Catching identities<i>in flight</i>

Jacobs, Catho; Mieroop, Dorien Van De; Laar, Colette van

doi:10.1075/ni.20025.jac

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Hester and Hester mention the example of compliments, which "may be paid for a variety of reasons", "may be understood in a variety of ways" (Hester & Hester, 2010, p. 36) and may thus contribute to the construction of a variety of identities. For instance, when telling someone they speak the local majority language 'so well', this may construct the speaker's identity of a language teacher within an educational context, yet, outside of such a context, this may be understood by a person with a migration background as a racial microaggression, thus constructing the speaker's identity as prejudiced (see for example Jacobs et al, 2022). These examples demonstrate that conversational actions, such as complimenting, but also giving directives (see fragment 1), may "invoke various types of social relationships" thus potentially contributing to all sorts of identity work -which is and will always be "a locally produced interactional matter" (Hester & Hester, 2010, p. 36).…”

Section: Identity Through the Lens Of Membership Categorization Analy...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Discourse Analytic Approaches to Language and Identity

Mieroop¹

2022

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics

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Rather than thinking of identity as something that defines a person in such a way that it makes them distinguishable from others, researchers using discourse analytical approaches within linguistics—especially in the fields of pragmatics and interactional sociolinguistics—tend to adopt a social constructionist perspective and thus view identity as a multimodally constituted activity or process. From this perspective, identity is not something one is or has, but something that one does or creates by means of various linguistic and paralinguistic resources as well as bodily movements. This performative view of identity has a number of implications. Rather than thinking of identity in the singular, a plural conceptualization of identities is capitalized on. Moreover, these identities should not be regarded as pertaining to only the ‘large’ macro-level sociodemographic categories individuals belong to, such as gender, race, and social class; identities are often described in much more nuanced terms. Such a fine-grained approach is needed to do justice to this performative perspective on identity, as it helps to capture the many dynamic and extremely fleeting ways in which people engage in identity work. Furthermore, all these identity constructions are not necessarily always consistent with one another, and they may sometimes even be contradictory, as people may not always be—or be able to be—equally prone to enacting a particular identity. This may depend on what they are doing and with whom, as identities are also related to the identities other people may construct around them. All these aspects make the analysis of identity quite a complex endeavor, as not only can their plural and fleeting nature make identities quite hard to capture, but it can also be quite a challenge to pin down precisely at which points in an interaction we can actually observe identity work in action.

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Section: Identity Through the Lens Of Membership Categorization Analy...mentioning

confidence: 99%