Interaction And Identity

Scholarly interest in issues of self-identity has exploded across disciplines within the humanities and social sciences in recent years. Common to these concerns are the assumptions that self-identity is not an a priori, not given or fixed, but created in the process of communication. This also assumes that social institutions and values are produced and reproduced by individuals in interaction. To capture the essential characteristics of a person requires analysis of how the social and psychological intersect in moments of communication. Interaction and Identity contributes, theoretically and empirically, to contemporary scholarly interest in issues of identity. Chapters and contributors to this stand alone volume include: "Part/Whole Discovery: Stages of Inquiry" by Thomas Scheff; "Communication" by Gregory Bateson; "Internal Muzak: An Examination of Intrapersonal Relationships" by Linda Lederman; "The Constitution of Identity as Gendered in Psychoanalytic Therapy: Ideology and Interaction" by Margaret Carr; and "The (Reconstruction and Negotiation of Cultural Identities in the Age of Globalization" by Getinet Belay. The multiple disciplines of social research with contemporary interest in identity are ably reflected in Interaction and Identity. The authors are drawn from eight disciplines: anthropology, communication, information science, linguistics, philosophy, psychoanalysis, psychology, and sociology. This book will be invaluable to scholars in all these areas—above all in communication research as such.

This book addresses two critical calls pertaining to language education. Firstly, for attention to be paid to the transdisciplinary nature and complexity of learner identity and interaction in the classroom and secondly, for the need to attend to conceptualizations of and approaches to manifestations of (in)equity in the sociohistorical contexts in which they occur. Collectively, the chapters envision classrooms and educational institutions as sites both shaping and shaped by larger (trans)communal negotiations of being and belonging, in which individuals affirm and/or problematize essentialized and idealized nativeness and community membership. The volume, comprised of chapters contributed by a diverse array of researcher-practitioners living, working and/or studying around the globe, is intended to inform, empower and inspire stakeholders in language education to explore, potentially reimagine, and ultimately critically and practically transform, the communities in which they live, work and/or study.

Narrative research is frequently described as a diverse enterprise, yet the kinds of narrative data that it bases itself on present a striking consensus: they tend to be autobiographical and elicited in interviews. This book sets out to carve out a space alongside this narrative canon for stories that have not made it to the mainstream of narrative and identity analysis, yet they abound as well as being crucial sites of subjectivity in everyday interactional contexts. By labelling those stories as 'small', the book emphasizes their distinctiveness, both interactionally and as an antidote to the tradition of 'grand' narratives research. Drawing primarily on the audio-recorded small stories of a group of female adolescents that was studied ethnographically in a town in Greece, the book follows a language-focused and practice-based approach in order to provide fresh answers and perspectives on some of the perennial questions of narrative analysis: How can we (re)conceptualize the mainstay concepts of tellership, structure and evaluation in small stories? How do the participants' telling identities connect with their larger social identities? Finally, what does the project of storying self (and other) mean in small stories and how can it be best explored?

Analyses how different English language teacher identities and power relationships are oriented to and made relevant in social interaction.

This book examines everyday stories of personal experience that are published online in contemporary forms of social media. Taking examples from discussion boards, blogs, social network sites, microblogging sites, wikis, collaborative and participatory storytelling projects, Ruth Page explores how new and existing narrative genres are being (re)shaped in different online contexts. The book shows how the characteristics of social media, which emphasize recency, interpersonal connection and mobile distribution, amplify or reverse different aspects of canonical storytelling. The new storytelling patterns which emerge provide a fresh perspective on some of the key concepts in narrative research: structure, evaluation and the location of speaker and audience in time and space. The online stories are profoundly social in nature, and perform important identity work for their tellers as they interact with their audiences - identities which range from celebrities in Twitter, cancer survivors in the blogosphere to creative writers convening storytelling projects or local histories. Stories and Social Media brings together the stories told in well-known sites like Facebook and lesser-known community archives, providing a landmark survey and critique of personal storytelling as it is being reworked online at the start of the 21st century.

This book examines identity theory’s centrality within social psychology and its foundations within structural symbolic interaction, highlighting its links not only to other prominent sociological subfields, but also to other theoretical perspectives within and beyond sociology. The book provides a synthetic overview outlining the intellectual lineage of identity theory within structural symbolic interactionism, and how the “Indiana School” of identity theory and research, associated especially with Sheldon Stryker, relates to other symbolic interactionist traditions within sociology. It also analyses the latest developments in response to the push to integrate identity theory, which initially focused on role identities, with the study of personal, group and social identities. Further, it discusses the relationship between identity theory and affect control theory, providing a sense of the many substantive topics within sociology beyond social psychology for which the study of identity has important, sometimes underappreciated implications. The book concludes with a chapter summarizing the interrelated lessons learned while also reflecting on remaining key questions and challenges for the future development of identity theory.