Open Access Kent State (OAKS)

This study includes responses from two sets of focus group participants, comprised of African American Language (AAL) interlocutors who communicate using digital AAL in online spaces. Participants shared their thoughts about language, identity, and research regarding AAL. Focus groups were recorded and transcribed so that topics could be coded and categorized. Five core topics emerged: 1) History of AAL, 2) Digital Composing Choices, 3) Digital Research Methods, 4) Racial Issues, and 5) Personal Stories. The data obtained from the focus groups sheds light on participants’ initial feelings of mistrust when discussing their language as well as their learned dislike for and unawareness of a language that they use every day.

Expanding critical scholarship on fashion, gender, and identity, this study aims to explore how dress and style can be used in a strategy of resistance through analyzing Chinese youths’ narratives about their appearance, personal style, gender, culture, and self. The study mainly draws on the philosophical ideas of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to engage with a research agenda, which disrupts the transcendent logic and challenges binarism and essentialism as the guiding approach to fashion studies. Inspired by Deleuze and Guatarri’s concepts of rhizomatic thought and becoming, this exploration works within the realm of post-qualitative research. The study develops its argument through tracing two lines of creative “becoming” or lines of flight emerging from the “molecular mapping,” pointing to the moments of rupture and deterritorialization: gender and style; the ethics of consumption and style. The findings demonstrate the subversive potential in dress which challenges normalcy and regularity as well as consumerism, highlighting the complexity, multiplicity, and heterogeneity of gender, fashion, and subjectivity. It advocates the creation of more inclusive spaces and potential socially just territories through fashion and clothing.

Since the mid-twentieth century, the T-shirt has been regarded as one of the most iconic symbols in fashion and culture. Indeed, it is cheap, classless and globally recognized, and is a key item in many people’s wardrobes. Low price points attributed to the fast fashion T-shirt make it an item available to all. However, this in itself raises questions regarding sustainability. This paper considers how, through its iconic status, the T-shirt can create opportunities for a more sustainable future by exploring the role that the T-shirt plays in encouraging individuals to become activists on a personal level. One of the ways they can do this is by wearing shirts displaying meaningful messages. This prompts the research question, ‘how effective is the T-shirt as a sign vehicle to promote environmental activism?”
Using research drawn from FashionMap, a garment archive housed in NTU’s School of Art and Design, the paper details how the T-shirt has evolved from a protest garment to a tool used by environmental activists. T-shirts which convey messages and signs through their design and typography were examined as communication tools, with a particular focus on protests and brand activism. Primary research using a focus group and wardrobe studies explore how participants respond to the T-shirt as personal expressions of courage, protest, and change. Findings demonstrate how social justice can impact on a personal level through the wearing of T-shirts.

After many years of research across disciplines, it remains unclear whether people are more motivated to seek appraisals that accurately match self-views (self-verification) or are as favorable as possible (self-enhancement). Within sociology, mixed findings in identity theory have fueled the debate. A problem here is that a commonly employed statistical approach does not take into account the direction of a discrepancy between how we see ourselves and how we think others see us in terms of a given identity, yet doing so is critical for determining which self-motive is at play. We offer a test of three competing models of identity processes, including a new “mixed motivations” model where self-verification and self-enhancement operate simultaneously. We compare the models using the conventional statistical approach versus response surface analysis. The latter method allows us to determine whether identity discrepancies involving over-evaluation are as distressing as those involving under-evaluation. We use nationally representative data and compare results across four different identities and multiple outcomes. The two statistical approaches lead to the same conclusions more often than not and mostly support identity theory and its assumption that people seek self-verification. However, response surface tests reveal patterns that are mistaken as evidence of self-verification by conventional procedures, especially for the spouse identity. We also find that identity discrepancies have different effects on distress and self-conscious emotions (guilt and shame). Our findings have implications not only for research on self and identity across disciplines, but also for many other areas of research that incorporate these concepts and/or use difference scores as explanatory variables.

Traditional views of the canon of memory limit it to mere memorization or, at best, memorization of lists of topics to be used during invention and thus are easily dismissed as irrelevant in the age of computers. "Data-palace: Modern memory work in digital environments" presents audio interviews paired with screen capture recordings of modern writers' memory work to argue that cultural-historical activity theory, particularly theories of distributed cognition, provide more robust ways of understanding the digital tools, practices, and products of modern memory work.

Concerns about identity in educational research and theory have understandably focused on politically salient identity categories, especially class, race/ethnicity, and sex/gender. This focus contributes to political discourse, but offers a simplistic if not totally misleading picture of which identities are observably relevant in educational settings and practice. Politically salient categories are not always relevant in particular educational contexts, and even when they are, their relevance cannot properly be understood without an appreciation for the multiplicity and diversity of identities which become relevant in particular contexts and courses of action. These arguments are illustrated with reference to the case of Mary Daly, the feminist professor who refused to integrate male students into her women's studies courses. A detailed analysis of a news interview excerpt, drawing upon ethnomethodological conversation analysis, suggests how identity can be respecified more widely and more finely by situating identity within natural language use and social interaction.

Furthering the cause of consilience in the social sciences a model is proposed in which Eriksonian life span theory and life history theory are integrated. The model explains individual differences in the Eriksonian developmental stages as a function of the individual differences in developmental trajectories of life history theory as conceptualized by Belsky, Steinberg, and Draper (1991). Erikson's fifth stage of identity formation is used to examine the model, with the results of three studies presented to illustrate the viability of the model. Future research should examine other aspects of the model and the relationship between the developmental trajectories in life history theory and the Eriksonian stages in greater detail.

Religion is a defining factor in the identity formation process of a minority community. Historically, religion has often been used as a driving force behind the introduction, development and completion of projects that require collective effort. In fact, in many cases, religion has been an extreme denominator that has created new communities of practice, or solidified existing ones. A unifying force, religion and its expressions in liturgical or everyday forms is an overarching element that unites members of these communities beyond the geographic or temporal limitations. Today, new technologies are paramount in online and digital archives of minority communities, especially in ways that these communities use these technologies to retell and “exhibit” their identity online. Crowdsourcing archives with user-generated material can add valuable context to archival holdings, shed light on hidden collections, and tie them with material in other institutions or countries. In the context of this paper, the notion of crowdsourcing in archives will be examined through the lens of religion and a classification of such initiatives will be proposed.