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.

This study explores how student participation in the development of a school computer-network (SCN) motivated students to learn and promoted service and collegial relationships in the school. Students participated in a Technology Leadership (TL) community and engaged in activities that were central to the development of the SCN. The research examines the co-evolution of the SCN and student activities and the relationships between TL students and the school. In the study, data on students' experiences in the TL program came from non-participant observation, conversations, semi-structured interviews and document analyses. Using a sociocultural perspective of identity construction and informed by Lave and Wenger's notion of participation in a community-of-practice, with actor-network approaches, the analysis of the data showed that student level of engagement increased when the activities were relevant to their in-school and out-of-school technology experiences, or to their future career goals. Program participants provided technical support to the SCN and taught what teachers and students wanted to learn at a time when they needed to know it. In so doing, these leadership students moved towards greater technical expertise, improved interpersonal skills and increased leadership responsibilities as demonstrated by the availability of improved technical support services in the SCN. As newcomers to the TL community gradually advanced to full participation and old-timers became computer consultants to the school before they eventually graduated, the TL community was subjected to a continual process of renewal in terms of participants. With progressive student participation and with translations of diverse technology actors, the services the SCN provided to the school improved. Over time, the SCN's technical character changed and the relationships of service and collegiality between TL students and the school were enhanced. Thus, both participants and the school realized educational value. The implication for curriculum and pedagogy of discipline-based courses is that if students are to be attracted to school initiatives and retained, the curriculum and its delivery need to increase opportunities for students' changed relationships with the school community to take place, and for student participation in a relevant community-of-practice that is responsive to students' future aspirations.

The qualitative case study on which this thesis is based was designed to investigate the relationship between migration and identity construction of three young people who immigrated as children and adolescents, two of them as refugees, from the former Yugoslavia to Germany and finally to Canada. The autobiographical narrative interviews of the manifold migration stories were mainly analyzed from the point of view of Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory, which considers speech and thought in a close relation, to illustrate how identity must be understood as both individual and social in nature, and as a complex narrative action. The socialization processes in all countries of migration were viewed in order to investigate how the previous acculturation affects the cultural identity of the young people today and how it is unfolded in the story. The study reveals that these subjects with threefold migration position themselves between their lifeworlds which enable them not only to say where they belong to or which is their homeland but to answer the simple question “Who am I?” This is revealed by the way of their narration which contains a lot of contradictions. The individuals deal differently with their dynamic identity construction, while one of them seems to suffer under the instability of his identity, and of being different in all his lifeworlds, other subjects however can see advantages related to it. The way how they deal with this dynamics has a crucial influence on their view of their migrations today and consequently on their identity construction as a narrative action.

The qualitative case study on which this thesis is based was designed to investigate the relationship between migration and identity construction of three young people who immigrated as children and adolescents, two of them as refugees, from the former Yugoslavia to Germany and finally to Canada. The autobiographical narrative interviews of the manifold migration stories were mainly analyzed from the point of view of Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory, which considers speech and thought in a close relation, to illustrate how identity must be understood as both individual and social in nature, and as a complex narrative action. The socialization processes in all countries of migration were viewed in order to investigate how the previous acculturation affects the cultural identity of the young people today and how it is unfolded in the story. The study reveals that these subjects with threefold migration position themselves between their lifeworlds which enable them not only to say where they belong to or which is their homeland but to answer the simple question “Who am I?” This is revealed by the way of their narration which contains a lot of contradictions. The individuals deal differently with their dynamic identity construction, while one of them seems to suffer under the instability of his identity, and of being different in all his lifeworlds, other subjects however can see advantages related to it. The way how they deal with this dynamics has a crucial influence on their view of their migrations today and consequently on their identity construction as a narrative action.

This dissertation investigates the workplace experiences of gay and lesbian teachers. In-depth interviews and field observations were conducted with 51 teachers in Texas and in California, two states with different legal approaches to gay rights and worker rights. This comparative study highlights the importance of social, political, and cultural context in individual decision-making about sexual disclosure and performance, explores the consequences of "normalization" of LGBT experiences in the classroom, and addresses the role of identity politics in social change. By taking an intersectional approach to gay/lesbian identity construction, this dissertation considers how race, class, gender, and sexuality inequalities are expressed and reinforced in the experiences of gay and lesbian teachers. / text

The purpose of this study was to provide a clearer understanding of current Korean American adolescents under the recognition that their stories are barely told in educational research. Based on the literature that has described identity as a core concept in understanding adolescence and literacy practice as a dominant tool for identity construction, this study focused on Korean American adolescents' identity construction through their self-directed Internet literacy practices. Four Korean American adolescents living in a mid-size city in the Southwest participated in this study for several months. Data sources included face-to-face interviews, literacy practice logs, participants' literacy products on the Internet, online chat logs, and emails. Collected data were analyzed based on the constant comparative method. Results showed that these youth are active meaning makers with agency, that they constructed multiple, fluid identities within their sociocultural context, and utilized the Internet to stage these identities strategically. The result of this study implies a successful pedagogy needs to begin with careful consideration of each student's changeability and complexity by removing the labels imposed on them related to their ethnicity, race, gender, class, and so forth. This study also implies that literacy researchers' contribution, as messengers of adolescents' literacy practices outside of school, is critical for the a clearer understanding of adolescents. Finally, this study suggests that Korean American community take more interest in diverse voices among Korean American adolescents in the era of globalization. / text