Researching Identity and Interculturality

Fred Dervin, Karen Risager, Fred Dervin, Karen Risager

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317811961
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Sociolingüística

This volume focuses on advances in research methodology in an interdisciplinary field framed by discourses of identity and interculturality. It includes a range of qualitative studies: studies of interaction, narrative studies, conversation analysis, ethnographic studies, postcolonial studies and critical discourse studies, and emphasizes the role of discourse and power in all studies of identity and interculturality. The volume particularly focuses on critical reflexivity in every stage of research, including reflections on theoretical concepts (such as 'identity' and 'interculturality') and their relationship with methodology and analytical practice, reflections on researcher identity and subjectivity, reflections on local and global contexts of research, and reflections on language choice and linguacultural aspects of data generation, analysis and communication.

Section 1
Identity and Interculturality: Studying Narratives

In this section, the chapter authors analyze narratives. For all of them both the context and the presence of the researcher count in the analysis of identity work. The first chapter, written by Kadianaki, O’Sullivan & Gillespie, proposes a dialogical analysis of discourse of identity transformations. The data used by the authors consist of interviews and group discussions of immigrants in Greece. The focus of the chapter is on the influence of inter-culturality on the intra-subjectivity of the participants in their narratives about life in Greece. The authors are also interested in the transformation of their identities. The chapter also emphasizes the awareness of intra-psychic representations of identity and interculturality. In a similar vein, Anna De Fina’s chapter, entitled ‘Enregistered and Emergent Identities in Narrative’, is a close analysis of discourses of belonging in talk in interaction by Latin American migrant and transmigrant women in the United States. De Fina concentrates on the creative and stereotypical strategies contained in the women’s narratives to construct their identity. In his chapter, Michael Baynham wonders whether identity is something that people bring about or along—or both!—in narratives. He argues that these two dimensions are in constant tension in intercultural interaction. Baynham studies migration narratives by means of linguistic realizations of positioning and stance.

1
Identity Transformations in Intercultural Encounters

A Dialogical Analysis

Irini Kadianaki, Ria O’Sullivan-Lago & Alex Gillespie

Introduction

The intense geographical movement of human beings due to extended tourism and migration flows in 21st-century world has created intercultural zones: places where people and groups from previously unrelated cultures come into contact (O’Sullivan-Lago & de Abreu, 2010). The experience of living in these physical zones creates psychological interculturality: the existence of multiple cultural points of view, or voices, in the self. These zones push questions of identity to the fore. As people establish new relationships and encounter a changing social world, they redefine the ways they see themselves and others (Chryssochoou, 2004). These transformations can be equally psychologically demanding for migrants and locals: vis-à-vis different social others, individuals come to question values and practices, taken for granted routines and aspects of their identity (Hermans & Kempen, 1998; Hermans & Dimaggio, 2007).

With regards to immigrants, research has criticized static and essentialist understandings of self as making choices between acculturation strategies, which reflect stable identity positions in the new social environment (Bhatia, 2002; Dervin, 2011). They argue for acknowledging the multiplicity and complexity of identity in intercultural contexts (Bhatia & Ram, 2001; Aveling & Gillespie, 2008; Verkuyten & De Wolf, 2002).

While increasingly demonstrating the variability and complexity of identity, research seems to either fall back to essentialist claims by presenting identity as a set of multiple and contradictory self-categories (Risager & Dervin, introduction to this volume) or to fail to exemplify how this variability and complexity emerges out of social experience (Jasper, Moore, Whittaker & Gillespie, 2011). While at a theoretical level it is widely agreed that identity is produced through social relations, the methodologies used are still individualistic (Gillespie & Cornish, 2010).

In this chapter, we propose a methodological and analytical framework for unraveling the ways that intercultural encounters permeate and transform the intra-psychological domain. We follow theoretical approaches that consider the role of social relations as fundamental in structuring and transforming identity. The three-stage dialogical analysis of discourse presented seeks to identify the perspectives of social others in the discourse of individuals; it interprets the ways these perspectives are negotiated and illustrates their effect on identity. After a short presentation of our theoretical background, we present our methodological and analytical approach and illustrate it through excerpts of immigrants’ discourse, taken from a study by the first author (IK). Finally, we discuss the overall contribution of our approach for advancing methods of studying identity in intercultural contexts.

Theoretical Background

The Social Nature of Identity

The present chapter assumes the social nature of identity. It is not simply that the social world influences the way we perceive ourselves; rather, we conceptualize higher mental functions and our identity as produced through social interaction. This idea can be traced back to Vygotsky’s (1981) suggestion that psychological functions appear first in the inter-psychological domain before becoming intra-psychological. Equally, following from the work of Piaget (1923; 1932), it has been established that social relations of either cooperation or constraint have distinctive transformative effects on the development of cognition and morality (Psaltis & Duveen, 2006).

Cooley (1902) and Mead (1913) further emphasized the constitutive role of social relations. They focused on empathy and our capacity to self-reflect, which they conceptualized as emerging from and transformed by our social interactions. According to Mead (1934), self-reflection, understood as the capacity to reflect upon our thoughts, feelings and actions, is performed by taking an observer’s perspective upon one’s own self. Mead suggested that this is possible because self and other are part of a relatively stable social structure in which they frequently exchange social positions (i.e. students become teachers, teachers become students) first physically and later imaginatively. Thus, self (e.g. teacher) is able to take the perspective of the other (e.g. student) upon the self (and thus self-reflect) because she has actually been a student. Likewise, children are able to take the perspective of their parents upon themselves because they have occupied this position during play (Gillespie, 2006a). Accordingly, our self-perception, the way we see ourselves, is shaped by the ways we think that other people see us. This in turn is based on our movement through social space. The idea is that moving between social positions creates movement within the self, developing identities or voices within the self. The movement across national borders and between reference groups—the interculturality between people and groups—can become interculturality within individuals.

This socially situated approach to identity has been followed in our previous studies, where we showed how self-perception emerges out of social interaction in the context of tourists and locals (Gillespie, 2006b) and between immigrants/asylum seekers and locals (O’Sullivan-Lago, de Abreu & Burgess, 2008; Kadianaki, 2013; Gillespie, Kadianaki & O’Sullivan-Lago, 2012). Taken together we espouse a fundamentally ‘liquid’ approach to intercultural relations (Dervin, 2011). The question we address in the present chapter is: how can we turn such subtle theory into a functional methodology, which avoids the reification of cultures or identities?

Geographical Movement: An Identity Challenge

In this chapter, we will use the empirical site of immigration to analyze the ways that social encounters transform the self. Geographical movement, as that of immigration, has been shown to have a transformative effect to identity, for both immigrants and locals. The encounter of people with different languages, ideas and values in multicultural societies promotes changes at the level of how people perceive and define themselves (Chryssochoou, 2004).

Migrants are a heterogeneous group, which cannot be ‘lumped’ together (Gillespie, Howarth & Cornish, 2012). There are economic immigrants, political refugees, asylum seekers, sojourners, and highly skilled professionals seeking to gain expertise. However, migrants do share the basics of geographical movement, which tends to entail cultural encounters. They all have to deal with a more or less unfamiliar environment and culture, requiring the acquisition of new social and cognitive skills. Moreover, the encounter with alterity, that is with new ways of doing things, new values and new self-definitions, can stimulate change and self-reflection. Migrants often redefine their cultural values and practices (Knafo & Schwartz, 2001; Kwak, 2010), and they redefine their identity to different extents because of their encounters with new social others (Chryssochoou, 2000; 2004). But, of course, the content of those changes will vary. Migration due to economic hardship, being headhunted or getting married will each entail a different engagement with the local culture, which in turn will depend on the meaning of the migration for the people concerned.

Movement into a new environment brings about new positions that the self relates to, and dialogue between them produces self-transformation (Bhatia, 2002; König, 2009). Identity repositionings as they arise from movement are means to both achieve self-continuity (O’Sullivan-Lago & de Abreu, 2010) and to engage with self-transformation (Märtsin, 2009) as well as negotiate belongingness (Ali & Sonn, 2010).

Upon entering into a new social context, immigrants are positioned by others in terms of various social categories that they did not relate to before migrating, such as that of an immigrant, a foreigner, an asylum seeker. These social categories are laden with stigmatizing meanings of criminality, illegality, misery, poverty and even barbarity (Kadianaki, 2013). For these reasons immigration has been considered as a threat to identity (Timotijevic & Breakwell, 2000; Deaux, 2006), as it poses challenges to self-esteem, distinctiveness, continuity and self-efficacy (Breakwell, 1993).

Ethnicity memberships are also put into question: immigrants’ origin ethnicity may become distant or rejected by immigrants’ origin communities and stigmatized by the residence communities (Kadianaki, 2013), new ethnic memberships are imposed by residence societies (Yarborough, 2009) and others become available or unavailable. In each case ethnic membership is redefined because of immigrating (Verkuyten, 2005).

In short, immigrants have their identities reconstructed not only through encountering a new community, but also through renegotiating their relationship to their home community. Movement across physical space creates repositionings in the intra-psychological domain (Bhatia & Ram, 2001), at the level of personal meaning (Gillespie et al., 2012). The remainder of this chapter will propose a way of analyzing how individuals deal with this movement and what changes this movement produces in individuals’ identity.

Methodology

The Context and Participants

The quotations analyzed here come from a research project conducted by the first author (IK). Part of this project examined the ways that immigrants redefined their identity following their relocation to Greece. Data were collected through 32 in-depth interviews, 6 focus group discussions and 8 months of ethnographic participatory observation in three immigrant communities in Athens (Greek Forum of Migrants, United African Women Organisation and ASCLAYE union of Latin-Americans in Greece), between September 2007 and April 2008. Participants were recruited through their immigrant communities and through ‘snowballing’. Most participants came from African and Latin American countries and resided in Greece, their residence duration spanning between 2 and 30 years. Differences in ethnicity, age and years of residence enabled the researcher to maximize variety (Flick, 2009) and gain rich understanding of the different migratory trajectories, motivations and characteristics of immigrants and the challenges they faced.

A combination of narrative and episodic interviews were conducted (Flick, 2009), starting from childhood and reaching the moment of the interview, identifying episodes and events leading to immigration and experiences following immigration. Interviews lasted between 60 and 120 minutes. Focus groups were composed of people who knew each other as members of the three immigrant communities. This was advantageous, as the members of the groups felt comfortable in expressing and reflecting upon their experiences (Howarth, 2002a). Focus group discussions examined specific themes related to immigration: ‘expectations meet reality’, ‘feelings and embodied experiences’ and ‘contact with Greek society and home community’. Vignettes of people describing different aspects of the aforementioned themes were used during focus groups to stimulate discussion. Focus groups lasted between 60 and 80 minutes. Interviews and focus group discussions were conducted in English, Spanish or Greek, depending on the maternal language of the participants or the language that the participants chose. They were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim.

The Relation Between Language And Identity

The socio-cultural approach to identity adopted here focuses on individuals’ thoughts and actions as they negotiate their positions in socially created streams of meaning, such as discourses and representations (Valsiner, 2004). Language, in the form of talk, is thus a central feature of analysis, since it is seen as a constitution and an expression of thought (Marková, 2003), a way of expressing one’s position. When individuals talk, they unfold their thoughts within particular encounters. Their perceptions about their audience, as well as the reactions of that audience, may lead the speaker to un...