Mediated Identities

Mediated Identities is an empirical examination of how youth identity is negotiated in urban and rural spaces where cultural, economic, and political forces compete for the allegiance of the young consumer and worker. Rich with fieldwork on teens and television in India, Germany, South Africa, and the United States, the book provides a new direction for the critical discussion of youth agency. It questions young people as autonomous consumers and examines the interpellatory forces of media and market. The application of postcolonial theory produces an incisive analysis of television and other media consumption as part of a process that bolsters the neocolonial imperatives of globalization. Simultaneously, the book focuses on the opportunism on both sides of the equation, on youth particularly in developing economies and the industries that need their cheap labor. In such opportunistic contexts, Mediated Identities addresses ethical dilemmas and transformative possibilities.

This book examines the emerging problems and opportunities that are posed by media innovations, spatial typologies, and cultural trends in (re)shaping identities within the fast-changing milieus of the early 21st Century. Addressing a range of social and spatial scales and using a phenomenological frame of reference, the book draws on the works of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Don Hide to bridge the seemingly disparate, yet related theoretical perspectives across a number of disciplines. Various perspectives are put forward from media, human geography, cultural studies, technologies, urban design and architecture etc. and looked at thematically from networked culture and digital interface (and other) perspectives. The book probes the ways in which new digital media trends affect how and what we communicate, and how they drive and reshape our everyday practices. This mediatization of space, with fast evolving communication platforms and applications of digital representations, offers challenges to our notions of space, identity and culture and the book explores the diverse yet connected levels of technology and people interaction.

This book looks into the role played by mediated communication, particularly new and social media, in shaping various forms of struggles around power, identity and religion at a time when the Arab world is going through an unprecedented period of turmoil and upheaval. The book provides unique and multifocal perspectives on how new forms of communication remain at the centre of historical transformations in the region. The key focus of this book is not to ascertain the extent to which new communication technologies have generated the Arab spring or led to its aftermaths, but instead question how we can better understand many types of articulations between communication technologies, on the one hand, and forms of resistance, collective action, and modes of expression that have contributed to the recent uprisings and continue to shape the social and political upheavals in the region on the other. The book presents original perspectives and rigorous analysis by specialists and academics from around the world that will certainly enrich the debate around major issues raised by recent historical events.

Mass media and culture.

Second Language Identities examines how identity is an issue in different second language learning contexts. It begins with a detailed presentation of what has become a popular approach to identity in the social sciences (including applied linguistics) today, one that is inspired in poststructuralist thought and is associated with the work of authors such as Anthony Giddens, Zygmunt Bauman, Chris Weedon, Judith Butler and Stuart Hall. It then examines how in early SLA research focussing on affective variables, identity was an issue, lurking in the wings but not coming to centre stage. Moving to the present, the book then examines in detail and critiques recent research focussing on identity in three distinct second language learning contexts. These contexts are: (1) adult migration, (2) foreign language classrooms and (3) study abroad programmes. The book concludes with suggestions for future research focussing on identity in second language learning.

Increasingly, identities are the site for interdisciplinary initiatives and identity research is at the heart of many transdisciplinary research centres around the world. No single social science discipline 'owns' identity research which makes it a difficult topic to categorize. The SAGE Handbook of Identities systematizes this complex field by incorporating its interdisciplinary character to provide a comprehensive overview of its themes in contemporary research while still acknowledging the historical and philosophical significance of the concept of identity. Drawing on a global scholarship the Handbook has four parts: Part 1: Frameworks presents the main theoretical and methodological perspectives in identities research. Part 2: Formations covers the major formative forces for identities such as culture, globalisation, migratory patterns, biology and so on. Part 3: Categories reviews research on the core social categories which are central to identity such as ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disability and social class and intersections between these. Part 4: Sites and Context develops a series of case studies of crucial sites and contexts where identity is at stake such as social movements, relationships and family life, work-places and environments and citizenship.

Through case studies from diverse fields of cultural studies, this collection examines how different constructions of identity were mediated in England during the long eighteenth century. While the concept of identity has received much critical attention, the question of how identities were mediated usually remains implicit. This volume engages in a critical discussion of the connection between historically specific categories of identity determined by class, gender, nationality, religion, political factions and age, and the media available at the time, including novels, newspapers, trial reports, images and the theatre. Representative case studies are the arrival of children's literature as a genre, the creation of masculine citizenship in Defoe's novels, the performance of gendered and national identities by the actress Kitty Clive or in plays by Henry Fielding and Richard Sheridan, fashion and the public sphere, the emergence of the Whig and Tory parties, the radical culture of the 1790s, and visual representations of domestic and imperial landscape. Recognizing the proliferation of identities in the epoch, these essays explore the ways in which different media determined constructions of identity and were in turn shaped by them.