Considering Alternate Sources of Role Identity: Childless Parents and Their Animal “Kids”

Identity theory posits that role identity is negotiated between human social actors and is based in broader cultural expectations about how particular statuses should be performed. I argue that the formation of role identity in actors can also occur in relationship to nonhuman actors, if they are perceived as minded. Depending on context and human perception, identity can be formed as a result of interaction and developing “theory of mind” with nonhuman animals, directly implicating the animal. Using in‐depth interviews of childless and childfree companion animal owners, I demonstrate the existence of a parent identity in childless participants that would not otherwise be present were it not for interaction with the animal “child.” This identity is confirmed in participant narratives describing substantial behavioral output aligned with the U.S. cultural ideal of “parent.” Likewise, I find that significant others provide external support for the enactment of this role identity, allowing participants to verify self‐in‐situation. Overall, my analysis emphasizes the importance of considering nonhuman sources as occupying counterstatus positions in the formation of role identity while highlighting how these relationships affect interaction in the childfree and childless home, thus expanding scholarly understanding about both identity formation and emerging family types.     

“I Was Always This Way…”: Rhetorics of Continuity in Narratives of Conversion

This article is concerned with identifying, comparing, and accounting for the principal rhetorical conventions within Pagan practitioners’ narratives of conversion. Applying key insights from studies on narrative identity and drawing on 15 months of fieldwork and 25 in‐depth interviews with Pagan practitioners, I first outline formal similarities in the content of participants’ narratives, arguing that these narrative conventions together constitute an ideal typical conversion narrative: what I call the rhetoric of continuity. This narrative form depicts the process of conversion as a rediscovery or uncovering of a temporally continuous and essentialized Pagan self. I suggest that while all conversions involve both change and continuity, adherents of different faith traditions vary in the degree to which they stress self‐transformation and/or self‐continuity. I then argue that the rhetoric of continuity reflects and reinforces practitioners’: (1) perspective on the locus and nature of the authentic self; (2) claims to legitimacy and social acceptance; and (3) understanding of the nature of religious truth.     

Personal narratives, relational selves: residential histories in the living and telling

This article is set in the context of debates about how far social identity and agency should be seen as individualised or relational concepts. It examines how people in a qualitative study in the North of England constructed personal narratives about their residential histories. These were fundamentally about identity and agency, because they centred upon ‘what mattered’ more widely to the narrator, and upon what had constrained or enabled action and change in their life. The narratives were characterised by contextuality, contingency and in particular by relationality. Four styles of relational narrative are explored: relational inclusion and co‐presence, relational participation, relational constraint and conflict, and relational individualism. Overall, it is argued that both agency and identity need to be understood relationally, and that through their narratives people in the study were constructing relational selves. It is suggested that a misreading of personal narrative as an individualistic discursive form has fuelled the hold of the concept of individualism on popular and sociological imagination, in the face of increasingly compelling empirical evidence about the extent and nature of people's connectivity with others.     

Transforming habit: revolution,routine and social change

Compelling recent scholarly work has explored the crucial role affect, emotion and feeling might play in activating radical social and political change. I argue, however, that some narratives of ‘affective revolution’ may actually do more to obscure than to enrich our understanding of the material relations and routines though which ‘progressive’ change might occur and endure in a given context – while side-stepping the challenge of how to evaluate progress itself in the current socio-political and economic landscape. Drawing on the work of Eve Sedgwick, John Dewey, Felix Ravaisson and others, this article asks whether critical work on habit can provide different, and potentially generative, analytical tools for understanding the contemporary ethical and material complexities of social transformation. I suggest that it habit’s double nature – its enabling of both compulsive repetition and creative becoming – that makes it a rich concept for addressing the propensity of harmful socio-political patterns to persist in the face of efforts to generate greater awareness of their damaging effects, as well as the material forms of automation and coordination on which meaningful societal transformation may depend. I also explore how bringing affect and habit together might productively refigure our understandings of ‘the present’ and ‘social progress’, as well as the available modes of sensing, instigating and responding to change. In turning to habit, then, the primary aim of this article is to examine how social and cultural theory might critically re-approach social change and progressive politics today.     

Khash,history and Armenian national identity: reconsidering post-socialist gender,food practices and the domestic

This article explores how improvisation with food and cooking is a way for Armenian women to appeal to ‘public’ national narratives from within their ‘private’ spaces. Such appeal to the grand narrative of Armenian identity is in many ways predicated on their skilful abilities to survive or ‘make do’ with what is available and it is these skills that establish connections between individuals, the community and the nation. When these skills are enacted, women have the power to invoke national feelings of Armenianness and feminine morality through their ability to find and cook a proper Armenian meal. These skills also give women the ability to obligate individuals both within their families and amongst their peers at the same time that they can use them to express creativity and personal identities through their cooking. In other words, through cooking and from within the kitchen, I argue that women engage with powerful ‘public’ or national discourses that are often assumed to suppress them.     

Awakenings: Autobiography,Memory, and the Social Logic of Personal Discovery

Taking a formal, sociocognitive approach to narrative analysis, I explore autobiographical stories about discovering “truth” in political, psychological, religious, and sexual realms of social life. Despite (1) significant differences in subject matter and (2) conflicting or oppositional notions of truth, individuals in different social environments tell stories that follow the same awakening formula. Analyzing accounts from a wide variety of social and historical contexts, I show how individuals and communities use these autobiographical stories to define salient moral and political concerns and weigh in on cultural and epistemic disputes. Awakening narratives are important mechanisms of mnemonic and autobiographical revision that individuals use to redefine their past experiences and relationships and plot future courses of action while explaining major transformations of worldview. Awakeners use two ideal‐typical vocabularies of liminality to justify traversing the social divide between contentious autobiographical communities. Further, awakeners divide their lives into discrete autobiographical periods and convey a figurative interaction between the split personas of a temporally divided self. Individuals use this autobiographical formula to reject the cognitive and mnemonic norms of one community and embrace those of another. Advancing a “social geometry” of awakening narratives, I illuminate the social logic behind our seemingly personal discoveries of “truth.”     

Markets,contingency and preferences: contemporary managers’ narrative identities1

We explore work identity amongst managers, a key group in the ‘new’ capitalism. Some existing accounts of such workplace identities emphasize new ‘cultures of control’, others focus on new requirements and possibilities of individual autonomy through reflective identity formation, while others identify a crisis in workplace identity formation. Focusing on these issues, we analyse the career narratives of 136 managers and show that our empirical data do not neatly fit any existing models. Managers’ career stories were dominated by a ‘market’ narrative, in which they placed themselves as strategic actors making choices in a social world constituted by market‐like interactions. We show that the market narrative frames how managers understand risks to their careers arising from the contingent actions of firms, and how it provides a space for managers to reflectively identify their preferences and pleasures. We consider the consequences of this analysis for contemporary understandings of work and identity.     

Narrative and Frame Alignment in Social Movements: Labor Problem Novels and the 1929 Gastonia Strike

Research on social movements and frame alignment has shed light on how activists draw new participants to social movements through meaning making. However, the ‘framing perspective’ has failed to interrogate how the form or genre in which frames are deployed affects the communication of meaning. The burgeoning literature on social movements and narrative would seem to point to one discursive form of importance to meaning making in social movements, but scholars have failed to connect their insights with the literature on framing. In this article, I analyze five novels published in response to a 1929 communist-led strike in Gastonia, North Carolina. I argue that labor movement activists deployed these long-form narratives for the purposes of ‘frame alignment,’ specifically ‘frame amplification’ and ‘frame transformation,’ and I show how these narratives conveyed frames in ways that other discursive forms could not. The study raises new questions about the selection and reception of discursive forms in social movements.     

‘Not that kind of atheist’: scepticism as a lifestyle movement

This article examines atheist activists from a lifestyle movement perspective. I focus on how atheist activists adopt the term ‘sceptic’ as a distinct identity marker to represent their growing interest in other types of activism beyond atheist community building and criticism of religious beliefs. My data come from thirty-five interviews with Canadian atheist activists and participant observation in the province of Alberta. In contrast to previous social movement approaches to atheist activism, I deemphasize the importance of collective identity and instead attend to personal identity as the site of social change. My findings show that being a sceptic is a personally meaningful identity in the context of a relatively weak secularist collective identity. Moreover, atheist activists who also identify as sceptics wish to expand the boundaries of the atheist movement to include individualistic projects of personal affirmation based on science and critical thinking. This work contributes to our understanding of the everyday activities of activists who engage in individual action in the absence of a strong collective identity. In particular, this article expands our understanding of lifestyle movements beyond the current focus on socially conscious consumption. Instead, I return to the roots of lifestyle movement theory, that is, how one’s everyday choices serve as a form of protest. Finally, this work contributes to atheism scholarship, which has neglected the diversity of individual identities within atheist organisations and among atheist activists.     

Mimesis,narrative and subjectivity in the work of Girard and Ricoeur

Abstract

While Ricoeur wishes to relate the concept of narrative to identity and ethics, Girard sees the development of ethical conscience in myth. This paper examines this difference, arguing that the implicitly universal human nature that he posits, driven by mimetic desire, compromises subjectivity as narrative identity, as developed in Ricoeur's work. This paper attempts to read Girard alongside Ricoeur, in order to suggest that there is a problematic tension implicit in Guard's work between subjectivity and drive. To do this, I describe Ricoeur's understanding of mimesis and how this is related to truth and narrative identity. Then turning to Girard, I show how his linking of violence to truth repudiates the possibility of the attestation of truth as subjectivity.     

Defending the Family,Defending the Faith: An Analysis of The Family: A Proclamation to the World,Religious Identity,and the Politics of Same-Sex Marriage in a Mormon Community

In this article, we apply Peter Berger's theory of religion as a social construct to learn how The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormon Church) advances a heteronormative view of family relationships in the United States using a document titled The Family: A Proclamation to the World. Furthermore, applying cultural studies theory, we examine how believing Mormons negotiate the tension that arises when their secular values compete with those expressed by Church leaders. We argue that, although the Proclamation addresses a number of issues, the Church offers a closed text that emphasizes war narratives in which same-sex marriage is portrayed as a threat to LDS identity and the heteronormative family. This closed text is further legitimized by emphasis on the authority of Church leaders as oracles of God. The study participants largely accept the dominant narrative, and those who reject it, do so with some trepidation.     

Grieving for mestizaje: alternative approaches to Maya identity in Yucatan,Mexico

This article takes as its point of departure the highly contested theoretical terrain of ‘Maya’ identity in Yucatan, Mexico. Set in the physical terrain of a state psychiatric hospital, this article uses a framework of identity culled from the narrative of a young woman, ‘Claudina’, committed to its wards, to argue that being ‘in-between’ categories of ethnic identity, an experience she characterises as a painful sense of ambiguous loss, can be fruitfully analysed using an analytical framework of ethnic identity introduced by Claudina herself. Specifically, I argue that categories of identity culled from Claudina's story – mestizaje and elegancia – represent a valuable opportunity to think about how power dynamics and relationships operate in situations of ambivalent identities and social suffering. To this end, I use Claudina's language as a point of departure for understanding the lived experience of everyday life in Yucatan today.     

Social media time,identity narratives and the construction of political biographies

ABSTRACT

The question of identity narrative is at the core of the interaction between social movements and temporalities. In this paper, we draw on long-term qualitative research amongst activists engaged in Italian social movements and argue that identity narratives are often the result of a complex mnemonic, contradictory and open-ended process that spans through a life-time of engagement with multiple collectives. We then question whether the use of social media reshape these dynamics. The analysis shows that the construction of identity narratives on social media tends to take place with knowledge of the complexity and overlaps that characterise these processes online. Nevertheless, the temporality of social media, based on immediacy, archival and predictive time, challenges the unpredictable, contradictory, and open-ended nature of political identity construction offline. The need to escape the hegemonic temporalities of social media poses new challenges to activists in their creative agency.     

Face,Accounts, and Schemes in the Context of Relationship Breakups

This article investigates account strategies that individuals employ to neutralize identity threats caused by breakups from romantic relationships. I distinguish three narrative frames for such accounts: dumper, dumpee, and consensus narratives. Individuals who employ a consensus narrative frame provide accounts by default: they deny that any harm was done to anyone. Dumpers dismissed the breakup's conflictuality, used externalization strategies, and depicted themselves as empathetic. Dumpees used externalization strategies and denials of injury, emphasized their agency, and pointed out valuable changes of self. I then analyze the results from a phenomenological perspective to identify connections between accounting practices and the structure of the self. I argue that accounting for traumatic breakups is important for the development of schemes that guide perception, action, and the interpretation of biography.     

Photo albums: Images of time and reflections of self

The advent of popular photography has allowed ordinary people to visually record their view of themselves and the passage of their lives. Photographs not only record events but also allow the maker to group them for presentation in a structured manner comparable to verbal narratives, most commonly in photo albums. We examined more than forty albums created by amateur photographers in order to investigate the psychological and social functions of photo albums and their value to scholars as documentations of social life. Albums are intensely personal; they create a relationship between the presenter and the viewer; the audience is small; the possessor plays an active role in the album's presentation; and there is an accompanying verbal narrative. This narrative is crucial to the understanding of the album. This paper explores the structure of these narratives and their role in creating the meaning of the album. In the absence of a possessor/presenter, a narrative can be constructed by determining the type of album being examined and establishing the personal relationships and themes within the album. We suggest devices and procedures for reconstruction of such a narrative in the absence of a presenter.     

The Role of Domain Content in Understanding Identity Development Processes

The current studies examined the importance of domain content in the processes of identity development using two approaches—narrative and status. We examined personal narratives for identity domain content, the co‐occurrence of different contents, and the relations between content and processes, using two approaches to identity—status and narrative. Across two studies, 762 participants (average age = 19 years) and 2214 narratives, traditional ideological and interpersonal status domains were present, but so was a novel domain: existential concerns. Narrative identity processes were more frequent in narratives with multiple contents, and relations between identity statuses processes and narrative processes were modest. We discuss theoretical implications, the importance of examining content, and the utility of narrative approaches for doing so.     

Narratives of Leisure: recreating the self

Utilising insights from narrative theory this paper explores the role of narrative in the everyday leisure experiences of people with a mild intellectual disability. Drawing on our experiences with an Australian leisure service Live it UP! we develop the connection between leisure and storytelling in order to open up an innovative approach to working with individuals. The stories of people's capabilities that we draw on run counter to a dominant cultural story of lack associated with disability. Through a post-structuralist analysis we argue that narratives of leisure are a powerful social medium with the potential to produce change in an individual's life and immediate social relationships. Such an understanding is crucial for the development of alternative leisure support services which identify the person's needs, challenging the social positioning of people with an intellectual disability.     

Narratives of identity: Denying empathy in conservative discourses on race,class, and sexuality

Issues of identity are crucial in current political debate. This article analyses narratives of identity using three very different examples, namely colonial-settler Australia, lesbian romance genres, and the role of class in contemporary American and British politics. It explores both privileged and marginalized identity narratives and the tensions between them. For example, lesbian romance narratives are contrasted with religious right arguments against same-sex marriage. Some argue that the complex intersections, compatibilities, and differences between conflicting narratives of identity reveal a great deal about how specific concepts of identity are formed. The narratives examined do not produce explicit binary constructions of dominant and subordinate identity categories. Rather, being able to imagine (or not imagine) other narratives plays an important part in the process of constructing identities within these discourses. Narratives that foreclose empathy facilitate the denial that discrimination or subordination is taking place. Similarly, privileged narratives of identity facilitate subjects ability to think well of themselves and their treatment of others.