This article aims to demonstrate that the concept of the ‘dialogical self’ is an identity theory that provides useful tools for studying intersectionality. In terms of the dialogical self, the formation of identity is a process of orchestrating voices within the self that speak from different I-positions. Such voices are embedded in field-specific repertoires of practices, characters, discourses and power relations specific to the various groups to which individuals simultaneously belong. By telling one's life-story, the individual intones these voices and (...) combines them in new ways, thus reshaping them as they use them. The article applies the theoretical concept of the dialogical self to the analysis of the life-story of a relatively well-known female Dutch politician of Moroccan background whose explanation of why she wears a headscarf allows her to combine the religious and political voices in her story with her more hesitant female voice. The words, images and self-evaluations used in her self-narratives demonstrate the ways in which her religious, ethnic and gender identifications are formed and are in dialogue. (shrink)

This paper explores the contribution of Zen storytelling to moral education. First, an understanding of Zen practice, what it is and how it is achieved, is established. Second, the connection between Zen practice and ethics is shown in terms of the former’s ability to cultivate moral emotions and actions. It is shown that Zen practice works at the roots of consciousness where, according to the fundamental tenets of Buddhism, the possibility of human goodness, known as bodhicitta , lies. Third, it (...) is suggested that storytelling is a viable and desirable means of moral education. Two examples of Zen stories are introduced, and interpretive commentaries are offered in the service of illustrating the major points made in this article. (shrink)

An enduring concern for educational policy in many affluent countries is the endemic nature of educational inequalities that are predominately located in poor urban contexts. Given the inabilities of school reform per se to deal with these inequalities, the paper focuses on issues of scarcity and spatial processes that are implicated in the formation of young people's educational identities - identities that then mediate the conversion of educational resources into educational attainments or achievements.

An enduring concern for educational policy in many affluent countries is the endemic nature of educational inequalities that are predominately located in poor urban contexts. Given the inabilities of school reform per se to deal with these inequalities, the paper focuses on issues of scarcity and spatial processes that are implicated in the formation of young people's educational identities – identities that then mediate the conversion of educational resources into educational attainments or achievements.

Intersemiotic translation (IT) was defined by Roman Jakobson (The Translation Studies Reader, Routledge, London, p. 114, 2000) as “transmutation of signs”—“an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems.” Despite its theoretical relevance, and in spite of the frequency in which it is practiced, the phenomenon remains virtually unexplored in terms of conceptual modeling, especially from a semiotic perspective. Our approach is based on two premises: (i) IT is fundamentally a semiotic operation process (semiosis) and (ii) (...) IT is a deeply iconic-dependent process. We exemplify our approach by means of literature to dance IT and we explore some implications for the development of a general model of IT. (shrink)

Most prior research on figurative language has looked at the cognitive aspects of metaphoricity. The present research attempts at going beyond metaphor's cognitive impact and aims to view the social and discoursal aspects of metaphorical constructions in relation to people's identities and social realities. This article reports an analysis and discussion of figurative language used by Pakistani women while talking about their literacies and selfhood. The article makes two claims about figurative language: first, metaphorical constructions are cultural and therefore rooted (...) in social practices and discourses; second, figurative expressions are common to everyday talk, constrain and enable thinking processes and construct social reality. Methodologically too, the article offers an interesting departure from the traditional studies of metaphor as the data cited are `incidental' and natural, rather than elicited or experimental; the researcher `s aim was not to study figurative language but it turned out to be ubiquitous in women's everyday talk. Hence, the present data strengthen Tannen's and Carter's work that creativity and figurative language are not exclusive to literary discourse but are part of everyday discourses. (shrink)

Though rapid collection of big data is ubiquitous across domains, from industry settings to academic contexts, the ethics of big data collection and research are contested. A nexus of data ethics issues is the concept of creep, or repurposing of data for other applications or research beyond the conditions of original collection. Data creep has proven controversial and has prompted concerns about the scope of ethical oversight. Institutional review boards offer little guidance regarding big data, and problematic research can still (...) meet ethical standards. While ethics seem concrete through institutional deployment, I frame ethics as produced. Informed by my ethnographic research at a large public university in the U.S., I explore ethics through two models: ethics as institutional procedures and ethics as acts and intentions. The university where I conducted fieldwork is the development grounds for a predictive model that uses student data to anticipate academic success. While students consent to data collection, the circumstances of consent and the degree to which they are informed are not so apparent, as many data are a product of creep. Drawing from interviews and participant observation with administrators, data scientists, developers, and students, I examine data ethics, from a larger institutional model to everyday enactments related to data creep. After demonstrating the limits of such models, I propose a remodeling of ethics that draws on recent works on data, justice, and refusal to pose generative questions for rethinking ethics in institutional contexts. (shrink)

This paper aims to interrogate the potential and challenges in interdisciplinary working across disciplinary boundaries by examining a longitudinal partnership designed to research student experiences of digital technologies in undergraduate medicine established by the two authors. The paper is situated in current methodological trends including the changing value of replicability and evidence based methods and increases in qualitative and mixed methods studies in Medical Education, whilst education research has seen growing encouragement for randomised controlled trials and large-scale quantitative studies. A (...) critical analysis of the partnership interactions is framed by Holland’s positional and imagined identities, negotiated across ‘figured’ worlds and the concept of epistemic games that guide knowledge construction. We consider social, political and cultural challenges and how ‘in between’ sites of knowledge were established where the academic identity of each was shaped by engaging with the other and new theoretical, methodological and ethical understandings were co-constructed. The paper concludes that despite the on-going challenges, ‘bottom up’ partnerships can contribute to a growth in interdisciplinarity which might itself be understood as a boundary object. Interdisciplinarity necessitates improvisation and boundary crossing and can therefore always be considered a matter of negotiation, creativity and collaboration. (shrink)

Heterosexist ideology underpins education policy and practice almost universally. It has the effect of rendering invisible and disrespecting practitioners and students of other sexual and non-gender conforming identities. Much explicitly queer work has challenged this normalising and frequently oppressive higher education terrain. To maximise this queer potential this article proposes re-positioning queer within and through a practice and pedagogy of feminism. The broad-based identity politics of feminism and the anti-identitarian politic of queer may appear a slightly improbable alliance. The article (...) argues, however, that intersectional approaches which reinforce queer integrity, challenge oppressive social norms and simultaneously re-emphasise the importance of the political through an identity politics heavily influenced by feminism, are not just possible but necessary. In seeking to explore what unites feminism and queer educationally, the article makes three observations relating to history, pedagogy and activism. It references two particular LGTBQ Irish and European educational programmes, which it argues highlight this sense of the probable in terms of queer–feminist educational alliances. Such alliances can continue to challenge in material ways sustained educational constructions of heterosexuality as normal, natural and moral and in so doing provide a platform for empowerment and change. (shrink)

This philosophical anthropology tries to explore the basic categories of man’s being in the worlds using a special quantum meta-ontology that is introduced in the book. Quantum understanding of space and time, consciousness, or empirical/nonempirical reality elicits new questions relating to philosophical concerns such as subjectivity, free will, mind, perception, experience, dialectic, or agency. The authors have developed an inspiring theoretical framework transcending the boundaries of particular disciplines, e.g. quantum philosophy, metaphysics of consciousness, philosophy of mind, phenomenology of space and (...) time, and ontological relativity. (shrink)

The ability to dominate or exercise will in social encounters is often assumed in social theory to define power, but there is another form of power that is often confused with it and rarely analyzed as distinct: logistics or the ability to mobilize the natural world for political effect. I develop this claim through a case study of seventeenthcentury France, where the power of impersonal rule, exercised through logistics, was fundamental to state formation. Logistical activity circumvented patrimonial networks, disempowering the (...) nobility and supporting a new regime of impersonal rule: the modern, territorial state. (shrink)

This article explores the identity of youth in relation to the information sources they choose in the constellation of information of video games, using the massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft as an example. From this study, several identities are recognized that are combinations of the participants skill and level in the game, as well as their play style and the information practices they use in relation to school success.

An object-based activity—science and culture story box—was designed, developed, and used to explore young people’s views about cultural knowledge and scientific knowledge. In informal education spaces, culture is often presented via representations of easily observable features of ethnicity such as music or dress. The development and application of knowledge in culturally diverse communities can be difficult to visualize and is rarely presented. Instead, Western science often dominates as the authoritative, valid, systematic, and useful way of thinking. Conversations about science and (...) culture can create a platform for meaningful dialogue and valuing of a variety of cultures and different funds of knowledge. Using an informal science education lens, we interrogated young people’s views about different knowledge systems. Six cohorts of Western Australian young people participated in the study. The activity involved groups of three to four young people assigning seventeen photographs of objects and or processes onto a Venn diagram of scientific knowledge, cultural knowledge, or both. Photographs were taken of the forty-four resulting Venn diagrams showing association of items with knowledge domain. This was quantified to show the number of times an item was associated with scientific knowledge, cultural knowledge, or both. Group discussions were audio recorded and transcribed. Thematic analysis of discussions and associations of items to knowledge domain revealed intriguing themes and perspectives. Young people in this study associated technology with electronic devices and scientific knowledge but not with cultural knowledge. Young people expressed views that culture was old and basic and science was new and progressive. Other impressions expressed were that cultures do not “do” science and that skin color determines culture. No clear or consistent conception emerged of Australian culture. These young people’s perspectives are discussed within the context of meaningful intercultural understanding in multicultural societies. This activity was developed as a research tool for use with young people in a multicultural society to examine views of different funds of knowledge. We propose further development and directed use of the story box in informal education spaces as a process to stimulate conversations that might enhance intercultural understanding and appreciation of multiple ways of knowing. (shrink)

This paper argues for the utility of ANT as a philosophical and methodological approach to policy analysis. It introduces the key features of a recent educational policy reform initiative, Skills for Life and illustrates the argument by looking at three ‘moments’ (in Callon's 1986 terminology) in the life of this initiative, applying the theoretical tools of ANT to these. The analysis shows that even (and perhaps especially) within a strongly framed social policy initiative like the Skills for Life Strategy, things (...) constantly escape; that differences held in tension within the ‘successful’ project sow the seeds of failure and dissolution. (shrink)

In this article I will suggest that futures are made as embodied enactments of individuals and collectives. Values and identities are shaped as postures, gestures, movements, and expressions that are in themselves sites of personal and communal meaning. Bodily organizations are ground for senses of self, and the recognition, and reaction to, the otherness of others. Bodily organizations are shaped in encounters in families and social and cultural institutions that they in turn shape. Kinds of bodies and kinds of bodily (...) enactments are cultivated in different communities. They can be sources of conflict or sources of transindividual and transcultural becoming. In this article I look at some ways bodily meanings are developed in both families and communities. I use the image of Paladin, a fictional television gunslinger character in the 1950s, among others, to describe processes of embodied self-formation that are derived from the media and other extra-familial sources. I look at the polycultural organization of individual psyches in our era, as well as somatically based community conflict and collaboration. I briefly describe how practiced experiences of somatic organization can be used as tools for personal and communal exploration of new possibility. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to offer an additional perspective to the understanding of educational change processes by clarifying the significance of identity learning. Today’s innovations require changes in teachers’ professional identity. Identity learning involves a relation between social‐cognitive construction of new meanings and individual, emotional sense‐making of new experiences. This relationship between cognition and emotion asks for a strong learning environment: the question is whether schools provide these strong learning environments. To answer this question, the paper provides an (...) overview of the existing knowledge about schools as contexts for teacher learning and change. It will become clear that the emotional side of the change process has been overlooked. A model for identity learning is presented, involving both meaning‐giving and sense‐making. Building on this model, it is discussed how school leaders can build strategies for the identity learning of teachers. (shrink)

The concept of multiplicity describes the fluid nature of identity and experience in the wake of postmodernity. Yet the question of how we negotiate and maintain our identities, despite our multiplicities, requires phenomenological clarification. I suggest that recognition of multiplicity needs to be combined with an acknowledgement of continuity, however minimal. I maintain that this continuity is evidenced in our pre-reflective self-awareness, embodiment and habitual activities. Our authorship of life narratives and our ability to deliberate and shape our identities takes (...) place against the background of our lived, prereflective experience. I develop the notion of prereflective self-awareness using the work of Sartre, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. I suggest that prereflective self-awareness, embodiment and habitual activity are themselves shaped by our participation in sociocultural frameworks that give meaning to our lives. (shrink)

How and why could some stories be construed as sacred in organizations, and what functions does the sacred have in organizational values work? Research has shown how values can be made formative of a range of organizational purposes and forms but has underscored their performative, situated, and agentic nature. We address that void by studying the sacred as a potentially salient yet under-researched realm of values work. Drawing on an ethnographic case study of a faith-based health care organization and the (...) ethical philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, we describe how the sacred is figured in two sets of tales that were lived and told with surprising intensity and consistency: the parable of the Good Samaritan and the tale of the legacy bestowed by the organization’s founder. We theorize how this figuring of the sacred in story and in action recasts values work from a centralized and unitary process to a two-way learning dialectic between the ongoing creative imitation of action and narrative. Values in the shape of stories of the sacred do not achieve their meaning as unchangeable cores or sanctioned beliefs. Rather, they come to life in a process of ongoing moral inquiry that co-evolves with moral agencies. In the latter regard, the sacred primarily becomes manifest in everyday work in the form of questioning and creative acts of care. People become moral agents when they feel and respond to the sacred in the call of the other. (shrink)

In this paper I develop an alternative to prevailing moral development assumptions in early childhood education. Drawing on a Bakhtinian theoretical framework, theories of identity formation, and examples from my longitudinal research study of child-adult play, I reframe development as a lifelong process of coauthoring ethical identities that may begin in early childhood when adults join children in dramatic play.

This paper offers an alternative theoretical consideration of ethnic identification in psychology. Mainstream social psychological theories are largely positivist and individualistic. New possibilities of theoretical understanding open up as the relational and symbolic nature of ethnicity enters psychological inquiry. This paper takes culture and self as two conceptual domains of social identification, following a meta-theoretical position of cultural psychology. The central focus is the cultural development of the person in social context of a given culture, specifically their ethnic identification, to (...) which end, it looks at several processual aspects. First, ethnic culture is approached as a guiding principle and practice in everyday understanding and experience of one?s own ethnicity. Second, ethnic identification is considered a social and personal act of meaning making, which happens in a given social context, through practical activity and the discursive positioning of a person. Third, since rather than considered a conscious aspect of belonging, ethnicity is assumed and taken for granted, ruptures are considered as destabilizing events that create an opportunity for ethnic meaning reinterpretation and developmental transition. In the meaning making process, symbolic resources are conceived of as primary self-configuring tools, which are also culture-configuring. Ethnic meaning making is theorized as a central social-psychological process through which ethnic culture and a person as an ethnic subject emerge in historical perspective. Finally, the uniqueness of a singular person in the shared ethnic culture is conceptualized based on symbolic distancing from the immediate social context, through the model of knitting personal and socio-historical semiotic threads. (shrink)

This research explores the incorporation of narrative perspectives in economics as a social science and its implications for rethinking epistemology. By examining the role of narratives in economic analysis, the study highlights the advantages of narratives in providing contextualized accounts of human experiences, connecting economic concepts to real-world phenomena, and exploring diverse perspectives. It emphasizes the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration between philosophers, economists, and social scientists to gain a comprehensive understanding of narratives' influence on economic decision-making, market dynamics, and consumer (...) behaviour. The research suggests that narratives offer a means to challenge the notion of a single, objective truth and contribute to a more inclusive and robust framework for analyzing economic phenomena. The implications extend beyond economics, urging a broader perspective on epistemology by embracing narrative perspectives and engaging in interdisciplinary collaboration across disciplines. Overall, this research calls for a rethinking of epistemology, recognising the significance of narratives and their role in knowledge production. (shrink)

This is a study of the development of student agency from a gender perspective in a Finnish classroom. The data originates from an ethnographic research project in an elementary school classroom engaging in a play pedagogy project called a “playworld.” The article has two purposes. The first is to examine the potential of imagination and improvised fantasy play in the development of agency. The second is to investigate the role of gender as a social category in shaping the students’ possibilities (...) for agency in the play pedagogical setting. The creative use of imagination is at the center of the playworld pedagogy. However, it has rarely been studied in relation to the potentially uneven or stereotypic consequences of cultural tools, symbols, and categories. The analytical focus is on the gender-related categorization of a ‘horse girl’ and the role it played in the development of the agency of two seven-year-old girls as they participated in the playworld. I have used a multidisciplinary analytical framework to sensitize myself to the data. In the article I combine Vygotsky’s ideas of double stimulation, Sacks’ categorization analysis and, Holzkamp’s concept of action potence . The results show that the playworld pedagogy that explicitly aimed at developing children’s agency and collaboration was strongly gender categorized and thus was constraining for the girls in this study. On the other hand, the girls’ unplanned fantasy play, which took place on the sidelines of the classroom activity, contained important agentive elements. It gave the girls a sense of agency crucial to their enactment of agency in the wider playworld setting. It is argued that the girls were able to become agentive players in the activity through questioning the gendered categories openly in the classroom. (shrink)

This paper examines how British war veterans fold together war time and post war experiences in practices of remembering and reconciliation. We examine these practices as networks of association between British ex-servicemen (veterans) and the people, places and circumstances associated with their experiences as prisoners in Japan during WW2. We focus on the experience of World War 2 British ex-servicemen (veterans) who were prisoners of war in Far East. During their period of captivity they worked to build Thai-Burma Railway before (...) transfer to a copper mine in Japan. Some 50 years later they participated in a "reconciliation trip" to Japan. We discuss two related issues. First, how and in what ways are the post war lives and war time experiences of these veterans gathered up in the emergent collectivity of such practices? In other words in what ways do these practices emerge and sustain themselves as a process of collection and dispersion of circulating reference in networks of association between people places and things. Second, we examine how accounts of redemption (claims to the consequences of experience as being other than you would expect them to be) create the basis for emergent forms of agency and settlement in expanding networks of remembering and reconciliation. (shrink)

How do researchers and/or practitioners know when change efforts are bringing about significant transformation? Here we draw on a theory of change put forward by the feminist economic geographers, Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson. Proposing “a postcapitalist politics” that builds on possibility rather than probability, they direct theoretical attention and community engaged action research to recognizing and supporting non-capitalist economic practices and sensibilities that already exist despite the dominance of capitalism that keeps them hidden and ignored and to understanding the (...) “reluctant subject” of change efforts. We enter into a conversation with their theory of change by inferring criteria for assessing significance and using those criteria in dialogue with two social movements we have researched: the feminist movement in Bogotá in the 1970s and 1980s and the contemporary local food movement in North Carolina. Lessons from these movements, in turn, help refine the criteria. Gibson-Graham are unusual – and consequently resonant with cultural-historical activity theory and related social practice theories of identity – in that they bring into dialogue theorists of the political and those interested in embodiment and the micro-politics of everyday life enabling both to better understand and support conditions for positive social and economic transformation. (shrink)

In addressing the persistent challenge of fully integrating individual dimensions and human subjectivity within the cultural-historical activity theory, this paper suggests several steps to revise its core onto-epistemology in an expansive approach termed the transformative activist stance. This approach outlines the subtle dialectics of individual and collective planes of human praxis whereby each individual is shaped by collective history and collaborative practices while at the same time shaping and real-izing them through contributing to their collective, dynamic materiality in moving beyond (...) the status quo. In capitalizing on people always transcending what exists in ‘the here and now,’ in a non-adaptive fashion, based in a commitment and vision to how the world “ought to be,” the individual subjectivity is reclaimed as itself a fully social, embodied, material-discursive process. Individual subjectivity and agency gain status through contributing to changes in “collectividual” practices as the primary onto-epistemology of a unitary realm that is individual and social/collective at the same time. (shrink)

This article discusses the identity formation process former right wing extremists go through, during and especially after being involved in an exit program for those leaving right wing extremist environments. Based on an ethnographic investigation (and practice theoretical approach), the article argues that participation in culturally defined worlds – such as the extremist right – develops sensitivities and sensibilities that endure. This enables them to engage in social actions, gain a position and develop a correlated identity, but it is also (...) the reason why it can be very demanding for the individual to leave an extremist environment. Perceived from the position of former right wing extremists, the article considers the challenges involved in (re)integrating into society by those stigmatized by a criminal and extremist past. It explores how individuals leaving a right wing extremist group handle themselves in a new world when their embodied knowledge and habitual responding are no longer appropriate, and investigates the many aspects individuals struggle with years after their engagement, when they do not know who to become and how to act. (shrink)