Digital storytelling, the practice of combining personal narrative with multimedia to produce a short autobiographical movie, continues to expand its creative uses in classrooms around the world. However, teaching the actual story process within digital storytelling presents several challenges for teachers as it demands a combination of creative writing, basic film conventions, visual and media literacy, as well as the technical facility with the technology. Digital storytelling presents a unique opportunity for students to acquire much more than new technology skills. It enables them to represent their voices in a manner rarely addressed by state and district curriculum while practicing the digital literacy skills that will be important to their 21st century futures. Storytelling and multimedia production have rarely been taught, if at all, while the development of students narrative skills has rested on the shoulders of English teachers. This pedagogical disconnect between story literacy and technology literacy is at the heart of the multiliteracies debate. Elliot W. Eisner writes in The Kind of Schools We Need, What we ought to be developing in our schools is not simply a narrow array of literacy skills limited to a restrictive range of meaning systems, but a spectrum of literacies...We need a conception of multiple literacies to serve as a vision of what our schools should seek to achieve (2002). An effective implementation of digital storytelling in schools is a model of the metaliteracy Eisner suggests.

This thesis poses the following question: are post-apartheid racialised identities constructed relationally? More specifically, this thesis investigates the co-construction of black and white racialised identities within the realm of South African public discourse. To this aim, it draws on editorials and letters to the editor which appeared in the City Press and the Sunday Times newspapers from 1994 to 2011. Informed by Foucauldian Discourse Analysis, the analysis focuses on the relationality between blackness and whiteness through a consideration of two major discourses. These discourses, labelled Bold New Blackness and Enduring Whiteness, are presented as templates for post-apartheid racialised identity construction. The analysis is comprised of three interrelated parts. The first part demonstrates that the respective templates construct racialised identities in terms of oppositional views regarding the apartheid past and the emerging post-apartheid future. Nevertheless, as each template contains references to the racialised other, it is suggested that racialised identity is co-constructed independently within each template. The second part shows that the way in which blacks and whites are positioned is constructed through constant reference across the two oppositional templates. In turn, it is suggested that racialised identity is co-constructed interdependently between the templates via an endless cycle of opposition. The third part delves into black and white subjectivities, revealing that the templates are neither wholly independent nor wholly interdependent. Instead, it is suggested that racialised identity is co-constructed through a set of entanglements, disentanglements and re-entanglements between blackness and whiteness. In this way, the thesis elucidates the post-apartheid tensions and complexities that exist around black and white racialised identity co-construction. Moreover, given that the vast majority of existing studies have presented black and white racialised identities as independent constructions to be examined separately within the respective fields of blackness and whiteness studies, this thesis highlights the fruitfulness of simultaneously utilising these otherwise disparate fields of study.

A post-structuralist framework (Foucault, 1976; Weedon, 1997) is used to explore language acquisition and identity construction in the life histories of four multilingual white South African men, who became fluent in the African language of isiXhosa in the racially-divided world of Apartheid South Africa, at a time when law and policy made fluency in an African language unusual for whites. Theories used within the 'social turn' in Second Language Acquisition (Block, 2003; Norton, 2000), as well as the social learning theory of Lave and Wenger (1991), support an exploration of how the men acquired this language on the farms in the Eastern Cape where they spent their early years. The identity implications of the men's multilingualism are examined using post-colonial studies of race, 'whiteness' and hybridity (Bhabha, 1994; Frankenberg, 1993; Hall, 1992a). The study was undertaken using Life History methodology (Hatch & Wisniewsky, 1995) and biographic interviewing methods developed within the Social Sciences (Wengraf, 2001). Poststructuralist discourse analysis (Wetherell & Potter, 1992), together with aspects of narrative analysis (Brockmeier, 2000), were used to analyse the data. The study contributes to research into naturalistic language acquisition, using theories from the 'social turn', and analysing a bilingual context in which language, power, race and identity interact in unique ways. The findings endorse the importance of a post-structuralist framing for the Communities of Practice model (Wenger, 1998), and show that participation in target-language communities requires investment by learners in identities which ameliorate the inequities of power relations. The study shows that isiXhosa can become linguistic capital (Bourdieu, 1991) for white South Africans, depending on context and the isiXhosa register they use. It demonstrates that Apartheid discourse ascribes to the men an identity which is indisputably white, but that early experiences shared with isiXhosa-speakers shape their lives and form a potentially antihegemonic facet of their identities.

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AN ABSTRACT ON THE THESIS OF TOMMIE LEE WILLIAMS, for the Master of Arts Degree in APPLIED LINGUISTICS AND TEACHING ENGLISH TO SPEAKERS OF OTHER LANGUAGES, presented on NOVEMBER, 5, 2013 at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. TITLE: AFRICAN AMERICAN IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION ON FACEBOOK MAJOR PROFESSORS: Dr. Laura Halliday and Dr. Janet Fuller In contrast to early utopian theories about life on the internet, research revealed that the internet does not exist in a gender, class and racial vacuum (Kendall, 1998, Zhao et al, 2005). Identity issues that exist in the real world are mirrored in online presentations (Turkle, 1995). A previous study on Ethno Racial displays on Facebook examined whether different ethnic and racial groups used different identity strategies to construct their online identities on the Facebook social media network. The findings from that study and others were instrumental in the development of this research. The study conducted Face book profile page analyses for over 150 students from five distinct ethnic groups, African American, Vietnamese, White American, Hispanics and Indian. Their methodology included a coding system and instrument that revealed that the five ethnic racial groups did employ different strategies in the construction of their profile page identities. The object of this study is to exclusively study African American identity construction on Facebook. The goal of the study is to add to scholarship and body of research in this area. The research involves analyzing the Facebook profile of twenty former employees of a southwestern call center that closed the same year Facebook was founded. The employees vowed to keep in touch with each other through the new social network. A decision to employ a multiple methodology approach to the study was primarily driven by the small sample size and complicated nature of the information. A quantitative study was conducted first followed by a qualitative case study of the individual profile pages of four of the subject. The choice of the case studies selected was driven by results of the quantitative analysis which revealed outlier categories and cases. The findings from the two studies were then calculated, analyzed and reported. The early report of the quantitative study revealed that in comparative analysis that there were no significant differences between the two independent variables labeled Ethnicgroup White and Ethnic group African American. The secondary report from another statistical analysis discovered differences as a result of outliers in the data. The identified outliers were used to choose the subjects for the qualitative study. The results from the qualitative case study revealed that the African Americans in the study used different identity construction strategies. The strategies, however, did not show congruence on racial or ethnic lines. The data suggested the subjects chose identities that adhered to established socio-cultural archetypes rather than exclusively afro centric models. Triangulation of the data also suggested support for the original quantitative report of no significance.

This study focuses on the functional identities of legal witness, legal victim, and legal perpetrator and their co-construction in the forensic interviews that take place after allegations of child sexual abuse have been made. I argue that while these are inter-related identities, the focus of their constitution and the direction of their constructional dependencies is determined by the event context. Nineteen transcripts of forensic interviews involving children ages 3 to 12 were collected during a three-month period at a children's center in a western state.Legal witness as an identity of performance, is constituted in performance. Interview processes socialize children to these performances. Ritualized sequences within interviews also provide evidence that children have the qualities required of a legal witness. Children are constructed as legal victims in interview processes that establish they have been acted upon according to specific actions defined in the law. This mutually constitutes the legal perpetrator. Children, however, resist both interpellation as a legal victim and elements of the process of the interview affecting how they are perceived as legal witnesses. Analysis also reveals that the purpose of the interview within the extended legal process inherently shapes the accounts and narratives that are co-produced.The addition of a third interview participant is also considered. Second interviewers provided a complex co-construction process that can support the constitution of the legal witness identity. Relatives of the child also provide a complex process. If they are perceived as co-authoring the narratives or accounts, however, they may negatively affect the legal witness identity. The addition of an interpreter can facilitate the child's co-construction as a legal witness. As pre-trial events, forensic interviews are not subject to trial requirements for trained interpreters. In the case considered here, the untrained interpreter produced language that was less precise, more personal, and had the potential to affect the legal implication of questions.Finally, I discuss the therapeutic, theoretical, and the social, cultural, and political implications of the study.

The relationship between theatrical performance and religion in Western culture has always been complex and often troubled; and yet at points of encounter each provides fertile ground for exploring questions about how our religious and spiritual identity is constructed through society. This is particularly true of England today. The arrival of the 21st century seems to have heralded a renewed interest in questions surrounding religious practice and spiritual seeking. When debates about the nature and implications of religious belief are so high on the cultural agenda, performance inevitably becomes a public site of these debates. This is reflected in the academy, and while sociologists of religion have become increasingly aware of the 'performative' aspects of religious practices, contemporary performance practitioners and theorists have become more concerned with questions of religion, spirituality and the sacred. This thesis acknowledges both aspects of this nexus. It contextualises these manifestations in popular culture through recent scholarship from the sociology of religion, and uses frameworks and discourse from performance scholarship to consider the implications of psychophysical practice on performative identity construction. To do this it critiques performance culture’s use of religion and spirituality to describe both positive and negative aspects of performance and its genealogies, which at its most extreme, asserts the 'failure' of mainstream religion and moves to assume the mantle of religion itself. This thesis, through textual and performance analysis, literature reviews, archival research and fieldwork argues that performance optics offer significant mechanisms for examining the efficacy of embodied practices that construct the infinite variety of religious, spiritual and cultural beliefs. It includes a series of case studies which explore how notions of ‘Englishness’ as civic-identity are interwoven with concepts of religiosity and responsibility. They are informed by my fieldwork as a participant and observer in acts of Christian and Spiritualist worship, in addition to my pilgrimage to Lourdes and Glastonbury with Goddess worshippers and Catholics. This thesis asks how is contemporary English religious and spiritual identity constructed and reconstructed by performance?

The present study provides an understanding of how married, tertiary educated and employed Muslim females negotiate their identities across contexts within a multicultural environment, such as post-1994 contemporary Johannesburg. An additional facet of this study was to gain insight into the construction of Muslim female identity by the husbands of the women in the study. The commonly portrayed images of Muslim women are unflattering and ill-conceived and depict the Muslim woman as one who is veiled, oppressed, secluded and submissive. In South Africa however, Muslim women have been able to participate in secular education and employment opportunities and practice their religion within a democratic dispensation that is responsive to issues of gender. In order to obtain an understanding of the nuances that underpin Muslim female self-constructions and constructions by their husbands, the study was approached from a social constructionist epistemology. It is the assumption of the researcher that identities are thus in part created discursively, and for the purpose of this study, the constructions of identity of the participants were analysed using a discourse analysis methodology. Interviews were conducted with four Muslim couples. Social facets such as gender, race, religion and globalisation were used as topics in order to understand how participants constructed Muslim women’s identity. The Muslim women who participated in the study appear to inhabit different subject positions in their daily lives. The study highlighted that identity may not be fixed or stable, rather a function of relational or contextual positions. Both the women and men in this study emphasised an Islamic identification while distancing themselves from a cultural identification. The oppression of Muslim women was relegated to the realm of culture. In prioritising an Islamic identity the participants have created a space where they are able to construct an alternative identity for Muslim women that enables them these women the freedom to access secular spaces or what may be viewed as the public sphere of men.

This study aimed to describe the educational experiences of deaf adolescent learners attending a school for the deaf in South Africa. The specific objectives of the current study included: (a) obtaining a detailed description of the educational experiences of deaf adolescent learners; (b) establishing with which rhetoric (medical vs. cultural) the deaf adolescents could best identify; (c) establishing the potential influence on individual identity development of the established affiliations with the opposing models of deafness. Ten deaf adolescents ranging between 14 and 16 years, attending a single school for the deaf were selected as participants for the current study. A basic research design and a qualitative approach, embedded within the theory of social constructivism were employed. Two pilot studies were conducted in order to establish the feasibility of the current study. Thereafter, interviews as per the ‘interview guide approach’ were administered. Field observations within the school context and file reviews were also conducted. Thematic content analysis was employed and the identified themes were described qualitatively. Results revealed the emergence of three themes. Within these themes, the adolescents’ experiences included: limited SASL role models both at home and at school, negative educational encounters as well as positivity and hope for the future. Experiences characteristic of the medical model and socio-cultural model of deafness were reported and factors affecting these affiliations were described. The researcher concluded that a level of affiliation with both the medical and the sociocultural models of deafness existed for the participants. The impact of these affiliations on identity construction was explored and a model of identity development, the multiculturalexperience model, was proposed. The education of deaf individuals in South Africa shows room for significant growth. By adjusting government education policies for deaf education as well as supporting the goals of early intervention, deaf learners can reach their full potential regardless of the mode of communication favoured.

This thesis investigates the construction of identity and authenticity through sociophonetic variation, focusing on British Hip Hop artist Amy Winehouse. Prior work on British vocal artists’ phonetic variation has relied upon regional categorical frameworks (Trudgill, 1983; Carlsson, 2001) and found variation to be evidence of production errors and speakers’ misidentification of targeted speech patterns, resulting in summative interpretations of conflict between speakers’ discreet identities and speech pattern categories. More recent work has attended to linguistic processes within cultural movements influenced but not strictly delimited by sociolinguistics’ canonical categories of region, class, race, etc. Within the context of the Hip Hop cultural movement, which demands members maintain authenticity via its mantra of keepin’ it real, scholars have described processes by which authenticity is redefined and re-localized (Pennycook, 2007), emphasized the performative process of the construction of identity rather than the categorical delineation of identity (Alim, 2009), explicated the construction of authenticity within Hip Hop as inextricable from Hip Hop’s roots in the Black American Speech Community (Alim, 2006), and shown how linguistic processes mediate the markedness of artists’ Whiteness as they construct authenticity within Hip (Cutler, 2007). This work applies sociophonetic analytic tools to sung and spoken speech informed by indexical theory. Through indexical theory, the construction of identity is examined via the employment of variants that do not convey fixed meanings but instead create complex fields of possible meaning (Eckert, 2008). The variables examined include postvocalic contexts of the liquids /l/ and /r/ and intervocalic instances of /t/. Findings indicate that Winehouse’s use of non-rhotic postvocalic /r/ in spoken language, rhotic postvocalic /r/ in singing language, glottal [ʔ] intervocalic /t/ in spoken language, intervocalic /t/ as [ɾ] in singing language, and categorical use of vocalized postvocalic /l/, demonstrates a negotiation between a Hip Hop identity and a White British non-posh identity. Her spoken and singing language represent a re-localizing of Hip Hop’s demand for authenticity within Winehouse’s British context. Findings indicate that phonetic features can index a redefinition of authenticity as forms of talk, such as Hip Hop, gain ownership in new contexts.