Browsing by Subject "Imagined communities"
Item Daughtering and daughterhood : an explanatory study of the role of adult daughters in relation to mothers(2016-08) Alford, Allison McGuire; Maxwell, Madeline M.; Donovan, Erin; Menchaca, Martha; Vangelisti, AnitaThis study investigated the role of an adult daughter in mid-life, a time in a woman’s life when she has a personal relationship with her mother based upon shared interests more than dependence for care. Using interactional role theory (Turner, 2001), this study explored the understanding a daughter has for her role as an adult daughter in everyday encounters with her mother. Participants in this study described that when in situations that call for daughtering, they enact the adult daughter role. For this study, adult daughter participants (N = 33) ranging in age from 25-45 years old participated in face-to-face interviews to discuss their role as an adult daughter to their mothers. All participants had a living, healthy mother age 70 or younger. From daughters’ discussions of everyday communication with their mothers, layers of meaning were uncovered which related to the adult daughter role. Using role theory as a guide, thematic analysis revealed six themes of meaning. These findings contribute to an understanding of the social construction of an important role, which daughters learn over a lifetime and which they use to communicate within a family. Discussions of daughtering were challenging to participants due to borrowed vocabulary for describing this role, narrow role awareness, and a low valuation of the work of daughtering. When sorting role influences, daughters noted their mothers and a variety of other sources that inform role expectations. This finding prompted a new manner for evaluating daughters as a daughterhood, or community of role players collectively enacting the same role. Finally, participant responses revealed new ways to conceive of the social construction of the adult daughter role and the practice of daughtering and daughterhood, with outcomes including a variety of comportments for performing daughtering. Implications for future research by communication scholars, as well as for practitioners who work with adult daughter-mother pairs, will be presented with other results from this study.Item I thought we weren't in Spain : the emergence of authenticity in a foreign language classroom(2014-05) Whitehead, Sarah Jey; Palmer, Deborah K.; Callahan, Rebecca M; De Lissovoy, Noah; Horwitz, Elaine K; Urlaub, PerThis study is based upon the idea that foreign language (FL) classrooms exist apart from their target language communities. While historically, this has been a geographic truth, divides between FL learners and native speakers may also reflect symbolic social distance. Given the symbolic, if not geographic, isolation of the FL classroom from the real world, this study presumes that a challenge inherent to the endeavor of FL education is that the authentic, real-world language and culture under study are, by definition, not naturally present in the FL classroom. This study considers how this challenge, referred to as the challenge of authenticity, is managed in one FL classroom. Seven eighth-grade students and their teacher comprise Classroom 204, a beginning Spanish FL classroom at a private school in the southwest U.S. This qualitative case study uses classroom observations, audio-recordings, classroom artifacts, and participant interviews as data to consider not only how authenticity is imported, imagined, and conjured by participants in Classroom 204, but how authenticity is assigned value therein. Data is analyzed largely with discourse analysis of transcripts of classroom talk about (and classroom talk that constituted) various facets of authenticity, value, and the real world. Ecology theory serves as a broad theoretical lens through which to understand (and accept) the complexity inherent to the social phenomena being researched. Benedict Anderson's (1991) theory of imagined communities is adopted to understand the boundaries that delineate the inside of the FL classroom from the outside, and Bourdieu's (1992) notion of symbolic capital is used to understand the ways by which authenticity becomes valuable (and, conversely, how that which is valuable becomes authentic). Findings suggest that, while participants are largely oriented to real-world manifestations of Spanish language and culture, authenticity is not most present in Classroom 204 in the form of stuff imported from elsewhere. Rather, authenticity emerges out of the highly local, socially-immediate interactions and value systems unique to Classroom 204. Suggestions for both pedagogy and future research focus on approaches that acknowledge and capitalize on the power of local authenticity in the FL classroom, as cultivated by local social actors.Item Imagining sittee : constructions of homelands and grandmother narratives in Arab American literature(2010-05) Eltahawy, Nora; El-Ariss, Tarek; Harlow, BarbaraThis report examines the use of grandmother figures in the construction of imagined communities in Arab American literature. Through the lens of diaspora studies, it argues that grandmother figures become integral in the creation of an Arab American imagined community based on two main tropes: a theoretical collapse between notions of patriotism and the maternal figure (in which the homeland becomes the Motherland) and the tendency of second-generation Arab American authors to connect their immigrant grandmothers to ethnic homelands. In exploring this connection, the report argues that the creation of an Arab American imagined community is necessitated by anti-Arab racism in the United States and the need for the community’s authors to be seen in tandem with the literary traditions of other ethnic minorities in America. The report problematizes the imagined homeland by arguing that it is constructed on the basis of simplistic juxtapositions between different generations within the Arab American community, and ends by examining the anxiety that is generated when this juxtaposition and the imagined community are threatened.Item Sports and the city : the rhetorical construction of civic identity through American football teams(2011-08) Duda, Emily Jo; Adams, Paul C.; Doolittle, WilliamSports fandoms can form a key site of identity formation, particularly as they gather and merge numerous threads of identity, including gender, socio-economic status, and civic affiliation. The connections formed between members of the fandom, the fandom and the team, and the fandom and the place in which it is grounded can be a strong force for social cohesion. This cohesion becomes particularly relevant during times of crisis, when some turn to sports as a unifier. However, these relationships can also be fraught with tensions, within the group and without. Forces such as nostalgia and the ‘othering’ of those outside the group become import methods in creating and sustaining these Andersonian “imaginary communities” of fans, mitigating difference. In examining this process of identity creation, two cities were chosen for their intense team attachments: Pittsburgh and Baltimore. Qualitative analysis of discourses surrounding the teams in these cities reveals the complex ways in which nostalgic fantasies about the team and its relationship to the city are created and maintained, hierarchies of space and time are formed, and the identity of the community is shaped by its relationship to team and city. Analysis of the sporting landscape, created through a complex network of material culture, media, and the repetition of certain fantasy themes, reveals how geography is complexly implicated in the production of sporting fandom.