Language and Identity

"A cross scholarship on gender and sexuality, binaries like
female versus male and gay versus straight have been
problematized as a symbol of the stigmatization and
erasure of non-normative subjects and practices. The chapters
in Queer Excursions offer a series of distinct perspectives on these
binaries, as well as on a number of other, less immediately
apparent dichotomies that nevertheless permeate the gendered
and sexual lives of speakers. Several chapters focus on the
limiting or misleading qualities of binaristic analyses, while
others suggest that binaries are a crucial component of social
meaning within particular communities of study. Rather than
simply accepting binary structures as inevitable, or discarding
them from our analyses entirely based on their oppressive or
reductionary qualities, this volume advocates for a retheorization
of the binary that affords more complex and
contextually-grounded engagement with speakers' own
orientations to dichotomous systems. Each chapter offers a
unique perspective on locally salient linguistic practices that help
constitute gender and sexuality in marginalized communities. As
a collection, Queer Excursions argues that researchers must be
careful to avoid the assumption that our own preconceptions
about binary social structures will be shared by the communities
we study."

This essay examines gender, sexuality, and society through the lens of apocryphal sexual acts, specifically the Donkey Punch, the Cleveland Steamer, and the Houdini. Although these acts are so disgusting, degrading, dangerous, or even deadly that they seem to exist in name only, such imagined acts serve a normative function, providing limits on not only sexuality, but also on the kinds of individuals worthy of such acts.

During postsecondary education, students undertake a process of identity navigation, which becomes visible in their narrative practices. Having interviewed undergraduate, law, and business students, we examine their taking on of various social and enregistered voices to identify their self­positioning relative to other individuals and institutions, and the ideologies so expressed.

""Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in multilingualism, language maintenance and managing language diversity both inside and outside the educational context. However, much of this work, especially in the educational context, has focused on (minority) languages and relatively little attention has been paid to ‘dialects’.

This study explores the status and role of Mewati, a dialect generally subsumed under Hindi (Government of India, 2001) in schools. While Mewati is spoken by most Meos as their first language (Srivastava, 2011, p. 250), there are currently no studies that examine the use and role of Mewati in education in Mewat. This thesis addresses an important gap in understanding what roles are assigned (or not) to local dialects in education.

This project was guided by two research questions: What language-in-education policies (LiEPs) were in place in the two types of schools (rural and urban) chosen for this study; and what role did Mewati play in the overall language policy framework in these schools.

The goal of this project was to develop an understanding about how teachers comprehended, negotiated and implemented LiEPs within classrooms. It also aimed at uncovering and critically analysing the underlying ideologies, policies and political processes that informed and influenced these LiEPs in the two schools studied and how these policies, affected the position of Mewati in these schools.

The schools studied differed across multiple dimensions including medium of instruction, board of affiliation, textbooks and curricula, location, infrastructure and the socio-economic background of the students. However, they were similar in that most students in both schools spoke Mewati as their home language. The case study was based on data collected in interviews, informal conversations, artifacts, documents and field notes. The data was gathered from both Meo and non-Meo teachers, who differed across linguistic, ethnic and religious lines, in order to obtain a richer and holistic perspective on teachers’ views and practices.

This project took an interdisciplinary approach and drew insights from sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, education and sociology. The study draws significantly on Spolsky’s (2004) model of language policy which was used both as an analytical framework as well as a tool for organizing data.

The study revealed that the LiEP of the rural schools was largely Hindi monolingual and the urban school mostly Hindi-English bilingual. Both types of schools failed to make space for Mewati, the mother tongue of the majority of students. In both school types, Hindi was taught as the first language. The majority of teachers also held negative attitudes towards Mewati. The teachers perceived Mewati as a hindrance for the learning and overall development of students. There was a significant communication gap between teachers and students particularly in the early years of education. There was also a severe shortage of local Meo teachers. Most teachers in both schools were non-Meos who could not speak Mewati. A complex mix of inter-ethnic relations between these groups and the socio-historical and political structures greatly influenced language choice patterns and policy decisions.

This study has important implications for the role of mother tongue in education for policymakers, government officials, educationists, and teachers as the findings indicate a need for change in language policy and procedures.""

"The term academic literacy is a common term in EAP literature but neither its meaning nor the discourses in which it is embedded are transparent. Lea and Street’s (2000) model of student writing in higher education provides a useful starting point for a consideration of this issue. They summarise the three major approaches to student writing in higher education (HE) as study skills, academic socialisation and academic literacies. In this chapter, I view these approaches as embedded in discourses on skills, acculturation and literacies, respectively.

As the notion of ‘academic literacy’ becomes ‘naturalised’ (Fairclough, 1992), in that it is a term in common usage, it is helpful to consider the discourses that underpin it. To do this, I will draw on the work of Foucault and other poststructuralist writing on discourse, which I will first outline. This will be followed by an examination of socialisation, as the dominant discourse in EAP and one that views student writing in terms of acculturation into the academic community. I shall then discuss skills, as a powerful modernising discourse in HE, in which writing is viewed as a study skill with which students need to be equipped. Finally, I will consider the increasingly influential discourse of literacies, in which writing is perceived as sets of practices with which learners need to grapple both at the level of cognition and affect. I consider ways in which skills, socialisation and literacies’ discourses position EAP practitioners and learners. I suggest that skills discourses can encourage students to adopt deficit or remedial positions, which may be reinforced by their lecturers. Socialisation discourses position learners and lecturers in novice/ expert relationships, in which EAP learners’ educational experience in their home country and L1 tend to be ignored or seen as an obstacle to learning. I argue that literacies offer alternative positions to EAP learners and practitioners and argue that discourses on literacies could assist in developing approaches to writing in HE that are more sensitive to student identity."

Language is more than words. Within language is embedded a multitude of social and cultural values. According to Lacan, language is the way we determine who we are and the way we create our identity. When the privilege of language is abused, as it has been in colonized countries, the “native” suddenly finds not only herself or himself unable to communicate, but also that her or his language becomes a barrier to survival. In Dream on Monkey Mountain by Derek Walcott, The Lion and the Jewel by Wole Soyinka, and Stones in His Pockets by Marie Jones, the protagonist, a representative for her or his people, must challenge the language of the colonial centre to redefine her or his marginalized group. Although very different in form, all three plays present the reestablishment of indigenous language as a strategy to re-appropriate cultural identity. In fact, all three authors use the characters’ indigenous verbal and non-verbal “words” to return to a time before colonization, when their language was the language of the centre and when they had a clearer understanding of who they were.

Muslim and Arab identities have long been instrumentalized to forge unifying national and regional identities. The impact of Algeria’s post-colonial Arabization policies that educated people in Standard Arabic  (to the exclusion of dialectal Arabic, Berber, or French) on economic cleavages and attitudes has been underexplored. Algeria has been described as polarized, with cultural and religious cleavages between Arabs and Berbers and traditionalists and modernists blamed for the country’s instability. Questions from a 2004 survey of 820 Algerian students allow us to distinguish between maternal language and preference for Standard Arabic or French used in professional settings. We analyze the influence of mother tongue, religiosity, and socioeconomic status on Arabophone or Francophone language orientation and whether there is evidence for the common assumption that Algeria is polarized politically and culturally among the three main language groups. Berber speakers and less religious students are more likely to complete the written survey in French, but socioeconomic status is a more important determinant of language choice. Francophone orientation is associated with more positive attitudes about Western and American culture, suggesting that Arabization has indeed produced a society somewhat polarized between a Francophone elite and a large population of students trained in Standard Arabic who cannot find jobs in the public and private sectors still demanding French skills. The findings point to the utility of  using  survey research to understand  sociolinguistic patterns and including nuanced measures of language distinct from ethnicity and mother tongue in diglossic societies to analyze  social  cleavages and their relationship to attitudes about politics, culture, and foreign policy. The results also emphasize the need for educational reform, expansion of employment opportunities, and democratization to reduce the potential for conflict among Algerian youth.

This action research, which utilizes critical race theory's counter-storytelling, analyses a process of debunking White students' epistemology of ignorance in a history course at an urban public high school. After piloting a raced curriculum that deliberately re-centers marginalized counter-stories of students of colour, I document its impacts on White students' understanding of history. Ultimately, such a process problematizes White students' sense of identity. I employ the analytic tools of Whiteness as power to understand how White students responded to curriculum on race and racism. The analysis silences White dominant Discourse while activating counter-stories by modelling critical consciousness and colourscence for my students of colour. Further, I detail two specific responses made by White students in this study: (1) symbiotic transformation; and (2) active resistance. Regardless of the differences in responses, both are processes in debunking White epistemology of ignorance.

"""In Heliodorus’ Aethiopica, the representation of identity is clearly a major issue, and has been discussed frequently in recent scholarship.  These interpretations rightly privilege the Hellenocentrism which underpins Charikleia’s Ethiopian identity, but what has been ignored is how this relates to the novel’s own fictions. Throughout the novel, the instability of Charikleia’s identity leads to inventions and (mis)representations of her character, and the way that this is portrayed on a scale of truth and falsehood demonstrates how the search for identity is closely tied to the novel’s own self-representation of its fictional discourse.
As Silvia Montiglio has discussed recently, while Theagenes cannot lie, Charikleia is adept at contriving fictions, especially those surrounding her identity.  Yet, rather than being a diametrical opposition between truth and lies, Charikleia’s approach is more subtle: she is aware that a lie can sometimes be good in exigent circumstances (1.26.6), but at the very end of the novel takes a solemn and public oath that she tells no lies when she claims to be Ethiopian (10.11.3). Charikleia’s strategic use of the language of truth and falsehood shapes the plot, and as such her use of invention to conceal and reveal her identity constructs various levels of fictional discourse throughout the novel. In this paper, I shall show how Charikleia’s inventions challenge and eventually stabilise not only her own identity, but the 'Aethiopica'’s own self-representation as a fictional text. """