. It does so not only with theory in mind but with practical lessons for teachers and teacher educators and thus becomes an essential volume for our libraries and studies. — Prof. Michael Byram, University of Durham, UK. In this compelling collection, co-edited by Karim Sadeghi and Farah Ghaderi, the authors address key questions about language teacher identity in contemporary applied linguistics: What is the relationship between language teacher identity and language teacher agency? To what extent does ideology impact language teacher identity? How do language teachers navigate an increasingly globalized and unequal world? Authors from different regions of the world draw on diverse methodologies to share insightful research on both pre-service and in-service language teacher identity, making an important contribution to applied linguistics and TESOL at a time of great social and educational change. — Prof. Bonny Norton (FRSC), University Killam Professor and Distinguished University Scholar, University of British Columbia, Canada. “Theory and Practice in Second Language Teacher Identity” captures recent thinking about language teacher identity. The broad array of excellent chapter contributions explores multiple dimensions of identity, from teacher agency and emotions to the disruptive effects of the Covid pandemic on teachers’ professional lives and practices. The studies draw on a number of theoretical perspectives and demonstrate the use of both familiar and innovative research methodologies. The relevant topics, the up-to-date bibliographic sources, and the useful research findings make this edited volume an essential addition to your bookshelf. — Prof. Gary Barkhuizen, University of Auckland, New Zealand.