Browsing by Subject "identity negotiation"

This research had the fundamental aim of closely examining the identity negotiation of people who are of bi-racial heritage. Utilizing a combination of the positioning concept and discourse analysis, the objective was to get an in-depth view of how the bi-racial identity is negotiated and situated within four sub-identities or variants, and those four subidentities being referred to are the singular, border, protean and transcendent identities by Rocquemore. The questions used to guide the research goals were the following: How does the identity negotiation take place? What are the discursive resources and tools used to facilitate the negotiation? Are all four sub-identities engaged equally? What is the relationship between the four sub-identities? What role does the media play in the identity negotiation? Through purposive sampling, the text was selected to represent cases from America, Britain, and Finland. Four cases were selected of which two are American. One from Finland and the other from Britain. The cases feature three females and one male. The study mainly utilized discourse analysis techniques with a particular focus on critical discursive psychology, which all form part of the qualitative approach methodologies. The outcomes indicated that for all the cases studied, the identity was observed to be negotiated within the confines of the four sub-identities. However, the ordering, the positioning of the identities, and the discursive tools that were employed to negotiate the identities varied, and this variation was found to be connected to an assigned identity or a challenged asserted identity. As a result, certain negotiations caused stress or cognitive dissonance, and to avoid the stress or minimise the dissonance, various discursive resources were strategically employed to help negotiate or situate other identity variants. As the analysis continued six theoretical themes emerged, that were found to be supported by the discursive works. This six theoretical themes were, self-agency, distant other, cognitive dissonance, emotional repertoires, sense of belonging and altruism. An interconnectedness between the six themes was also noticed, due to the proximity of functionality within which some of them operated. The implication is that the identity, whether assigned or asserted is rather complex, and is not without psycho-social conflict, perhaps its stability is through its continuous negotiations and mobility.