In this inquiry, I examine how six repatriated students from China perceive their experiences in Japanese schools and in Japanese second language education. I focus on their voices and perspectives gained through audio-taped interviews. Employing Pierce's (1995) concept of investment and Rampton's (1990) concepts of language expertise, affiliation, and inheritance, I focus on how these adolescent students perceive the relationship between languages and identities and how their experiences affect their ways of looking at themselves. The data I collected through interviews in Japan supports the views that identity is multiple and fluid, and languages are profoundly and intricately related with learners' identity construction. Depending on their particular contexts in which they situate themselves, they hold distinct views on the relationship between languages and identities. I address how the particular context in Japan's educational system may influence their ways of looking at themselves. The study confirms that teachers need to examine our students' identities and frames of reference, values and beliefs.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the psychological and social processes of regular physical exercise use by women who consider themselves "exercisers." In using grounded theory method, the primary objective of this study was to generate a substantive theory that described (a) the experiences of women who self-identified as exercisers and engaged in regular physical exercise, (b) the contextual factors that influenced their participation, and (c) explained the experience of participating in regular exercise, considering both the positive and negative effects of exercising, and the process of change through its use. Twenty-two women (age range, 21 to 60 years) were interviewed about their exercise experience. Twenty participants self-identified as exercisers. Two other participants, a former exerciser, and a nonexerciser, were interviewed in order to explore theory limits. A middle-range theory of "shaping self through exercise" was identified as the basic process of these women's experience of regular physical exercise. The process involved the reciprocal connection between two intrapersonal phases: "shaping up" and "experiencing self as shaped." Through interactions among the subprocesses of shaping up ("talking to self," "experiencing exercise," "diverting from self" and "feeling good about self") exercisers in this study experienced self as shaped through "growing into self," "grounding self in exercise," and "expressing self through exercise." Influenced by personal meaning and contextual conditions (one's personal exercise background, current life context, and socialcultural environment), exercisers frequently re-experienced both phases. Aspects of each conceptual element of the theoretical model are identified and illustrated by narrative data. This grounded theory provides insight into the complexity of women's physical exercise experience. To appreciate this experience it is necessary to view the social-psychological process from an interactionist perspective. Findings suggest that women's exercise may be more than physical movement in reaction to environmental and personal influences, but may also be an intrinsically motivated endeavour towards self-growth, self-care, and selfexpression. Awareness of the complexity of this process, including personal and contextual influences, may provide guidance towards more successful adoption and maintenance of exercise. Implications include future research directions to extend theoretical boundaries and specificity.

Adolescence is a time when individuals begin to explore and examine psychological characteristics of the self in order to discover who they really are and how they fit in the social world in which they live. It is during this time of self-exploration that adolescents at risk for Huntington's Disease often learn of their risk status and witness the debilitating symptoms of the disease in their parents. Huntington Disease (HD) is an autosomal dominant neuropsychiatric disorder characterized by mid-life onset, involuntary movements, cognitive impairment, and depression. This dissertation investigated how adolescents experience living in a family with Huntington's Disease and therefore at risk for Huntington's Disease, and how this impacts their self-understanding and self-identity. The method of inquiry was based on a phenomenological approach. In-depth interviews were conducted with each of the adolescents. The data were analyzed using Van Manen's (1980) and Cochran and Claspell's (1987) format, resulting in an extraction of three themes. These themes are: (1) Naming the Legacy: Understanding and Misunderstanding; (2) Experiencing the Legacy: Huntington's Disease in Relation to Relationships; and (3) Integrating the Legacy: At the Crossroads of Self and Future Self. The analysis emphasizes that the at-risk adolescents' exploration of self-identity and future self was an individual process influenced by the cognitive, developmental, and socio-cultural contexts of the adolescents' lives. The process of learning about Huntington's Disease occurred through intuition and practical and experiential learning. The adolescents found support outside their family through friends and adult mentors. They engaged in complicated coping strategies and demonstrated a capacity for decision-making that displayed maturity beyond what would be expected for their age group. These findings led to specific recommendations for theory, research, and clinical practice in the area of the adolescent experience of HD. The research underscores the need for healthcare professionals to re-evaluate their view of adolescent autonomy and capacity for decision-making.

My dissertation is an inquiry into issues of home and belonging. For many people, the struggle to create a home in a "new" country, and the oscillation between a past "there" and present "here" have become ways of existence. Displacement challenges and raises questions regarding one's roots, affiliations, loyalty and belonging. The yearning for a place such as home becomes a site of inquiry for communities of displaced people. Destined to live between languages, cultures and national affiliations, im/migrants construct their homes in the particular place of "border." Acknowledging Home(s) and Belonging(s): Border Writing is "homeward" journeying through the discursive landscapes of nation, ethnicity, diaspora, and "race." It explores how border interrupts/initiates a discourse of home. I am an im/migrant researcher. The word "migrant" connotes impermanence, detachment and instability. From this positionality I introduce a slash into the word "immigrant" to transform these connotations into a permanence of migration. As autoethnographic and conversational inquiry, I explore im/migrant experiences from the position of "I," rather than "We." However, "I" is not a position of isolated individual(istic) exclusiveness, but a position of the personal articulation through the relationships with/in community. My research includes conversations with: theorists, colleagues from different disciplinary backgrounds, members of the "ethnic" communities to which I belong, and my daughter. I construct these conversations as borderzone arriculations where a "third space" emerges. The word dissertation stems etymologically from Greek dialegesthai, to converse, to dialogue; whereby dia- means "one with another," and legesthai means "to tell, talk." My dissertation endeavors to recognize - to know again, to know anew these deep layers of border as dialogue and conversation. As an im/migrant inquiry, my dissertation intends to create a different, mother knowing and culture of scholarship that broaden and deepen the space of academic researching/writing.

Most research on medical professional socialization was conducted when medical students were almost uniformly white, upper- to upper-middle class, young men. Today 50% of medical students in Canada are women, and significant numbers are members of racialized minority groups, come from working class backgrounds, identify as gay or lesbian, and/ or are older. This research examined the impact of such social diversity on processes of corriing to identify as a medical professional, drawing on a survey of medical students in one third-year class, interviews with 25 third-year students, and interviews with 23 medical school faculty members. Almost all of the traits and processes noted by classic studies of medical professional socialization were found to still apply in the late 1990s. Students learn to negotiate complex hierarchies; develop greater self-confidence, but lowered idealism; learn a new language, but lose some of their communication skills with patients. They begin playing a role that becomes more real as responses from others confirm their new identity. Students going through this training process achieve varying degrees of integration between their medical-student selves and the other parts of themselves. There is a strong impetus toward homogeneity in medical education. It emphasizes the production of neutral, undifferentiated physicians - physicians whose gender, 'race/ sexual orientation, and social class background do not make any difference. While there is some recognition that patients bring social baggage with them into doctor-patient encounters, there is very little recognition that doctors do too, and that this may affect the encounter. Instances of blatant racism, sexism, and homophobia are not common. Nonetheless, students describe an overall climate in the medical school in which some women, students from racialized minority groups, gays and lesbians, and students from working class backgrounds seem to 'fif less well. The subtlety of these micro-level experiences of gendering, racialization and so on allows them to co-exist with a prevalent individual and institutional denial that social differences make any difference. I critique this denial as (unintentionally) oppressive, rooted in a liberal individualist notion of equality that demands assimilation or suppression of difference.

This qualitative inquiry describes the linguistic perspectives of eighteen grade six students at Ecole Duncan, a multiethnic primary school (grades K-6) located in Park Extension, an inner-city neighbourhood of Montreal. Employing standard tools of ethnographic enquiry, such as interviews and participant observation, I examined the childrens' perception of the interplay of language and identity, and rooted the inquiry within the theoretical framework of social constructivist learning. The key element of the lived experiences of these children that surface in the data is that their perceptions and experiences are largely determined by a sense of belonging and opportunities to participate in the life of their communities. I conceptualize students' language learning as a social practice, and identity as being socially constructed, contradictory, and subject to change over time. Rampton's concepts of expertise, affiliation and inheritance are used in the theoretical framework. The major assumption of this study is that social factors influence children's identities, which has a reciprocal effect upon their language learning. This inquiry has implications for policy makers, educators and families.

When a young white man from the small town of Swartruggens chose the informal settlement of Skierlik to go on a killing spree, this was labelled racist by the media. Only black people lived in Skierlik, and small towns in the North West province had a reputation for being racially divided. This study examined the impact of this event on residents’ identities, specifically because it was widely publicised and discrediting to the town. Problematised places potentially threaten residents’ sense of self. The concept of place-identity was used here from a discursive psychological framework, arguing that self-in-relation-to-place is socially constructed in the conversational space of human dialogue. Thus, this analysis exposed the spoken discourses that maintain and reproduce racialised constructions of place-identity in post-apartheid South Africa. Forty two semi-structured interviews were conducted in either English, Afrikaans or Setswana, during a two-week stay in the town. Despite the literature showing that place-identity threat in problematised places result in residents trying to preserve a positive place-identity, the data in this study shows a different trend. The central argument is that discourses of victimhood are constructed by both black and white residents, but for divergent purposes. White residents argue against negative media versions of Swartruggens, while black residents amplify disadvantage and promote media versions. Indian residents, largely omitted from media reports, maintain a positive place-identity by constructing an ambivalent third space of participant-observer in the town, geographically and socially separate in a black/white divide. The analysis is situated in relevant broader pre- and post-apartheid ideologies. / Thesis (M.Soc.Sci.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2010.

In this thesis, I argue that identity construction is a postal effect: it results from a transmission of some sort, received or sent. I examine three instances of postal effect. In a chapter on Jacques Derrida's "Envois," a collection of fragments presented as if transcribed from a one-way love letter correspondence, I explore the performative force of relayed address. Working from Derrida's account of the literary performative, I point out that the "Envois" letters are addressed to "you" in the singular, which implies an address reserved for a particular subject, but that the postal relay of the collection enacts a repetition of their address. For the reader of the book, this repetition has evocative force which I compare with the force of transference in the context of the psychoanalytic situation. In a second chapter on the "Envois" letters, I examine their haunting effect. The "Envois" letters have an I/we signature that intimates pluralities in the writing subject. I argue that this signature is the effect of a postal relay of another order: a phantom, which Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok define as a gap in the psychic topography of the subject caused by a secret unwittingly received along with a legacy. To a certain extent, the "Envois" letters are written by Plato's "in-voices." In a chapter on J. M. Coetzee's epistolary novel Age of Iron, I explore the gift effects of a posthumous letter. Age of Iron is an epistolary novel consisting exclusively of a single letter written by a dying South African woman, Mrs. Curren, to her daughter, a political objector who has emigrated to the United States. Writing her letter in the knowledge that her death is imminent, Mrs. Curren anticipates her daughter's mourning. Working with J. L. Austin's doctrine of illocutionary forces and Derrida's analysis of the gift event, I postulate two effects of Mrs. Curren's letter, one that annuls the gift in a circular return and another that surpasses this circuit with textual diss

This thesis provides two interwoven sets of detailed descriptions with narrative lines. The first relates to five case studies involving secondary school teachers in schools in and around Durban during 1993 and 1994. This account focuses on the relationships between the teachers' thinking about knowledge and learning and their classroom practice. The second account describes the processes and difficulties involved in qualitative research incorporating case study and participant observation methodologies - from gaining access to schools and developing a task to access teachers' thinking about knowledge to acquiring skills for observation, writing lesson descriptions, conducting interviews and completing different levels of analysis. In essence, this account traces the development of the researcher during the course of this project and also highlights both the strengths and the weaknesses of qualitative research as a mode of social inquiry. Analysis of theory/practice relationships in each of these descriptions is centred around issues of power and identity, the data collected during the course of the fieldwork being used to develop grounded theory. The work of George H. Mead, Michel Foucault and Thomas Popkewitz provide the basis for the concept of power identity. The relational and shifting nature of power and its role in identity and theory/practice relationships - both in the work of the five teachers work and in qualitative research - is explored. In the former, seven interrelated components of power are identified and the ways in which these strengthen and limit teachers' power identities are described. In the latter, the connections between epistemology and research methodology and the similarities between qualitative research and local criticism are highlighted together with the critical roles played by contradiction, language and reflexivity. Finally, the insights gained about theory/practice relationships and power identity are extended to provide possibilities for conceptualising rationality and teacher education. The thesis is structured so as to capture both the contradictory elements and the shifts and developments that occurred during the study - those in the work of the participating teachers during the period of collaboration and those related to my personal epistemology and my practice as a qualitative researcher. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of Natal, 1997.

In a South African society in transformation it is well known that "white‟ Afrikaans-speaking South Africans are experiencing social change as a painful process. Against this background the purpose of the study was to investigate the construction of identities of being Afrikaans during family conversations between school-going Afrikaner adolescents and their parents in the post-apartheid context. A qualitative research design was utilized to investigate the phenomenon of negotiating identities of Afrikaansness in depth, openness and rich detail. A social constructionist meta-theoretical perspective underpinned the study. Theoretical perspectives from discursive psychology, as well as the dialogical self theory, formulated by Hermans and colleagues, framed the analysis and interpretation of the data. In contrast to conventional psychological approaches to the study of adolescent identity, such as the neo-Eriksonian identity status model developed by Marcia, identity was conceptualised as discursively produced between speakers in dialogue, and in particular social, cultural and historical contexts. Nine Afrikaner families, consisting of both parents and at least one school-going adolescent, between 16 and 18 years of age, were invited to take part in family conversations about their "white‟ Afrikaner identity. The nine family conversations were managed as focus groups (Wilkinson, 2004), and the purpose was to allow family members to talk freely and interact with one another around their experiences as "white‟ Afrikaans-speakers in the post-apartheid society. A discursive and rhetorical analysis, using Billig's (1996) rhetorical approach, was utilized to analyse the transcribed texts of the family conversations. The analysis revealed that when Afrikaners talk about their identities of being Afrikaans in the post-apartheid context their discourse involves talk about being threatened. Afrikaners seem to experience a sense of threat in relation to the stigma of being branded as "oppressors‟ and "racists‟ under apartheid, and they often utilize the discursive strategy of constructing themselves as victims and the Other as a powerful opponent or enemy. Furthermore, the analysis showed that the threat narratives contained an ambivalent structure. This ambivalent structure can be seen in the use of disclaimers, mitigations and other forms of racism denial in the construction of these threat narratives. These are the routine discursive manoeuvres of social face-keeping when talking about the Other. Analysis of the interview transcripts revealed that discourses of the past were often recited in the construction of threat narratives. In unpacking the Afrikaner threat narratives, it was shown how the participants recited ways of talking that were dominant in the apartheid era in making sense of changing realities in post-apartheid South Africa. The discourse of the "Swart Gevaar‟ (Black Danger) seems to be one of the most pervasive discourses in the production of the threat narratives, and it is used to construct a powerful Enemy that wants to harm the language, culture and interests of Afrikaners. The analysis indicated that Afrikaner adolescents and their parents often collaborated in producing identities of threat and apartheid in conversation. However, during the dialogue forms of contradiction, contestation and discursive struggle also emerged. There were occasions during the dialogue where the adolescents utilized discursive and rhetorical resources from being embedded in de-segregated settings. These ways of talking can be characterized as "non-threat talk‟ and "non-separation/apartheid talk‟. From a discursive and dialogical self theory perspective, identities are taken up as ways of doing or enacting identities in discourse and in dialogue, and not as universal and timeless structures of personality (such as the neo-Eriksonian identity status model). In trying to understand the complex identity struggles of Afrikaner adolescents in a tension-filled and rapidly changing society like South Africa, it is necessary to utilize theoretical and methodological tools that are appropriate in dealing with the complexity and multiplicity of identity responses that emerge in these contexts. For this reason the dialogical self theory was found to be a useful theoretical perspective in making sense of the multiplicity of voices or identities that emerge in a heterogeneous and globalizing society like South Africa. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2012.