Drawing on Judith Butler's theory of performativity and positioning approaches, this paper examines how asylum seekers actively assert agency in navigating and (re)constructing their subjectivities and identities within research interviews. The analysis explores the power dynamics inherent in the interview setting and broader public discourse,…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to first consider how veterans use talk to shape interpretations of personal and social identity. Second, this paper seeks to gain an understanding of how veterans see themselves in a civilian world, their ability to re-conceptualise and realign their perspective on life to support their transition in to a…

The right to share the social heritage of a nation is an element of citizenship closely associated with education. Social heritage is understood as the negotiation of understandings within a dialectical understanding of social practice across multiple timescales. In this paper the meaning-making practices of one young child concerned with beavers…

The national curriculum reformers, regarded as members of the social elites and intellectuals, projected their vision of identity onto the curriculum which they constructed and influenced the next generation's national consciousness. In the tangled relationship between politics and education, the selection of the reformers in a sense dictates the…

This study examines how graduates of a specific educational institution ("The Boarding School for the Gifted Disadvantaged" in Israel) integrate their school experiences into their life story. The in-depth interviews with the boarding school graduates demonstrate special use of the gift metaphor to describe their selfhood and their…

This article explores the construction and shifting of "expert" and "novice" roles between and within two languages (Japanese and English). Taking a language socialization perspective while drawing upon insights from conversation analysis on epistemics in interaction, it analyzes seven hours of audio recordings of dinnertime…

Understanding learning disabilities (LDs) as constructed through multiple cultural practices including discourse, this paper focuses on a Latino middle school student with a LD named Elijah. This study documents both the discourses and practices used to position Elijah as a mathematics learner, as well as his use of similar discourses as he…

The paper examines the connection between discursive and non-discursive features and the construction of writer identity. In particular, the paper compares and contrasts the writer identity development of two groups of undergraduate students of applied linguistics in the Mexican context, one made up of locally educated ones and the other composed…

Based on interviews with eight adult immigrants to Montreal, this article explores how discourses from their cultures of origin interact with discourses in the host culture to influence the process of identity construction during their acculturation to the host society. Drawing on sociocultural theory and psychological concepts of identity…

The current study aims to investigate the discursive construction and navigation of agency in oral narratives of English learning by Chinese college English majors. Based on the theoretical framework integrating Bamberg et. al.'s theory of identity dilemma and Hallidayan systemic functional linguistics, the study has addressed two research…

Finland is officially a bilingual country but it is in practice multilingual. In the current study, we examined how mothers and fathers of mixed-language families linguistically identified themselves and others, and how ideological discourses and concepts historically and socially situated in Finland circulated through the parents' talk. The…

The focus of this paper is on Lithuania, where government policies continue to limit the use of Russian in education, the public space and the media, while the local economy has recognized proficiency in Russian as a commodity. This is particularly salient in the healthcare industry that grew significantly in the past years with patients from…

This dissertation explores the identity enactments (Bucholtz & Hall, 2005) of 14 multilingual university writing center tutors and multilingual student writers who use English and Putonghua to negotiate their interactions. The study is situated within sociocultural theory (Vygotsky, 1978) and uses ethnographic methods such as observation,…

The goal of this article is to contribute to understanding the interplay between students' disciplinary engagement and their identity construction. The term appropriation, borrowed from scholars in linguistics and education, was chosen to capture this broader sense of productive learning that sits at the nexus of disciplinary engagement and…

This paper considers how, in the process of positioning that is implicit in every interaction, all of us employ multiple and often competing narratives when we talk about cultural identity and our relationships with new cultural environments. In interviews with newly arrived postgraduate students about their experience of travelling to study…