This dissertation is a qualitative study of racially ambiguous people and their life experiences. Racially ambiguous people are individuals who are frequently misidentified racially by others because they do not resemble the phenotype associated with the racial group to which they belong or because they belong to racial/ethnic groups originating in different parts of the world that resemble each other. the racial/ethnic population of the United States is constantly changing because of variations in the birth rates among the racial/ethnic groups that comprise those populations and immigration from around the world. Although much research has been done that documents the existence of racial/ethnic mixing in the history of the United States and the world, this multiracial history is seldom acknowledged in the social, work, and other spheres of interaction among people in the U.S., instead a racialized system based on the perception of individuals as mono-racial thus easily identified through (skin tone, hair texture, facial features, etc.). This is research was done using life experience interviews with 24 racially ambiguous individuals to determine how race/ethnicity has affected their lives and how they negotiate the minefield of race.

Thesis advisor: Dennis L. Shirley / The recent mathematics curriculum reforms in the United States resulted in various classroom initiatives and research on cultivating students’ mathematical identity. Among many dimensions of mathematical identity (Fellus, 2019), mathematical authorial identity is connected to how students leverage the interactional space and communicate their ideas about mathematical concepts while invoking authority, especially during students’ peer discussion in mathematics classrooms (Povey & Burton, 2003; Schoenfeld & Sloan, 2016). Despite the emerging importance of students’ mathematical authorial identity, most research on authorship and authority in mathematics classrooms has focused on the relationship between teachers and students, and not on the relationships of students with one another in small groups (Amid & Fried, 2005; Cobb et al., 2009; Wagner & Herbel-Eisenmann, 2014). More attention is needed to understand how the notions of authorship and authority work in students’ interactions with others, and what interactional patterns occur as students construct mathematical authorial identity through classroom discourses (Langer-Osuna, 2016, 2017, 2018; Langer-Osuna et al., 2020). The current study used an applied conversation analysis to investigate students’ interactional patterns of seven small group discussions. These students met virtually four times over one school year to exchange feedback on each other’s mathematical arguments. After transcribing students’ small group discussions, I focused on the occurrences of accounts, which are statements “made by a social actor to explain unanticipated or untoward behavior” (Scott & Lyman, 1968, p. 46). They are typically used by interactants when they offer additional explanation or elaboration in situations when they are accomplishing a dispreferred action. The results indicate that mathematical authorial identity was manifested in three different types of account turns. The first type of account turns was ‘missing accounts,’ which were expected to occur but were missing due to students accomplishing other interactional work. Students deployed this type of accounts as they accomplished various forms of disagreement. The second type of account turns invoked external authority. Students typically deployed this type of account turns towards the end of a sequence, and they were likely to use strong expressions of disagreement. The third type was account turns that invoked shared/internal authority. These account turns usually occurred at the beginning of a new sequence and when students expressed weaker disagreement. The various types of account turns and interactional environments suggest that students actively conceptualize and manage interactional work, such as facework and preference organization, when navigating mathematics classroom discourse. Based on the findings, this dissertation offers pedagogical implications for mathematics educators to actively cultivate group norms that could occasion more interactional affordances for students and be aware of interactional features and sequences that foster students’ construction of mathematical authorial identity. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction.

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This thesis explores the Malay songket motifs in relation to Malaysia's cultural identity and the transformations of these motifs within the context of the researcher's own art works. An examination of Malaysian government's fixed National Culture policy on identity is contrasted with the reality of identity as dynamic. The identity policy was created and asserted on a multi-racial population based on concept of MalaylBumiputera with no recognition of the 'Other', the nonBumiputera culture. Divisions among the populace were created by the privileges of political, economic and social adjustments given only to the Bumiputera. The lack of addressing the concerns of recognition and acknowledgement of the 'Other' and existence of 'difference' and stereotyping becomes the main interest of this research. In this thesis, the Malay songket motifs were used as a vehicle to demonstrate the Malay's strong association with traditional customs and rituals, a culture that became the focus of the National Culture policy. The motifs symbolises the dominance of the Malays clinging on to power to control the nation, echOing the height of the Malacca Malay Sultanate Empire eight centuries ago. The sense of growth, unity and human spirituality associated with animism was expressed in the songket motifs. However, evidence of the motifs assimilation with Hindu-Buddhist and Islamic influences proved that there is no Malay 'purity' in this art form. The researcher's practice transforms the flat images of the songket motifs into installative art works. Foods, light, shadow, images and sound become the media which express the research findings drawn from documentary, visual and oral sources concerning the songket motifs. His practice differs from the normal practice of Malaysian artists, who literally translate Malay culture into art work. The researcher's practice employs specific references to Malaysian sources free from didactic, cultural-political content. Above all, as a Malaysian working in the UK, the researcher not only engages his theoretical findings to inform his practice, he becomes part of the research. He is both a Malaysian artist himself and a contributor to that part of Malay culture that is examined in this thesis. He contributes to the compilation of the songket motifs information into CD-ROM.

Drawing upon the work of McAdams (1988) and Breakwell (1986) on identity, gay identity can be conceptualised as a personal narrative that individuals construct in an attempt to impart meaning, coherence and purpose to the experiences they have had in relation to their same-sex sexual preference, and to boost their self-esteem and sense of personal continuity by forging connections between these experiences and imposing causality on them. With the aim of accessing the gay identity narratives of a sample of gay men, a structured multiple-choice-type questionnaire which examined experiences relating to the formation of a gay identity was distributed to 204 self-defined gay men in Greater London. The 146 completed questionnaires that were returned were first subjected to frequency analysis. One of the main findings to emerge was that respondents reported having constructed their gay identity formation narratives against a background of internalised negative societal ideas about homosexuals and homosexuality, which rendered problematic the admission of a gay identity to their overarching identity and the attribution of a positive evaluation to this gay identity. Data were also subjected to multiple regression analysis, the major outcome of which was that contact with the gay subculture appeared to have facilitated the development of a gay identity that individuals could regard as personally advantageous by challenging the negative images of homosexuals and homosexualityaccess to a subcultural narrative in which the development of a gay identity is construed as a worthwhile task. Respondents' accounts of their gay identity formation experiences were generally interpreted on two levels, i. e., as reflecting the actualities of the events they described and, importing concepts from work on autobiographical memory, as reconstructions of those events within gay identity formation narratives designed to boost the narrator's self-esteem and sense of personal continuity. internalised during socialisation and by allowing individuals

Aims and Rationale: The present study aims to enrich understanding of the professional identity of counselling psychology in the UK by exploring both the individual professional identities of counselling psychologists and the broader identity of the profession as a whole. This will elaborate on the existing literature base and allow the researcher to gather a breadth of perspectives of counselling psychology identity whilst also exploring the issues surrounding the identity development of practitioners in greater depth. Method: The study adopts a triangulation mixed methods design to explore the professional identity of counselling psychologists (Cresswell, Plano Clark, Guttman & Hanson, 2003). An exploratory online survey was designed to explore 1) the training, employment and practice characteristics of counselling psychologists and 2) their perception of the role, contribution and future identity of the profession. Concurrent with this data collection, qualitative interviews were conducted which aimed to explore the participants’ experience of training and working as a counselling psychologist, and develop an understanding of factors that have impacted upon their individual professional identity. Results: Both data sources contribute to the conception of counselling psychology as a diverse and multi-faceted profession. ‘Unity within diversity’ has been proposed as an overarching theme that marries the data sources and highlights the different ways in which counselling psychologists experience and articulate their individual professional identity, and the collective identity of the profession. Conclusions: The findings reveal there is no single professional identity inherent within counselling psychology. Multiple professional identities exist and are shaped by a range of factors. Uniting these diverse identities is a central commitment to a humanistic philosophy and value base. This provides a foundation on which therapeutic decision making is made and clients’ difficulties conceptualised. Whilst counselling psychology’s interest in identity and critical self-reflection has been questioned, this process may allow the profession to remain alert to the changing professional climate and adapt their practice to ensure that they remain valuable and are not overlooked within the field of therapeutic provision.

This thesis is situated at the intersection of feminist political theory, identity politics and moral philosophy. Its broader aim is to show the positive consequences of returning the self and its inner activity to the ethical domain for feminist identity politics. To this end, it brings feminist identity politics into dialogue with contemporary developments in virtue ethics, in particular Christine Swanton’s pluralistic virtue ethics. As its starting point, it takes issue with the tendency to reduce the complexity of identity to issues of category. The first part of the thesis problematises this tendency and argues for a reconsideration of the question of identity politics by shifting the focus away from identity per se and towards a more complex picture of the self that is reflective of the constitutive relation between the self and identifications, commitments and values. The work of the post-modern feminists Wendy Brown and Judith Butlers are read as proposing just such a shift away from the identitarian engagement of identity politics of ‘who am I?’ towards a more ethically imbued engagement that centres a complex self with inner depths. Part Two of the thesis extends this reconceptualisation of the problematic of identity politics and elaborates on what it could mean to undertake such a shift and how such a project could be conceived. Drawing on both Michael Sandel’s and Michel Foucault’s formulations of the self, identity and its relation to the good, the thesis develops the argument that the problematic of identity politics, articulated in ethical language, enables the formulation of an argument for giving an account of the good life and that this entails developing a subject imbued with a full inner life. Part Three of the thesis argues that contemporary work in virtue ethics offers the best way to take this project forward, suggesting that it represents a positive development in conceptions of the self and that a complex picture of the person emerges that provides the basis for a richer approach to the ethical concerns raised in identity politics. The thesis concludes by illustrating the potential value of taking those feminist insights into the constructed nature of identity into dialogue with a pluralistic virtue ethical account of the self and suggests that this approach provides new opportunities for understanding and discussing the collective dimension of identity politics in situations of diversity and inequality.