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This concept paper explores possible collective identities for a future wildland fire workforce. Taking inspiration from the work of futurists who foresee an end to the dominant fire exclusion/suppression paradigm, and assuming that an emerging fire restoration/resilience paradigm shift replaces it, this paper engages in speculative explorations of the process and product of this paradigm shift with respect to the future collective identities of a workforce conducting ecological fire management. Social constructionist assumptions from symbolic interactionist sociological theory, Gramscian political theory's concept of hegemony, and new social movement theory's concept of collective identity all provide the intellectual foundations for the discussion. This concept paper argues that in order to actualize a paradigm shift, more than advances in scientific research or reforms of government policies will be required—the wildland fire community will need to become (or join) a social movement engaged in collective actions. An imaginary social movement, the "Greenfire revolution," is invented to help illustrate how the selected theories and concepts might apply in the social construction of ecological fire management and the collective identities of its future workforce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Protesting government tuition increases in 2012, Quebec university and college students participated in collective action that they contentiously characterized as a ‘strike.’ While oppositional actors insisted students were boycotting classes – not striking – student activists claimed legal and cultural justifications for their action. This paper asks: How did Quebec student activists discursively characterize and legitimize their protest tactic as a strike? How did this discourse – and opponents’ counter-discourse – structure the terms of the debate within higher education institutions? Using discourse analysis of student newspapers and organizers’ first-hand accounts of the strike, this paper argues that striking students developed a discursive repertoire constituted by two components: they linked their action to a collective identity with a historical legacy of striking and adopted collective action frames that characterized the action as disruptive and collective. While the debate within higher education institutions centred around legitimacy, it was deeply rooted in contestation over individualism versus collectivism and the ongoing neo-liberalization of higher education. Through the case of the 2012 student strike, I propose employing collective identity and collective action frames together in a dialogic framework of discursive repertoires, thereby providing analytical clarity to this concept for social movement scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractPeople on the move are increasingly immobilised between and within state borders, having left ‘there’ but not allowed to be fully ‘here’. This paper presents a nuanced examination of this state of enforced in-­betweenness, exploring how refugees and other migrants negotiate collective existence through, despite, and alongside liminality. Drawing on ethnographic data collected at a Swiss Red Cross psychotraumatology centre, the study identifies factors that impede and facilitate the formation of collective identities, with temporal and spatial liminality emerging as the most central collective experience for refugees and other migrants. The findings illustrate how therapists reinforce these bonds by fostering an idealised sense of therapeutic communitas that promotes unity in adversity. However, the paper refrains from reducing the collective significance of liminality to a mere act of defiance. Instead, it critically reflects on how refugees and other migrants forge collective connections within politically and legally imposed disconnection. It accounts for the paradox of refugees and other migrants making collective lives in liminality while confronting the always-imminent possibility of this very liminality dismantling their lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advantageously, smaller regional wineries need to differentiate themselves, but also need to build partnerships with their local competitors in order to develop regional brand identity. Wineries will form geographical strategic groups to create a common identity and communicate with buyers through digital storytelling. Regional wineries that perform this strategy have the advantage of collectively drawing customers into the region before attempting to distinguish themselves individually. This paper is to conceptually demonstrate the benefits of strategic groups and how they operate via digital storytelling methods. Oftentimes, regional winery groups can craft a collective identity that provides benefits, such as mutual trust and reputation. More importantly, the collective identity is done as a strategic group to reinforce authenticity to the individual wineries' digital storytelling, to connect with buyers. Through a strategic group lens, we attempt to understand how collective winery groups use digital storytelling to create authenticity and enhance individual efforts. We investigate these efforts via regional wine collectives to understand authenticity development through digital storytelling. We introduce examples of wineries utilizing digital storytelling within their regions as a justification to study these concepts in the winery business. A call to empirically investigate winery strategic groups at a regional level is presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the COVID-19 pandemic, loosely affiliated protesters came together around the slogan ‘freedom’ in the online and physical places of anti-lockdown protests. These protesters held shared grievances against official health advice and social distancing measures. Although the slogan freedom emotionally validated protesters, they articulated a diverse set of interrelated motivations, identifications, and beliefs with this slogan. This paper studies the ways the collective identity of the anti-lockdown protests in the UK was formed, relying on 33 go-along interviews and ethnographic observations in London anti-lockdown protests. The findings, first, show that protesters came together around an anti-political identity, which reflected a larger political alienation from the political system. Their strong emotions of anger and ressentiment towards official health advice and social distancing measures and their distrust towards elites, political institutions, and mainstream media created a shared sense of ‘we-ness’. Second, the paper uncovers how the feeling of solidarity amongst protesters in London did not only originate from online platforms despite the increase in Internet use during the pandemic, but it was also materialized in local neighbourhoods, which fed larger anti-lockdown protests in physical spaces and online publics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Central to the growth and visibility of conspiracy theory QAnon is the #SaveTheChildren movement – a digital social movement aimed to bring awareness to and end child trafficking. This paper analyzes the #SaveTheChildren movement on image-sharing platform Instagram, where the hashtag (and related others) had to be shielded by the platform because of its association with QAnon. A thematic analysis of #SaveTheChildren posts examines the motivations, tactics, and desired outcomes of the movement. Emergent themes highlight the pervasive spread of misinformation regarding human trafficking and the ideological, political, and social motivations of posters. Drawing on shared reality theory and social identity theory, we argue that the movement represents a 'networked moral panic' and explore the structural limitations of digital social movements in an era of information disorder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Serious case reviews remind us that there is much to learn about inter-agency activity. Professional identity is a key phenomenon influencing work behaviour, especially during inter-agency activity. Yet, this link is complex and not well understood within the context of UK children's services. With an agenda of improving outcomes for children and their families, The purpose of this research paper is to conduct a systematic literature review on this topic to develop a conceptual model aimed at informing how practitioners mobilise their professional identity during inter-agency activity. Design/methodology/approach: This paper used meta-ethnography to synthesise the available research. This method is suitable for researchers who are interested in conceptual or theoretical understandings of a particular phenomenon as opposed to describing individual accounts or experiences. Findings: The findings support postmodern accounts of identity and show the construct as fluid, contingent and constituted within interaction. Professional identities are mobilised through the sharing of professional knowledge, which is underpinned by the performative nature of language. Mobilisations can lead to both positive and negative consequences, which can act as a barrier to and facilitator of inter-agency activity. Originality/value: Inter-agency working is integral to the function of children's services but remains an undertheorised concept, and this had led to a dearth of guiding theory on inter-agency practice. By drawing on relevant psychological theory, the proposed model provides a unique psycho-social perspective that articulates the important role of identity during inter-agency activity, which would be of interest to professionals working in children's services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, a frequent claim among speakers of local Chinese languages (called fangyan in Chinese) is that their native languages preserve the language of antiquity better than the Beijing-based national language, Mandarin. This paper explores the origin of these claims and probes their significance in the making of the Han ethnoracial collective identity. I argue that claims of linguistic proximity to the imagined ancient origins of Chinese civilization represent a form of "hegemonic Han-ness"—an idealized form of the Han collective identity that was both internally hegemonic, in that it was meant to supersede other expressions of Han-ness, and externally hegemonic, in that it was meant to uphold the superiority of the Han people over other ethnoracial groups. From Zhang Taiyan, whose work provided a model for drawing linguistic connections between contemporary local languages and the language spoken at the dawn of Chinese civilization, to local gazetteer authors, who used linguistic data to prove their mother tongues directly had preserved the language of antiquity without being adulterated by the languages of non-Han peoples, this paper explores how various groups drew upon the cultural power of an idealized Han-centered past to challenge the authority afforded to the national language by the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically examines the role of transnational AIDS networks and resources in the consolidation of one of the earliest identity categories, meti, used within an emerging Nepali LGBT movement in the early 2000s. It argues that political identity formation in resource-poor contexts with limited domestic support for queer organising has been a cumulative effect of transnational exchanges between activists and resource networks. Beyond this, the paper traces the emergence and changing meanings of meti to show how a seemingly Indigenous category is more closely linked to modern configurations of male same-sex sexuality in response to opportunities available for political mobilisation. The paper is based on secondary research and interviews with 71 participants and participant observation conducted during seven months of fieldwork in Nepal, and interviews conducted outside the country between 2016 and 2019. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The collective cultural memory is built on important, often traumatic, historical moments, which are reconstructed in the consciousness of the people by sacralization, transmitted by oral tradition, and maintained by the creation of narratives that consequently become a formative, integrative, and mobilizing factor of collective identity. Strongholds of memory and symbols of collective identity provide permanence and stability to the community in the examples of both Japan and Kosovo*. Although the context of the study of memory is different in the two case studies, the authors find the point of convergence of two seemingly incompatible examples, Japan and Kosovo, in the memory of traumatic events and suffering of both nations through the prism of the culture of memory as a reference theoretical model. Seen through the lenses of social constructivism, the paper aims to answer the question of whether the memory of the nuclear attack tends to change and simplify the Japanese identity, and to explore the potential for the creation of a national myth based on the motives of suffering and sacrifice, as is the case with the Kosovo myth. Also, the research intention is reflected in the determination of the significance, but also the (mis)use of the Kosovo myth in the historical positioning of the Serbian people, both in the construction of our identity and in the creation of distinction in relation to Others. Ontological security, as a learned relationship with Others through the culture of remembering common (in)glorious moments, builds on the existing findings of the general theory of culture by answering the question of why the existence of collective identities through the culture of memory is a topical security issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does collective identity form in virtual spaces and what role do hashtags play? This paper takes advantage of a unique dataset that includes surveys from activists who organized the nationally coordinated climate strikes in the US that began in spring 2019 to answer these questions. Building on the research about collective identity formation online and the role that hashtags play, we employ social network analysis to assess how collective identity forms online over three waves of protests. In particular, we analyze how activists involved in the youth climate movement used hashtags to project their collective identities and create collective narratives. Our findings show how hashtags use varied over the period of our study, in some cases indicating the formation of a thin collective identity. They also show that there are patterns in the ways hashtags are employed by activists in the movement that suggest the formation of subaltern narratives among those affiliated with youth-led groups. Our paper concludes by considering how this finding helps us understand collective identity in virtual spaces and the role that hashtags play more specifically within social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to portray social learning in cluster initiatives (CIs), namely, to explore, with the lens of the communities of practice (CoPs) theory, in what ways social learning occurs in CIs and discover how various CoPs emerge and evolve in CIs to facilitate a collective journey in their learning process. Subsequently, the authors address the following research questions: In what ways does social learning occur in CIs? How is social learning facilitated through the emergence and evolution of various CoPs in CIs? Design/methodology/approach: The study applies the abduction approach for the interpretation of the collected data and attempts to create the best explanations for the observations on the basis of the CoP theory. The qualitative study of four CIs helped to identify various ways that social learning occurs in CIs and the role of the identified CoPs in the process. Social learning is portrayed as a collective journey within and between CoPs, where the interactions of their members deepen their level of involvement and help them to enhance learning in their CoP. Findings: The paper shows ways that social learning occurs in CIs and describes the role of CoPs. It identifies three types of CoPs in CIs: participants, cooperators and locomotives. Additionally, it documents different ways of social learning in CIs, namely, one-way or two-way information transfer and raising awareness; demonstrating and inspiring; or motivating and educating. It also shows that while potentially every member of a CI has access to these practices, only a limited number of members are actually involved. Social learning in CIs is selective and some CI members accept their role as more peripheral in their CI. Research limitations/implications: The research shows the application of the CoP theory to the analysis of social learning in CIs, a peculiar type of clusters. It describes how CoPs in the studied CIs varied in terms of the occurrence of learning. Furthermore, it reveals how social learning related to the level of involvement of CI members, namely, with an increase of involvement, the members formed more selective CoPs and strengthened their social learning. Nevertheless, the qualitative approach in the study and the specific sample of the CIs chosen for the analysis do not allow a generalization of the findings. Practical implications: Although in different CoPs social learning occurs in different ways, at each stage of the development of CIs, the learning process is carried out on the basis of interactions created among members. Therefore, it is important to support the "soft" forms of cooperation within CIs – involving members in activities and developing interactions. In addition, to ensure the growth of their entire CI, coordinators should create conditions for the development of existing CoPs into higher forms, which better support learning. They should also adopt boundary-spanning roles between various CoPs to strengthen social learning in CIs. Originality/value: The literature on CIs, which are peculiar forms of clusters, is still underdeveloped. The research fills in the gap concerning the ways social learning occurs in CIs. It shows that selectiveness can be observed in this process, and emphasizes the role of interactions developed through CoPs and the benefits offered by them. The study applies the CoP approach. Consequently, it expands the theoretical base in view of the generally lacking studies on social learning in CIs in the literature on clustering. Because the CoP theory has rarely been applied in the management literature, it also augments this specific field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2020–2021, this paper investigates how people experiencing poverty and social exclusion process their collective in-group/ out-group identity as the urban 'others' in faith-based food assistance in Finland. By building on the concept of collective identity and employing narrative construction, the analysis shows that not only does perceived social exclusion function as a stigmatizing self-category and symbolic boundary maker but also as a resource for resistance, especially in the theological accounts of the informants. When looking through the lenses of urban theology, the informants do not just tell a story about themselves, but they do theology as well. All in all, the others may be excluded from society and yet included in Spirit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The right‐wing Hindu nationalist "Hindutva" movement in India has political control of the world's most populous democracy. To gain insight into the tools of the movement, this paper examines Hindutva framing rhetoric. Social movement framing entails the crafting of movement messages to motivate collective identity and collective action. This paper takes a new approach to studying social movement framing by using the social psychological principle of metacontrast as an organizing theoretical framework. Metacontrast involves minimizing differences within the group (intragroup homogenization) and maximizing differences between groups (intergroup polarization). We argue dual homogenizing‐polarizing frames work in concert to construct a unified collective identity and mobilize concerted collective action. Using qualitative content analysis of two Hindutva organization websites, we find Hindutva framing rhetoric simultaneously homogenizes and polarizes through two framing strategies: a threat‐counter threat frame that portrays an antagonistic outgroup that must be countered with a unified ingroup, and a striking positive‐negative intergroup contrast that paints the ingroup as a moral protector and the outgroup as a vilified adversary. Notably, key to these efforts is the minimization of deeply entrenched, rigid caste differences. Our findings have implications for the study of social movements, nationalism, collective identity, collective action, and intergroup relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Homeland-construed perceptions of the diaspora can yield valuable insights into the discourse around the homeland's collective identity. I illustrate this claim using the debate surrounding the Kotel Compromise, a government plan designed to regulate pluralistic and non-Orthodox Jewish prayer at the Western Wall (Kotel in Hebrew). This plan has recently become a subject of contention between the State of Israel, where Orthodox Judaism has an institutional monopoly, and Diaspora Jews, many of whom identify with non-Orthodox Jewish denominations, such as Reform and Conservative Judaism. Drawing on protocols of the Knesset (Israeli parliament), I show how the different participants in this debate used their perceptions of Diaspora Jews not only to reaffirm external boundaries relating to Jewish peoplehood, but also to reconstruct internal boundaries relating to Judaism as religion. This paper suggests that analyzing homeland perceptions of the diaspora can widen our understanding of the construction of homeland identities and boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers how the anti-immigrant organization Americans for Legal Immigration PAC (ALIPAC) uses discourse about immigrants and immigration to construct and maintain its collective identity. Although previous approaches to collective identity within organizations primarily center the organizations themselves, studies concerned with anti-immigrant discourse instead emphasize how the organizations that use such discourse racialize members of non-white (especially Latinx) groups as "illegal" residents of the United States who threaten the safety and economic well-being of Americans. Drawing from these two literatures to consider how anti-immigrant organizations construct collective identity, this study investigates how ALIPAC uses presentations its opposition and its membership together to shape the collective identity associated with the organization itself. Using a content analysis, 153 documents released by ALIPAC during 2005 and 2018, the study finds that ALIPAC uses a dual racialization process to racialize immigrants as criminal outsiders who, with assistance from political elites, have overwhelmed the United States and white Americans as victims of these criminal outsiders. From this dual racialization, ALIPAC identifies itself as a defender of American citizens against an immigrant invasion. These results illustrate how racialization and collective identity construction are relational processes understood through a group's presentations of itself and its opposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of the Jiu Valley has gone through multiple stages that have polished the identity of the communities. The development of mine exploitation has attracted immigrants from all over the country and from abroad. This has led to the emergence of two types of local identity communities: the natives and the newcomers. The relations between them have influenced the strategies used in building their constitution of identity. This paper focuses on the idea that these two types of identity are directly responsible for the degree of community homogeneity. In this respect, the natives belonged to a homogeneous community, with one dominant source of collective identity, while the arrival of the newcomers transformed the community into a heterogeneous one, with pluralistic sources of identity. These aspects reflect in the identity narratives which can be found in the Jiu Valley nowadays. The analysis of these narratives shows a common history, filled with tension, negation, disappointment and acceptance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to both professional journalists and news users, news should be relevant. While a great deal of research that treats relevance as co-constructed starts from the text of news stories, this paper asks how news users explicitly construct the (ir)relevance of particular news reports, taking a language-centered lens to open-ended survey responses. This paper makes a methodological argument in favor of a language-centered approach to open-ended survey data. Given the ubiquity of online surveys in many social science disciplines, the present paper provides an example of how this approach can deepen our understanding of survey responses. We find that news users construct relevance at varying scales, using a number of linguistic strategies of self-reference. Those who said they found the story they saw relevant used pronouns with a different distribution than those who did not, and these differences exceeded chance. In general, those who referred to themselves as members of larger collectivities were more likely to say they found a news story relevant, suggesting that relevance is discursively constructed in part through practices of self-reference. • Relevance of news stories is discursively constructed through self-reference. • Self-reference as a member of larger collectivities may be linked to more relevance. • We provide example of novel language-centered approach to survey data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the question of identity in relation to jocular interactional practices. The metapragmatic analysis is based on qualitative interview data where native speakers of Australian and British English were shown a number of videos with potentially jocular verbal behaviours. The main objective of this paper is to observe what role jocular verbal behaviours play in claims to identity as well as in the attribution of identity to others via their interactional behaviour. The results suggest that in the analysed data identity related to jocular verbal practices primarily manifests itself in three different, though sometimes overlapping, ways: via (1) perceiving oneself as part of a cultural context where particular preferences are shared by the majority of people (what is referred to here as 'collective identity'); (2) arguing that one's evaluations and reactions to jocularity depend on personal characteristics ('individual identity'); and (3) suggesting that the understanding of and reactions to humour are limited to a particular situation and the interactants involved ('situated identity'). • This paper explores the interplay between humour and identity construction. • The study focuses on metapragmatic comments in the interview data. • Three types of identity are explored: collective, individual and situated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's new National Security Law, enacted in Hong Kong on 30 June 2020, has amplified widespread concerns among the city's population regarding the implications of this law. These concerns have at root anxieties related to Hong Kong's resinicisation, referring to anxieties over Hong Kong's political and economic dependence on mainland China, including loyalty and patriotism towards the motherland. This paper explores these developments in relation to the ongoing legacy of localism, argued to be instilled as a colonial project to help secure the populations' identification with Hong Kong. Seen as 'criminals' from the perspective of mainland Chinese authorities, many of those involved in today's protests (many of whom include young people) see themselves as engaging in legitimate forms of civil disobedience. First explicating the context of Hong Kong's colonial history in order to help make sense of present-day turmoil, we turn to recent trends in arrests related to the protests, as well as evidence of rapidly declining trust in the Hong Kong Police Force, seen by some as increasingly beholden to the interests of mainland China. Implications for these trends going forward are considered, with a discussion of the need for greater attention to colonial histories and post-colonial ramifications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pensioners' movement in 2018 was the first mass mobilization based on a collective identity of older people in Spain, and showed an unprecedented capacity for popular contestation on the issue of pensions. This paper inquires into the process of collective identity configuration as an analytical strategy that allows us to understand the emergence and (successful) nature of the mobilisation. Following Melucci's conceptualization, this process is analysed from a double perspective. On the one hand, as a strategy of collective actors seeking to articulate popular contestation to the pension policies implemented during the Great Recession. Here, the analysis focuses on identifying the organizational process in which the identity bases of the movement are established and, which were successfully extended in the subsequent phase of mass protest. On the other hand, attention is paid to the nature of the collective identification among pensioners themselves as result of learning processes during their protest experiences. The analysis of the organizational configuration of the movement is based on information obtained from press reports on the protest activities and documents produced by the movement's organizations. The individual perspective of the participants relies on the analysis of the discourses obtained in focused interviews with participants. This dual approach, as an intentional organizational strategy and as a learning process during the mobilization experience, provides key information to understand not only the process, unprecedented in Spain, of building a voice for pensioners, but also to investigate the learning processes and attitudinal change involved for ordinary participants. More broadly, it also allows, on the one hand, to place the process of mobilization of pensioners in a broader temporal trajectory of popular contestation and, in particular, to link it to the legacies of the cycle of mobilization in the wake of the 15-M movement. On the other hand, it also allows us to observe protest as learning spaces in which attitudes, values, and other elements of the culture of protest are modelled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies the extent to which ethnic minority and ethnic majority students in highly diverse urban schools identify with Flemish and European identity. In doing so this paper aims to discuss to what extent these sub-national and supranational identities can function as shared identities within the multiple identity belongings of teenagers and what the impact is of teacher support and perceived discrimination in schools on these phenomena. The analysis is based upon a survey among Belgian native and Moroccan origin students in the 5th and 6th year of secondary education in Antwerp, one of Europe's most diverse cities. The results show that Moroccan students identify more strongly with a European identity than with a Flemish identity, while Flemish native students identify more strongly with Flemish than with European identity. This results in a large 'identity gap' with respect to Flemish identity but a much smaller gap with respect to European identity. In addition, our results show a positive effect of teacher support on Flemish and European identity for Belgian students, while it only has a positive effect on European identity for Moroccan students. The broader implications of the findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper illustrates the possibility of gaining meaningful insights into a place by exploring its relationship with its surroundings. A model is suggested for examining the possible significances of this relationship and the actual meanings attributed to it by those who plan and use the place. The site analyzed here is Sidnā 'Alī, an Islamic shrine on Israel's Mediterranean coast. Sidnā 'Alī, which has been a pilgrimage site for centuries, was abandoned during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War; it was renovated in the late 1980s by Muslim Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel. The paper discusses the social mobilization for the renovation of the old mosque as a prelude to exploring the meanings of Sidnā 'Alī's relationships with the surrounding landscapes, places and buildings. The study of the social function of the renovation campaign focuses on its role in unifying the people involved and on forging a collective identity based on the shared struggle to return the site to Muslim hands. The spatial interpretation presented examines the renovation project as a form of Palestinian, Arab and Islamic resistance to the covert and overt Zionist hegemony in the public space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on twenty-four interviews and 2 years of ethnographic fieldwork with leaders of Queer and Trans Muslim Organizations (QTMOs) in Toronto, Canada. Rather than look at psychological identity dissonance or integration, the paper follows a recent shift in focusing on LGBTQ religious group formation and membership. I look at the ways that creating sectarian groups, as opposed to acquiring reform from mainstream institutions, impacts collective identity formation. Analyzing the responses of QTMO leaders to both queer and religious institutions reveals that such organizations foster multidimensional collective identities that are distinct from the mainstream. I show that QTMOs can be analyzed as alternative-to-mainstream "safe spaces," which pose a challenge to the sexism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, and racism that they perceive as occurring in the religious and queer mainstream. In doing so, they cultivate strong oppositional and intersectional collective identities. The article contributes both to the study of LGBTQ religious group formation and to the analytical development of 'safe spaces,' as sites within which marginalized collective identities emerge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate memes about student issues. We consider the memes as expressions of a new networked student public that contain discourses that may fall outside the mainstream discourse on higher education. The paper is based on content analysis of 179 posts in the public Facebook Group ‘Student Problem Memes’, combined with a nine-month media watch and a discussion workshop with 15 students. Through self-deprecating humour, students create an inverse attention economy of competitive one-downmanship, where the goal is to display humorous failure instead of perfect appearance. Our analysis shows that students use humour to express, share, and commiserate over daily struggles, but also that the problems related to work/study balance and mental health, are experienced as a persistent feature of student living. We also analyse limitations of meme-based publics, emphasizing processes of inclusion and exclusion through specific vernaculars of visual and discursive humour where issues related to gender, race, orientation, class, and ability are sidelined in favour of relatable humour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper illustrates the possibility of gaining meaningful insights into a place by exploring its relationship with its surroundings. A model is suggested for examining the possible significances of this relationship and the actual meanings attributed to it by those who plan and use the place. The site analyzed here is Sidnā 'Alī, an Islamic shrine on Israel's Mediterranean coast. Sidnā 'Alī, which has been a pilgrimage site for centuries, was abandoned during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War; it was renovated in the late 1980s by Muslim Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel. The paper discusses the social mobilization for the renovation of the old mosque as a prelude to exploring the meanings of Sidnā 'Alī's relationships with the surrounding landscapes, places and buildings. The study of the social function of the renovation campaign focuses on its role in unifying the people involved and on forging a collective identity based on the shared struggle to return the site to Muslim hands. The spatial interpretation presented examines the renovation project as a form of Palestinian, Arab and Islamic resistance to the covert and overt Zionist hegemony in the public space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of identity narrative is at the core of the interaction between social movements and temporalities. In this paper, we draw on long-term qualitative research amongst activists engaged in Italian social movements and argue that identity narratives are often the result of a complex mnemonic, contradictory and open-ended process that spans through a life-time of engagement with multiple collectives. We then question whether the use of social media reshape these dynamics. The analysis shows that the construction of identity narratives on social media tends to take place with knowledge of the complexity and overlaps that characterise these processes online. Nevertheless, the temporality of social media, based on immediacy, archival and predictive time, challenges the unpredictable, contradictory, and open-ended nature of political identity construction offline. The need to escape the hegemonic temporalities of social media poses new challenges to activists in their creative agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public sphere theory has come to an epistemic crossroads. The rise of right-wing movements in Europe and the U.S., for example, pose a challenge to public sphere theorists. This holds especially true since they make use of social media to articulate their messages, network, recruit, dissent or attack. In this conceptual paper we suggest a functionalist approach that integrates the concept of counterpublics within the public sphere based on the two generalised functions agenda-setting and identity formation. We describe how counterpublics may become regular publics, but also emphasise on how strong collective identities may lead to a vicious cycle of extremism. Based on the examples of the far-right Stormfront forum and the Generation Identity, the concept of the vicious cycle of extremism is being proposed to highlight the internet's role in the formation and radicalisation of counterpublics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collective identity is critical to motivating and sustaining participation in social movement groups. What organizes and sustains collective action when a group's members do not share common identity traits such as race, class, religion, or gender? This paper argues that shared ideas about the future, or future projections, are overlooked bases of collective identity in social movement groups, and that the processes of defining, aligning with, and negotiating future projections constitute previously unrecognized forms of identity work. I support this argument with ethnographic, interview, and archival data from a nascent urban farming project. After describing how project founders defined a compelling future of "sustainable community," I identify a process called imaginative imputation through which a diverse set of participants aligned themselves with the project. Coordination problems created critical points for negotiating new properties of the imagined future, ultimately weakening some individuals' identification with, and commitment to, the urban farm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores collective identity frames and discursive strategies employed by social movement actors mobilizing in ethnically divided societies, a context where ethnicity constitutes the primary collective category of identification. By using Bosnia and Herzegovina as a case study, it analyzes movement framing in three waves of social protests that occurred in the country in the last decade. Specifically, it investigates the diverse ways in which movement leaders tackled ethnicity in their discourses. The article shows that movement leaders' narratives rested, respectively, on the primacy of human and citizenship rights, a common feeling of deprivation, and victimhood. Their approach toward ethnicity, however, differed in each wave. Ethnicity was openly rejected in 2013, avoided and not openly contested in 2014, and accepted and approached as an opportunity to bring further support to the movement in 2018. The article highlights that ethnicity can be tackled differently by social movement actors mobilizing on nonethnic grounds in divided societies, and that it might constitute a vantage point for social mobilization rather than a drawback, contributing to raising transversal solidarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent wave of occupations highlighted how closely space and social movements are related. While this revived scholarly interest in the role of space during protests, little attention so far has been paid to the role of space in protests' long-term internal effects. Bringing together the literatures on transformative effects and space in social movements, the paper examines the role of protests' spatiality in their transformative effects, drawing on a narrow approach to space. The analysis focuses in particular on effects on collective identity building in social movements. Based on interviews and focus groups with activists in 2011, the paper examines the long-term effects of an incisive protest event of the Global Justice Movement (GJM) in Europe, the protests against the G8 summit in Genoa in 2001. The paper shows that this event's spatiality plays a crucial role in building movement identity several years later: it provides activists with interpretational devices to delineate the GJM's internal and external boundaries. The paper thus underlines that research on transformative effects can considerably profit from considering spatiality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Struggles for transformation of the Kenyan constitution brought into alliances disparate movements from below, sections of middleclass, and factions of political, economic and religious elites, in challenging the government. The emergence of these alliances presents useful cases for examining the dynamic relationship and politics between these movements, and also for probing social movement theory. Specifically, given the centrality of identity consciousness in movements, how were intrinsic class, religious, gender, generational and ethnic identity interests, contestations and cleavages overcome to enable inter-identity alliances in these struggles? More critically, how relevant are the dominant social movement theories in explaining this phenomenon? Is theoretical straightjacketing useful for analysing movements with such diversity? Drawing from in-depth interviews and existing literature on Kenyan constitutional reform struggles, this paper illustrates how alliances between the different identities and movements were forged to allow for a common struggle. The paper further illustrates that while political opportunity structures explain certain aspects of this phenomenon, framing, civic education and community organising strategies were critical enablers for collective identity formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the war in former Yugoslavia, city of Dubrovnik was shelled in 1991. Even though these experiences were traumatic for all those involved, the goal of this paper was to explore if these events resulted in a cultural trauma, i.e. a breakage of cultural patterns and of collective identity. We expected that the process of trauma-claiming, which is central to cultural trauma, was amplified because of the role, both physical and symbolic, that the Old Town played for the collective identity of Dubrovnik. In the paper, we give an outline of the war in Dubrovnik. To assess the way that the war in Dubrovnik affected the collective identity, as well as to find out the relation between personal and collective historical narratives, we conducted interviews with 13 informants. We observed that all the phases of trauma-claiming were successful, or in other words, that there indeed was a cultural trauma in Dubrovnik as a consequence of the shelling. Additionally, we were able not only to observe expressions of cultural trauma experienced by our informants, but also to trace further changes and developments spanning to the present day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the paper, I analyze the conceptual and contentual definition of selfhood, its individual and collective component, and its modernist objectivity within ethnic and national identities. As a concrete historically shaped and determined creation, personal selfhood is subject to the dialectic of social reality which in the era of modernity obtains its sociopolitical merit within the nation and its institutional analogue - the national state. On the other hand, postmodern tendencies change the image of selfhood as a coherent and permanently anchored being by focusing on the phenomena of decentralization, fragmentation and heterogeneity. The central thesis of the paper is that the postmodernist image of social reality and the related image of a fragmented personal selfhood cannot eliminate the influence, intensity and efficiency of nations, national identity and nationalism, and in itself is unable to eliminate these modernist determinants from the components of postmodern / post-national individual and collective identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exploring and in turn developing professional identity is a challenge faced by social work programmes, nationally and internationally. This paper developed from the authors' shared research interest in how social workers and students of social work develop and express their professional identities. We report findings from a workshop designed to explore how a group of social workers from different countries conceptualised social work identity, including the effects of transnational and cultural contexts. Our starting point drew on theoretical concepts developed in Wiles's research, in which the term professional identity is used to convey multiple meaning, and the method developed in Vicary's research which uses drawing to elicit data. We found that a collective identity is shared across national boundaries albeit, and ironically, that this shared identity has components that are not cohesive and are continually being redefined. In the participants' own words, the notion of social work identity is always just out of reach conceptually, or 'over the horizon'. Tensions in identity were also revealed, alongside a sense of passion or deep commitment. These findings complement and add to the existing literature on exploring and developing professional identity in social work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While academics have addressed the interaction between mobilisation and citizenship in a myriad of ways, none of them have used citizenship to explain the sustainability of collective action. Drawing on an ethnographic fieldwork in Santiago de Chile’s underprivileged neighbourhoods, this paper provides an analytical framework explaining how neighbourhood activists sustain mobilisation on the basis of citizenship construction despite Chile’s transitional and post-transitional stark political exclusion. This article calls this concept ‘mobilisational citizenship’. Building on the notion of rights-claiming, mobilisational citizenship explains how durable mobilisation results from the dynamic interaction between four factors: agentic memory, mobilising belonging, mobilising boundaries and decentralised protagonism. Through mobilisational citizenship, local residents politicise their neighbourhood, build autonomous local empowerment and self-define their political incorporation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The text is devoted to the early modern visual communication of the Franciscan Order in northern part of the former multiconfessional Kingdom of Hungary. In the form of case study from Slovakia the paper aims to elaborate on the manner the Franciscan order (including their third order and fraternities which activated laics) effectively formed a concept of their collective identity. Selected examples range from changes taking effect after the 1650 when the idea of belonging to the winning church resonates in the constructed visual image of the order, through the 18th century dominated by the rivalry inside the Catholic "camp," until the final part of the Baroque period under the influence of the Enlightenment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the impact of communication protocols on the development of collective identity in networked movements. It focuses primarily on how communication protocols change patterns of interactions and power relationships among the constituents of social movements. The paper suggests that the communication protocols of commercial social networking media lead to organizational centralization and fragmentation in social movements by eroding one of the preconditions of collective identity, namely solidarity. The empirical material presented is part of a PhD dissertation on a political protest movement and their use of Facebook as a core communication and organizational platform. The data gathering is multi-methodological and relies on both qualitative and quantitative data collection techniques in the form of a historical analysis of interaction patterns, and a content analysis of online conversations among activists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The collective empowerment imagined in the government rhetoric of localism bears little resemblance to the market model of aggregative democracy that characterizes much of the practice of participation in spatial planning. This paper explores one of the rare statutory strategies to engage collective participation and to mobilize the neighbourhood as an institution of spatial planning. In a study of neighbourhood planning in England, it investigates the new political identities that emerged and the conflicts and antagonism that accompanied them. Drawing on the work of philosopher Chantal Mouffe, the paper explores the significance of the political practices that resulted for the state strategy of localism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The broad aim of this paper is to look into the implications of applying two different methods of research and analytical assumptions to the study of social movements. In order to develop and discuss this aim, I focus my analysis on the emergence of a social movement that impacted Spanish society in 2011: the 'indignados' movement 15M. Particularly, in this case, I confront the main conclusions of two different methodological approaches that analyze the emergence of the movement, focusing my interest in the ideological roots of its collective identity. The first approach is mainly based on ethnographic data (Laraña & Díez, 2012a; 2012b) and the second one consists of a statistical macro-analysis. Whereas in the two first works we highlighted the most micro and intersubjective aspects of the social action, through ethnographic techniques, that allowed us to study how the activists organize the actions of the movement, spread their frames and construct its collective identity, this paper mainly focuses on macro statistical data in order to: i) analyze the ideological bases of the movement, ii) compare the results obtained regarding this issue from the both aforementioned approaches, and iii) look at their complementarities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to understand the memories that are constructed by people who participate in territorial organizations in Valle del Huasco (Atacama Region, Chile) about their resistance processes in the present. Using qualitative methodologies, this article analyses fourteen interviews made to women and men that live in different cities of Valle del Huasco and that participate in processes involving territorial conflicts. The results of the analysis show how the political memory operates as a warp that articulates the experiences in sense narratives of usurpation and territorial resistance rhetoric. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper explores the factors determining collective identities in the Basque Country and Catalonia, paying special attention to language and birth as key domains of ethnolinguistic divide. We will also make a comparison to the case of Valencia, a region with a native language that nevertheless has not developed a nationalist movement. We have performed a cluster analysis to compare the differences between collective identities in these regions using data from the survey on National Identity in Spain, and discriminant analysis is used to test the validity of our model. Results show that an ethnolinguistic division, based on parental origin and linguistic skills, defines peripheral identities in the Basque Country and Catalonia, but this singularity cannot be found for Valencia. Finally, our model corroborates the relevance of ethnolinguistic factors in defining collective identities in the Basque and Catalan regions, while the civic factor may be more relevant in Valencia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that micro-mobilization into armed activism is strongly motivated by the enactment of an identity that people already have prior to their mobilization as a way to strongly assert and emphasize individual agency in the face of major changes in the political context. Empirically, it advocates that those who joined the Provisional IRA between 1969 and 1972 did so in order to respond to a need for action by a northern nationalist community that stemmed from a perceived, alleged or actual, sense of second-class citizenship. We suggest that the importance of identity rather than ideology can also help us to explain why IRA members and former members overwhelmingly accepted the compromise peace settlement of the 1990s despite the fact that core ideological goals had not been realized. We conclude by suggesting avenues for future research outside the Irish context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The aim of the paper is to offer an analysis of the role of emotions in Mexican environmental conflicts. Based on fieldwork in the state of Jalisco (Mexico), where we have carried out in-depth interviews with members of three self-organized collectives which are defending their territories, and following the sociological framework on emotions and protest, we will show the role of emotions 1) in a repressive context, 2) in the construction of collective identity, as well as 3) in the organizational and strategic choices. Our proposal aims to highlight the internal dynamics of environmental activism in Mexico through a sociological lens in which the emotional dimension of the protest matters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kung Fu associations are often understood as 'families' forming broader 'family trees' or lineages operating across centuries of history as well as transcultural associations. In an effort contributing to interdisciplinary martial arts studies, this paper presents data from two qualitative studies of Western practitioners of traditionalist Chinese martial arts (TCMA) in both the West and Asia by a phenomenological psychologist and an anthropological sociologist. We assess the use of the term 'Kung Fu family', what it means to the practitioners and how it impacts on their practice and their relationships with other martial artists. We argue that the conceptual metaphor of family offers a sense of belonging and solidarity within a diverse community in terms of age, ethnicity, gender, religion and social class. Meanwhile, we explore the metaphor in terms of the micro-political power dynamics that accompany martial arts collectives. Overall, the ideal of family can illuminate how identity can transcend across time ('generations' of practitioners) and place (from and to cultures an ndence of Chinese martial arts d contingents). It is thus a way of understanding the organisation, spread and transce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study is to empirically analyse the relationship of collective identity frames to the mobilisation strategies of the Czech Romani and pro-Romani activists over the past two decades. After all, most existing analyses merely implicitly assume that this relationship exists, and explain the relationship as the result of a given political opportunity structure, but they do not examine these frames more closely. Using frame and claim-making analysis, the text traces the diachronic and synchronic development of self-naming frames and the collective action repertoire in five-year intervals (1992, 1997, 2002, 2007, and 2012). It shows that, whereas self-naming significantly changes, the activists’ action repertoire does not. Thus, the frequently postulated relationship between self-naming, strategies and activists’ priorities is not confirmed. However, the analysis does reveal that certain claims and frames are connected with certain strategies and repertoire patterns. The paper concludes with a discussion of reasons for this diversification of activist framings, which may be the result of efforts to focus on different target audiences within the multiplicity of opportunity structures and a response to the (new) availability of external sources of funding in Central and Eastern Europe countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the individual and collective sides of identity are analysed in the context of different society structures. Throughout this paper, the role of individualistic and collectivist events in identity building and their affections on society are highlighted. It is thought that the collective identity, emphasises the belongingness to society, has essential role in social integration rather than the individualistic identity, which emphasizes the differences from 'others'. Moreover, in structuring social unity, cultural features play important roles and these features are held especially within the context of religion and nation. Thus, as a result of this article, it is underlined that the necessity of the collective identities, which make individuals conscious about that they are a part of a whole, in social integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper illustrates the current state of Thracian mounds in Bulgaria, reviewing its theory and practice from a new heritage perspective, grounded in the field of Heritage studies. It points out the critical need of reversing the present state of mis-protection and mismanagement that results in cultural disinheritance, mass looting and destruction. It is argued that the preservation and development of Thracian sites and landscapes is enhanced by the ongoing heritization process of ascribing multiple values, wider definitions and roles of cultural heritage in society. This recently acquired heritage significance has activated a growing awareness and interest on the side of scientists from diverse fields such as archaeology and heritage studies, spatial planning and geography, medicine and biology, genetic studies, ethnography, linguistics and religious studies, claiming their right to explore and contribute new evidence of the historical, cultural and ethnic continuity between ancient Thracians and present day Bulgarians. Due to the increasing integration of sciences and synthesis of knowledge, links in value systems, toponyms, language, folklore, traditions and rituals, as well as genetics, become more visible, promising to restore a lost collective identity and sustain a valuable ancestral heritage. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]