Non-strategic detection of identity-threatening information: Epistemic validation and identity defense may share a common cognitive basis

Readers use prior knowledge to evaluate the validity of statements and detect false information without effort and strategic control. The present study expands this research by exploring whether people also non-strategically detect information that threatens their social identity. Participants (N = 77) completed a task in which they had to respond to a “True” or “False” probe after reading true, false, identity-threatening, or non-threatening sentences. Replicating previous studies, participants reacted more slowly to a positive probe (“True”) after reading false (vs. true) sentences. Notably, participants also reacted more slowly to a positive probe after reading identity-threatening (vs. non-threatening) sentences. These results provide first evidence that identity-threatening information, just as false information, is detected at a very early stage of information processing and lends support to the notion of a routine, non-strategic identity-defense mechanism.

Applications

Chapter Four asks what happens when the physical markers of identity are rendered in the language of digital code. In the contemporary moment, fingerprints and DNA profiles are stored and matched through networked databases rather than paper records, while iris scans and facial recognition technology have produced radically new modes of reading identity in the body. This digitization of identification is accentuated still further when the more mundane means of identifying oneself in the contemporary period (through the use of credit cards or in ‘checking in’ to a workplace) are considered. Taking place within an essentially surveillant contemporary culture, these validations of identity create a retrievable record of one’s movements and activities and place the citizen’s body in the ‘non-place’ of networked databases in which a direct checking of what Haggerty and Ericson describe as ‘data doubles’ takes place. As with Chapter Three, much of the significance that is attached to this development in recent identificatory practice will be developed via Powers’s The Gold Bug Variations. This explication will cede into a more thorough analysis of Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1984) and Cosmopolis (2003) and Jennifer Egan’s Look at Me (2001). While DeLillo’s earlier text represents some of the archetypal modes of contemporary surveillance, both Cosmopolis and Look at Me depict a complete internalization of its logic. Thus, just as DeLillo and Egan’s central characters voluntarily place themselves under surveillant monitoring, so too their representation as, in effect, data doubles requires a decidedly anti-realist form of narration.

Reading Identity, Reading Essence: A Strategic Essentialist Approach to Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable

The term strategic essentialism, coined by Spivak, is generally understood as “a political strategy whereby differences (within Group) are temporarily downplayed, and unity assumed for the sake of achieving political goals.” On the other hand, essentialism focuses that everything in this world has an intrinsic and immutable essence of its own. The adaption of a particular “nature” of one group of people by way of sexism, culturalization, and ethnification is strongly linked to the idea of essentialism. Mulk Raj Anand’s Bakha is dictated as an outcast by the institutionalized hierarchy of caste practice. He is essentialized as an untouchable by attributing to him the characteristic of dirt and filth. However, unlike other untouchables, Bakha can apprehend the difference between the cultured and uncultured, dirt and cleanliness. Via an analysis of Anand’s “Untouchable,” the present article aims to bring to the forefront the horrid destruction of the individual self that stems from misrepresentations of personality. Through strategic essentialism, it unravels Bakha’s contrasting nature as opposed to his pariah class, defied by his remarkable inner character and etiquette. The term condemns the essentialist categories of human existence. It has been applied to decontextualize and deconstruct the inaccurately essentialized identity of Bakha, which has made him a part of the group he does not actually belong to.

Average and avid: preservice English teachers' reading identities

Purpose Previous research shows that identity and academic learning are interdependent, so affecting one can affect the other. The purpose of this case study was to explore preservice English teachers’ reading identities and their perceptions of reading identity development in the context of English classrooms. Design/methodology/approach This study used qualitative collective case design. Data sources included analogy exercise about participants’ reading identities, participant-generated observations of reading identity instruction, questionnaire on reading identity, class discussions about reading identity and final written reflection. Findings Data showed examples of participants’ reading identities as taking a variety of forms, but when discussing what shaped their reading identities, the strongest codes related to positive interactions with people and texts. The data showed that participants related positive reading identities to both reading to learn and reading for pleasure. More participants’ perceived their professional identity as that of a literature teacher than a reading teacher. Research limitations/implications Future research is needed on how to support preservice teachers’ positive reading identities in English education courses. Practical implications Our data suggest that learning about reading identity may help preservice English teachers think of reading as something that is developing in themselves as well as their students over a lifetime. By providing space in English methods programs to attend to preservice teachers’ reading lives, we can help them rekindle or find their love of reading. Originality/value This research is needed because helping preservice teachers construct and enact positive reading identities in turn aids guidance of their future students’ reading identities, and having a positive reading identity is in turn linked to positive student outcomes.

PLAYING WHILE FEMALE: RE-READING IDENTITY FIXATIONS IN OVERWATCH

In early 2019, Overwatch professional player, “Ellie” quit playing just weeks after having been named to one of the teams seeded into the professional league. The harassment cited as a reason to leave was related especially to whether or not “Ellie” was truly “female”. Not much later, Ellie was revealed (and confirmed by Blizzard, the parent company of Overwatch) to be an account created by a male player. This paper sets out to map the controversy that ensued from a self-styled “social experiment” of playing while female. This paper brings this current “revelation” into conversation with past, more fully embodied/manufactured identities to better understand why this case is particularly important to internet studies. To this end, we begin by briefly describing some earlier, more familiar cases of people revealed to be someone other than, in online spaces, they said they were. Then, we further outline the instance of Ellie: its uptake by mainstream media, prominent Youtubers and Twitch streamers, and its discussion on internet forums like Reddit and 4Chan. Paying particular attention to the ways these discussions frame the “trick” played in disguising Ellie’s ‘true’ identity (singular), we suggest that this kind of case has always been galvanized by an underlying conviction that the best gamers are always and only men, and one contribution internet scholarship can make here is to show how these discursive patterns are unhelpful in understanding contemporary identificatory politics and practices in online spaces.

Reading identity: American and Irish Women’s book clubs, culture, and identity

This research examines the role of reading and book club attendance in the lives of Irish and American women’s fiction readers who actively participate in women’s book clubs utilizing mixed methodology, including ethnographic observation, participation in book club meetings, and in-depth narrative interviews. Women in Ireland and the United States used reading to develop a sense of self and to learn about the social world, as well as to construct their own identities, often in contrast to expected norms of feminine identity. Women in Ireland utilized reading and book clubs to develop knowledge and understanding; women in the United States were influenced to increase their status in order to potentially secure or retain a high-status romantic partner. At the same time, important key themes relating to social positionality and social networks, capital development, and the construction of identity were similar and central to women in both cultural environments. Reading was deeply entrenched in the identities of the women in this study and attending book clubs allowed them to continue engaging literature, construct identities, and gain knowledge about the world around them.

Being bilingual, being a reader: Prekindergarten dual language learners’ reading identities

This study explores the interplay between early reading, identity and bilingualism. Reading identities, or understandings about what reading is and whom one is as a reader, have been linked to reading achievement and the development of reading skills. Only a small portion of the overall research on reading identities has included dual language learners. This exploratory study provides a description of the reading identities of three dual language learners in prekindergarten. Data include child-centered interviews, child and classroom observations, teacher interviews and a family questionnaire. Methods centered on the use of child-oriented data collection protocols, and the inclusion of children in the interpretation of their own work and language. Through the exploration of three cases, this study documents the ways that reading identities were constructed, taken up and expressed by the participants. This study provides evidence that dual language learners are actively constructing ideas about reading, bilingualism/biliteracy, and whom they are as readers as they learn to read. These findings show that framing early reading in an identity perspective presents opportunities to look more holistically at the language and reading practices of dual language learners as they learn to read and navigate two or more languages at home and school.