Onboard international flights, you may have witnessed the pre-takeoff information/in-flight safety speech by the cabin crew. It is not out of place that they tend to be European in their mode of speaking. However, when on a local flight, the Europeanness of speech still comes out loud. We want to understand why such Europeanised intonation should be and the audience it is meant to serve. Our research leads us to the conclusion that this insensitivity of local airline operators stems (...) from the desire to enjoy some patronage even if their actions inferiorise the community who are the major patronisers of their services. We will also explain why the Europeanisation of speech could lead to safety hazards. This work is inspired by the personal experiences of the researchers and of a few others. (shrink)

Using Fredric Jameson’s theory of the ideologeme to trace representations of working- and white working-class characters through a selection of contemporary literary texts, this article shows how t...

The Introductory chapter explains the purpose of the book. To this aim, the chapter contains four subsections: (1)Bring the Past Into the Present, (2)Multiculturalism and Liberal Feminism: Is the Rift Between Them Necessary?, (3)Development of Gender Discourse in Chinese Culture and Thought, (4)Purpose of This Volume and Its Four Main Parts, and (5) What's Next? A Way Forward. Excerpt: "Chinese philosophy, broadly construed, in its varied roots and forms has approximately three thousand years of history, and it continues to exert (...) immense influence on the lives of Chinese people as well as on the world community. Nonetheless, if traditions are not simply to remain as antiquated ideas, they must be able to converse with contemporary readers and address their deepest concerns and longings (Pang-White, 2009b, 2009c, 2011). Premised on the undeniable facts that (1) all persons are embodied and cultural beings and that (2) traditions constitute an essential element of individual identity, it would be a mistake to attempt to eradicate traditions altogether, as certain types of liberal feminists have recommended. Instead, it would be more meaningful to ask: Can we, and how do we, re-read, re-imagine, and reconstruct canonical texts so as to find their new significance in the contemporary world? It is generally agreed that Chinese traditions have had a troubled history in dealing with gender relations—well-known examples include concubinage, foot binding,female infanticide, and so on. For various reasons, Chinese traditions and societies have generally been less enthusiastic in confronting, dialoguing about, and resolving problems of gender disparity. Even though gender studies and feminist theories have populated academic discourse in the West since the 1960s, these topics remain relatively marginalized, often as an afterthought, in Chinese philosophical and cultural discourse. Furthermore, as the growing body of research and our deepened knowledge informs and expands our conception of gender, informed persons must ask themselves how Chinese philosophical traditions would and should engage the LGBT community and their concerns. Gender studies is not and should not be perceived simply as a subject in vogue. Rather, for humanity to flourish in this incredibly interdependent network of reality, it is imperative that we have a better understanding of all members of the human community so as to relate to one another in more inclusive, caring, and just ways. Surely, many of our contemporary concerns and vocabularies are anachronistic in the historical settings of classical texts. However, even within the framework of Western traditions, phrases such as “feminism,” “gender,” and “homosexual” were not part of the existing apparatus of vocabulary until the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries (Jenainati and Groves, 2010). Moreover, with the advancement of . . . ". (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Place of Imagination: Wendell Berry and the Poetics of Community, Affection, and Identity by Joseph R. WiebeJacob Alan CookThe Place of Imagination: Wendell Berry and the Poetics of Community, Affection, and Identity Joseph R. Wiebe waco, tx: baylor university press, 2017. 272 pp. $49.95The Place of Imagination is an artful narration of Wendell Berry's poetics focused distinctively on his works of fiction. Moralists concerned about (...) issues of land use or racialization could commend or criticize "what" they assume Berry's stories (re)present—nostalgia or some abstract, principial program. But Joseph Wiebe ventures a thesis about "how" Berry's imaginary Port William community discloses the nature of good, real-world community. Understanding how Berry's poetics reflect his real-world moral imagination clarifies what we may learn from his fiction. So, in part 1, Wiebe traces Berry's journey of local adaptation, through which he developed a moral imagination and discovered the agonizing details of his entanglement in his place's history and his neighbors' problems.Berry's poetics starts with imagination opening itself to the genius of a place and the other (friend and foe alike) as a living soul. Such imagination engages our sympathy to see others as complex subjects without controlling their stories, objectifying them to realize some idealist worldview. In sympathy, we [End Page 203] perceive the other as a neighbor and develop affection for them in their difference. This affection is no mere sentiment but a Humean moral sentiment that motivates behavior and, when properly nurtured, makes moral reasoning subservient to itself. Affection "disrupts habits of pity" that reduce others to mental objects and inspires a kenotic movement toward concrete neighbors (37). Problems felt at the societal level are habituated in local communities. While idealist solutions may satisfy the white, Western mind's impulse for complete knowledge, their resources prove incompetent before these problems as such. We must affectionately open ourselves to others who disrupt our mental worlds and draw us into real-world habits that change underlying communal dynamics. Relinquishing control of our storied identities (or idealist worldviews) to the others in our place, we might truly locate ourselves in those problems—and start undoing them.In part 2, Wiebe offers glimpses of "what" Berry's poetics teach us about a placed life together through select members of a quaint Kentucky farming community: Jack Beechum, Jayber Crow, and Hannah Coulter. His imaginative attentiveness to each character exemplifies the art of discovering the virtues of place-based identity. The way through Port William offers no shortcuts. Its imaginary community does not merely stand in for some universal idea of community. Neither potential solution nor nostalgic phantasm, Port William is the setting for parables that reveal something true about good community. "If there is something to imitate, it is the underlying processes that generate the particulars of Berry's narratives rather than the characters that furnish them" (152). In Port William, one can practice relinquishing control and patiently "imagining" the contours of a place; in the real world, one can deploy that imagination to develop fidelity to their place.Wiebe aptly follows Berry's method, yielding control over Berry's biography and work by taking a third-person narrator's perspective. He focuses on what Berry's life and writing reveal parabolically to the patient reader. The book beckons readers to hold Berry and his stories as a mirror—to engage in introspection and self-interrogation—that we might learn something about sympathy and affection needed for engaging our places non-imperialistically. Wiebe's adept style may appear to some as a flaw; the narrator gives no academic cues (e.g., "I will argue") for rapidly consuming principial content. There are only Berry's life and work and the reader, hopefully changed. The Place of Imagination will be of greatest interest to those who already have some affection for that "artful crank from Kentucky" (10). Beyond the agrarian crowd and its auditors, this book holds appeal for a range of explorations, from the fecundity of poetics in ethics to the disruptiveness of Christian imagination vis-à-vis whiteness. [End Page 204]Jacob Alan CookFriends UniversityCopyright © 2018 Society... (shrink)

The discoveries of marine mammal scientists over the last 50 years have made it clear that whales and dolphins demonstrate advanced intellectual and emotional traits once believed to be unique to humans. Sadly, discussions of cetacean captivity are regularly marked by unsophisticated approaches to ethics. Senior scientists regularly fail to demonstrate even the most rudimentary skills of ethical analysis. As a result, most discussions of cetacean captivity in the marine mammal community are intellectually +weak—marked by the combination of formal and (...) informal logical fallacies and a flawed understanding of such key concepts as “consciousness,” “personal identity,” “self-awareness,” “moral standing,” “moral rights,” “personhood,” and “flourishing.” Not surprisingly, similar weaknesses are evident in the arguments offered by representatives of businesses that profit from cetacean captivity. A fundamental problem regarding cetacean captivity, then, is blindness to the ethical significance of scientific facts already known. This essay argues that a proper understanding of the problem of cetacean captivity lies in an interdisciplinary and multi-faceted approach that combines both scientific and philosophical methodologies. (shrink)

Drawing on data from 18 months of participant observation and interviews at a community health clinic in North Carolina, the author illustrates how an intersectional perspective deepens our understanding of the construction of a moral identity. In this case, the author examines the moral identity of health care providers—all women—who provide family planning and contraceptive counseling for women clients. The author analyzes how maternity care coordinators—two whites and two Latinas—craft a moral identity by drawing on the cultural (...) toolkit available to them, using gendered frames but also racial, class, and nationalist frames. An intersectional lens helps us better understand how maternity care coordinators' moral identities are shaped by their different locations within racism, classism, and nationalism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Dear White Christians: For Those Still Longing for Racial Reconciliation by Jennifer HarveyMichelle WolffDear White Christians: For Those Still Longing for Racial Reconciliation Jennifer Harvey grand rapids, mi: eerdmans, 2014. 262 pp. $25.00Absent of opaque theory and disembodied ideology, Jennifer Harvey’s Dear White Christians: For Those Still Longing for Racial Reconciliation presents an indispensable introduction to the problem of “whiteness” illustrated with concrete examples from US history. Harvey’s (...) text clearly communicates the trouble with invoking universalism, colorblindness, and most specifically reconciliation as means of improving race relations. Alternatively, in the spirit of the Black Power movement, Harvey suggests that reparations more effectively atone for racism. [End Page 202]Harvey begins with a sympathetic account of churches seeking integration as the logical counter to segregation within the context of midcentury US history. While these approaches align with the ideals of the civil rights movement, Harvey goes on to elucidate the limitations of what she calls a “reconciliation paradigm.” Pointedly, Harvey asserts that reconciliation efforts fail to acknowledge the problem of whiteness (11). She therefore provocatively contends that “to be white is to be in a state of profound moral crisis” (56). This is because white identity has been constituted by violence, consistently benefits materially from that violence, and remains indistinguishable from white supremacy’s agenda (52–55). For this reason, black identity, according to Harvey, is never parallel to white identity. Reconciliation, then, problematically masks such difference via appeals to universalism.Harvey adroitly reorients approaches to problem solving away from white progressive efforts and good intentions by attending instead to African American experience, history, and requests (11–12). For this reason, she prioritizes Black Power movements over civil rights movements (65). The former Harvey understands as properly focusing on power differentials, rather than separation, as the primary issue (106). In so doing, Harvey underscores white folks’ culpability in failing to secure reparations for African Americans.In the final section of her book, Harvey describes specific US churches’ attempts at reparations programs. This section, including some of the most demonstrative and relatable chapters, contains concrete examples that echo the defensiveness, pain, and good will that frequently surface on the part of white folks in conversations about race (228–29). The process of collecting these stories and histories appears to have been nearly as beneficial as Harvey’s proposed reparations program, for history functions as confession here (206). In addition, even these constructive chapters resist an optimistic gloss on the flawed and painstaking work of reparations programs (211).Although Harvey touches on other forms of reparations, she consistently returns to economic efforts as most pressing. While financial and material reparations are immediate and measurable, and therefore consistent with the author’s preference for pragmatism over theory, they obfuscate the pervasive disadvantages that people of color suffer in the United States today. Equal candidates for employment with identical resumes, for example, too frequently experience the bias of gender and race as signified in the candidate’s name. One’s gender performance and sexual identity can exacerbate such discrimination. These gesture at the role of social currency that permeates communal life even more thoroughly than material wealth. This is to say that reparations are an important aspect for “interrupting whiteness,” and yet they cannot be the conclusion to a more just and equitable church and society.Harvey’s extraordinarily accessible text propels conversations on ethical living in classrooms, churches, and politics. Her assessment of the problem [End Page 203] of whiteness and constructive alternative suggestion for reparations efficiently prime readers for open dialogue and practical action.Michelle WolffDuke UniversityCopyright © 2016 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Using 16 in-depth interviews drawn from a larger sample of Black/white biracial individuals, this article explores how gender shapes the microlevel process of racial identity construction. Skin color stratification within the Black community, combined with a low rate of marriageable men and high rates of interracial marriages among the most educated and affluent Black men, has created a social context that differentiates the interactional experiences of biracial men and women. The findings highlight the need for more complex theoretical conceptualizations (...) of how gender shapes the way that women negotiate their racial identities in post-Civil Rights America. (shrink)

In this paper, I work towards a conceptualization of a new form of epistemic injustice – one that occurs within groups, as opposed to across groups – which I call ‘intra-group epistemic injustice’. Specifically, I focus on a case that occurs within the Jewish community, regarding what I and others see as the silencing of anti-Zionist Jews by Zionist Jews, via a conflation of Jewish identity with Zionism. Anti-Zionist Jews are accused by Zionist Jews of being ‘self-hating Jews’ or (...) perhaps not even Jews at all, and as such, the former’s contributions to discussions of what it means to be Jewish are preemptively disregarded by the latter. Consequently, the harm of this epistemic injustice is that it effectively issues a denial of one’s identity as a Jew, which may amount to a nearly complete denial of one’s self. (shrink)

In this article, we examine how white working-class women reimagine gender in the face of social and economic changes that have undermined their ability to perform normative femininity. As blue-collar jobs have disappeared, scholars have posited that white working-class men and women have become increasingly isolated, disconnected from institutions, and hopeless about the future, leading to a culture of despair. Although past literature has examined how working-class white men cope with the inability to perform masculinity through wage-earning and family authority, (...) gender has been undertheorized in these discussions, treating working-class women’s and men’s despair interchangeably. Drawing on 37 in-depth interviews conducted in a former coal-mining town in northeastern Pennsylvania, we identify three overarching strategies that women deploy in their life histories to cope with disruption: embracing pain as an opportunity for self-growth; dispelling shame and striving for equality; and enduring suffering. These strategies allow women to feel hopeful and worthy as they confront enormous challenges, whether starting over following relationship dissolution, learning to be independent from men, or simply surviving hardship for the sake of their children. We explore the implications for recreating gender identity in each strategy and question how different strategies might serve to protect women from, or alternatively solidify, sentiments of despair. (shrink)

This paper explores how women and non-binary Latinx Community Workers in Toronto, Canada, negotiate their identities, citizenship practices and politics in relation to settler colonialism and decolonization. We demonstrate how LCWs enact a Latinx decolonial politic of belonging, an alternative way of practicing citizenship that strives to simultaneously challenge both Canadian and Latin American settler colonialism. This can be seen when LCWs refuse to be recognized on white settler terms as “proud Canadians,” and create community-based learning initiatives that incite conversations (...) among everyday Latinx community members around Canada’s settler colonial history and present, Indigenous worldviews, as well as race and settler colonialism in Latin America. We consider how LCWs’ enactments of a Latinx decolonial politic of belonging serve as small, incomplete, but crucial steps towards decolonization. (shrink)

This article examines the relationship between everyday talk, the reproduction of political ideology and the interactional accomplishment of situated identities through analyzing how institutional members index neoliberal ideology in their everyday interactions. Analysis of audio- and video-recorded data from racially diverse business members of two Texas chambers of commerce illustrates how chamber members indirectly index neoliberal ideology through taking stances toward government policies. White, upper class participants display neoliberal stances through using complaints – constituted by questions, humor, idioms and inference-rich (...) terms – about the Affordable Care Act because it is a form of government interference that increases taxes and the federal deficit. Minority business members use discursive strategies such as double-voiced discourse and self-repairs to balance tensions between criticizing neoliberal ideology because it does not benefit minorities yet still orient to its taken-for-granted value in their business community. Overall, while participants’ interactions generally seem to operate within the structural constraints of neoliberal ideology, our analysis illustrates how participants take up neoliberal ideology in situated ways that, at times, provide avenues for negotiating the relevance of neoliberal ideology to everyday life. (shrink)

Hermeneutical injustice is being unjustly prevented from making sense of one’s experiences, identity, or circumstances and/or communicating about them. The literature focusses almost exclusively on whether people have access to adequate conceptual resources. In this paper, we discuss a different kind of hermeneutical struggle caused by stigma. We argue that in some cases of hermeneutic injustice people have access to hermeneutical resources apt to understand their identity but reject employing these due to the stigma attached to the (...) class='Hi'>identity. We begin with a reinterpretation of one of the cases discussed in the literature, Edmund White’s novel A Boy’s Own Story. We argue that in this case hermeneutic resources are available but are rejected due to the stigma attached to homosexuality. We then present two analogous kinds of cases: alcohol addiction and being the victim of intimate partner violence. Here, too, hermeneutic injustice occurs because of stigma attached to an identity rather than unavailability of resources. We close by suggesting that these cases may, additionally, involve the wrong of Tightlacing: by meddling with their self-conception, stigma can manipulate individuals into a view of themselves that licenses inappropriate demands on them and makes them complicit in an erasure of their identities. (shrink)

Although racism has always been present in the therapy room, the recent political climate and flood of news stories highlighting racist narratives and behaviors have made race and racism more salient in our society. For white therapists who align with antiracism in their self-identity and practice, this may present a difficult ethical dilemma when race and racism enter the therapy office. Therapists have a duty to protect client autonomy and self-determination as much as possible. However, therapists also have a (...) responsibility to the communities in which they work and to not willingly condone activities of others that hold prejudice, both of which are threatened with unacknowledged racism. This article addresses the issue of whether to work with racism as a clinical and ethical concern with white clients who hold racist ideas and narratives, and then offers a concise clinical model for therapists to help guide their practice. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sodalism as Open Worldview: Conspiring to Dismantle the White FranchiseSunny Heenenin the introduction to Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Gloria Anzaldúa writes: “Today we ask to be met halfway. This book is our invitation to you—from the new mestizas” (Anzaldúa 20). Mestiza is a specifically feminine descriptor for a Latin female-identifying person of mixed descent. What Anzaldúa proposes in this theory of the new mestiza is a consciousness rooted (...) in “the creation of yet another culture, a new story to explain the world and our participation in it, a new value system with images and symbols that connect us to each other and to the planet” (Anzaldúa 103). Just as the mestiza gracefully learn to navigate their complex multicultural identities, fashioning a new hybrid culture within which to flourish, so can we all develop an enlightened conception of who we are. The invitation extended by Anzaldúa is not meant only for those who identify as mestiza. The who being invited to help build this new culture is the group that identifies as white; Anzaldúa believes that those she invites are capable of learning to improve their behavior and their consciousness regarding their relation to other human beings. In fact, it is this dominant group who is needed for this new story because collectively dismantling hegemonic whiteness is the only path toward the kind of inclusive culture that Anzaldúa envisions. I will argue that a proposal like Anzaldúa’s first requires a new worldview for white people: one that restructures cognition toward communal activity.An ushering in of this new worldview can be made practical, I submit, through Audre Lorde’s theory of difference. Lorde advises that it is the recognition of and embracing of our differences that has the potential to move us forward. To reclaim difference and celebrate our pluralistic world, we require an in-depth look at the ways in which identity is formed through difference, especially white identity. In an essay on defining difference, Lorde worries that it is something we respond to with fear and contempt, when instead, [End Page 32] these differences have the capacity to be the strength of our foundation as social beings: “We have no patterns for relating across our human differences as equals.... Certainly there are very real differences between us of race, age, and sex. But it is not those differences between us that are separating us. It is rather our refusal to recognize those differences, and to examine the distortions which result from our misnaming them and their effects upon human behavior and expectation” (Lorde 115). According to Lorde, we misunderstand and misuse our differences, relying on them to form dualistic identities in negation to one another, identities that sow hatred and division. It is through confronting these identities based on difference that we might begin to approach them in new ways that take us forward together and that build these patterns of relating as equals.The new worldview that I am suggesting must be, primarily, a form of education. In examining the epistemic problems of white identity, I have developed something that I call “sodalism.” The word is derived from the Latin sodalis, which holds various meanings for our purposes, including comrade, fellow, and conspirator. The theory of sodalism connotes a sense of conspiring together toward a collective purpose of betterment, toward a world in which we perceive each other as comrades and fellow humans with beneficial and beautiful differences. Sodalism refrains from becoming totalizing by making visible and celebrating a plurality of identities and experiences. This skill can be developed through educated interchange, of which Anzaldúa writes hopefully: “Whites could allow themselves to share and exchange and learn from us in a respectful way” (90). But how can white people adopt a new open consciousness that will allow this interchange? After all, according to sociologist Anibal Quijano, the colonial structure of power—whiteness—“was, and still is, the framework within which operate the other social relations” (168). If white perceptions are still lodged in these hierarchical epistemologies, where can we begin to break down these mental barriers and decolonize minds? Anzaldúa suggests... (shrink)

This article documents a moment in history when poor and working-class white boys and men are struggling in their schools, communities, and workplaces against the “Other” as a means of framing identities. Drawing on two independent qualitative studies, the authors investigate distinct locations where poor and working-class boys and men invent, relate to, and distance from marginalized groups in an effort to create self. First the authors look at an ethnography of “the Freeway boys,” a community of urban white working-class (...) high school boys who must deal with the economic ravagement of their neighborhood and their insecure place in a world different than that of their fathers. Next, the authors draw from a large-scale survey of young adults to hear how a combined sample of urban poor and working-class white men narrate identities that are carved explicitly out of territory bordered by white women and African American men. Across sites, the authors theorize how high schools and workplaces both, in part, create white masculinities and interrupt them, at a time when white working-class boys and men feel under siege. (shrink)

The question that faces communities today has to do with who belongs and who has the right to claim certain identity markers. In contemporary United States of America, whiteness stands as an idol unto itself for it seeks to delegitimise all other identity markers except those it has given legitimacy, and which serve its own interests. One cannot deconstruct whiteness as a racial construct unless one sheds light on its origins and how it continues to validate itself in (...) society. A valid response to the idol of whiteness is to embrace a eucharistic identity; one that speaks of the human as a being radically defined by ethical solidarity with others. (shrink)

This article explores the problems and possibilities of different feminist theoretical models of identity for challenging women's symbolic and strategic positioning in the discourses and conflicts that produce national, ethnic and racialized community identities. The discussion focuses on two of the most popular alternative models to emerge within white western feminism, the nomad and the cyborg, while also considering some other suggested paradigm shifts emerging from diasporic and postcolonial feminisms. It asks how successfully these feminist alternative models of the (...) self and community identities deal with two key issues relating to women's positioning in prevailing identity discourses – on the one hand, women's relationship to questions of ‘place’, location and dislocation, and on the other, questions of female embodiment and the ways in which the specifically female body becomes both a symbolic and material target of conflict and contestation in processes of constituting community identities. (shrink)

The focus on this contribution is on the ‘late-learners’ digression. In Sph. 251a8-c6, the Eleatic Stranger briefly discusses the view of some ‘young and old late-learners’ who hold that, from a logico-metaphysical point of view, unlike ‘a man is a man’ or ‘a good is good’, the statement ‘a man is good’ is neither a well-formed nor a grammatical sentence. Usually, modern commentators devote little energy to interpreting this passage since they are content to note that it suffices to discriminate (...) identity and predication to avoid the sophism. The aim of this paper is to show that the position of the ‘late-learners’ is in fact more subtle than it seems, since it is widely open to many readings, and that the chosen reading of the digression has a direct impact on the general interpretation of the rest of the dialogue (communication of kinds, semantic distinction between names and verbs, etc.). To this end, the view of the ‘late-learners’ will be compared with a similar position discussed in a quite different philosophical ecosystem: the White-Horse Paradox forged by Gōngsūn Lóng, a dialectician of the ‘School of Names’. This paradox states that the sentence ‘a white horse is not a horse’ is true. Many readings of the White-Horse Paradox have been offered: some of these readings are the same as those suggested for the ‘late-learners’ view, but others are absent from the scholarly literature, although they provide interesting insights into the interpretation of Sph. 251a8-c6. (shrink)

Globally, performative spaces and venues of artistic creativity are governed by sets of conventions which impact the creative process. In this article, we discuss the experiences of four different creatives, operating in four different creative spaces. A poet and football player, a theatre producer and script writer, a gallery curator, and a ballet dancer have all shared their experiences of how traditionally white and heteronormative discourses regulate their respective creative spaces, the ways they conform to or transgress these norms, and (...) the ways their interactions with their chosen creative spaces affect their creativity. These creatives have identities which are somehow ‘marked’, somehow ‘different’ from the ‘norms’ Wales and South-West England. Whether members of the LGBTQ+ community, migrants to Wales from European and Caribbean countries, or being a different race to many around them, the creatives all have complicated interactions with the norms of their creative spaces within Wales and South-West England. These creative’s identities often clash with an entrenched lack of diversity and the broader expectations of British society. Despite, or perhaps, because of, these conflicts and tensions, each of the creatives discussed here found immense joy in the relationship between their identity/ies and their creative spaces and discovered how their own identity/ies are a central driving force for their creativity. Regardless of the differences of their mediums, each creative interviewed sought to centre their identity, to help them create art which can challenge dominant white and heteronormative discourses in wider British society. (shrink)

Identity politics has become dangerous and toxic. How should one respond to the current American psychosocial attitudes and mood swings? Should I keep my circle large or small? Professor Royce might respond: “It depends upon the community ideal that fosters one’s identity and individuality.” But from the perspectives and experiences of marginalized peoples, the answer is not so simple. A prominent Africana scholar retorts: “Keep your circle plastic!” Such is the distinction brought out in Tommy Curry’s investigative study (...) of Royce’s philosophy of white racial empire. Focusing on assimilation and Royce’s advocacy of practicing the “Dark Arts” of imperial rule, which Royce modeled on a system of British... (shrink)

Willie James Jennings contends that the goal of whiteness is the creation and preservation of segregated space. For Jennings, whiteness, as well as upholding perceived notions of white normativity, is a way of being in the world, an imagined reality made real by our movement in physical space which destroys the identity-forming connections between communities and land. In this article I bring together Pope Francis’s reflections on the globalised economy in Laudato Si’ with the critiques of James H. Cone (...) and Jennings to demonstrate the horrific harm of whiteness on marginalised people groups and the land itself. To resist the building project of whiteness, therefore, requires attention to our relationship with land. At this point I turn more readily to the land of England, offering the beginnings of a theology of place given the substantial land holdings of the Church of England. I close by asking whether the Church of England can be trusted to use its land to dismantle whiteness given its troubling colonial history in relation to land use. (shrink)

The presidency of Donald Trump saw the rise of a new kind of conspiracy in QAnon. The internet-assembled meta-conspiracy has grown to include elements of other growing conspiracies such as the anti-mask movement and anti-vaxxers. As it has grown, QAnon has attracted significant support for its beliefs from white evangelicals who also supported Trump in huge numbers in both 2016 and 2020. In this integrative review of literature, I explore the reasons that QAnon has performed so well so quickly, finding (...) justification for conspiracy theory support among evangelicals in the theory of cognitive dissonance. QAnon has found a foothold in evangelical circles during worldwide pandemic, which has left many evangelicals unmoored from their spiritual family and susceptible to other realms of community online. The conspiracy theory has infiltrated evangelicalism by using the language and concerns of Christianity in its messaging and by attempting to justify evangelical support of Donald Trump. Although traditional media are quick to point out the theory’s inconsistencies and failed prophecies, this paper finds that the harm QAnon has done to the evangelical community may only be undone through spiritual connection and practice. (shrink)

South African churches are struggling to form cohesive communities and strategies are needed to bring people together. Because of a deficiency in trust, people are reluctant to get to know each other, impacting on the quality of relationships and a positive sense of belonging and community. Congregations need to find ways to nurture an inclusive identity instead of the current norm of all-white or all-black churches, which can be perceived as being inaccessible or exclusive. Innovative strategies like storytelling can (...) unlock the power to understand each other breaking down prejudice, racism and xenophobia. Because intercultural socialisation is found wanting in congregations, sharing different perspectives and experiences can deepen engagements overcoming superficial interactions. This article expands on how storytelling can be used to facilitate an inclusive and intercultural congregational identity through identity formation, liberative practices of reconciliation, community building and as an educational resource. (shrink)

The author examines the symbolism of the Indian politician's common dress: white coarse khadi cham pioned by Gandhi. Does its continued survival during the post-independence era signify merely hypocrisy, empty ritual? What does it implicitly communicate about the public and private intents ofpoliticalfigures? What values does the khadi conceal in its texture? Do they serve any purpose? Chakrabarty's analysis concludes by admitting that though khadi no longer conveys any message as to the prevalence of Gandhian convictions, yet it constitutes a (...) deep-seated resistance by Indian democracy and politics to the wholesale loss of their identity in the rising surge of global capitalism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.2 (2003) 80-98 [Access article in PDF] Musical Spirituality:Reflections on Identity and the Ethics of Embodied Aesthetic Experience in/and the Academy Deanne Bogdan Music in/and My Life Several years ago, I attended a Pontifical High Mass at St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna. It was the feast of the Epiphany, a public holiday in the predominantly Roman Catholic country of Austria. 1 A "lapsed" (...) Catholic myself, my intention as part of the congregation that day was not primarily one of worship as it was to listen to a performance of the Pauckenmesse of Joseph Haydn, complete with soloists, full choir, and orchestra (in overcoats), including, of course, timpani.As I stepped from the brilliant winter morning into the narthex of that gothic splendor, the pungency of the incense propelled me into Proustian recollections of growing up female, Catholic, and Italian-Canadian in the cathedral parish in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada's steel town. My mother and father, first generation Italian-Canadians, whose own parents had emigrated as teen-agers, had been partners in a corner grocery located in another part of the city that was largely professional and white-Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Eager to assimilate (they never spoke Italian to my sister or me, and we never learned the language), my parents realized early on that their most valuable legacy to their two daughters would be the advantages of a solid education, religious and secular. For them that meant enrolling us in the local co-educational Catholic elementary school. Later we attended a convent secondary school as day students, and were the only members of our extended family, male or female, to attend university.It was memories of those elementary school years that were conjured up for me that crisp January morning at St. Stephen's. (In hindsight, I am struck by the synchronicity 2 of the fact that my original surname is Di Stefano, or rather "Distefan," as it had become in its anglicized form). 3 For a [End Page 80] whole complex of reasons, I identified strongly with my parochial school and the church that sheltered/shadowed it — a soaring pseudo-gothic structure reputed to have been replicated, stone by stone, wood carving by hand wood carving, from some European cathedral. The romance of that basilica — The Cathedral of Christ the King — its "daughter" school, and the priests and nuns who were our guides and teachers became my second family for the whole of my grade school education. For me, being at school was like a recognition scene. As Italian-American literary theorist Marianna de Marco Torgovnick writes: When I was a child, school was...a light-filled, wide awake world in which fear did not erupt except on rare occasions. I saw school as a place where I was valued for my intelligence, even though I was female — and this probably had something to do with my absence of fear there. I quite naturally chose to stay in school through college and into graduate school. It's in these relatively late years that I first became fully conscious of how even within the world of school I was and always would be female. 4My identification with my church/school centered around my musical development, which began at age four when the piano I grew up on arrived like a beacon in our home. Coterminous with my eager entry into first grade, piano lessons were begun with Sister Cecile, a somewhat nervous, gentle nun predisposed to mystical experience, who shepherded me through exams and recitals until high school. Because I could sight-read fairly well, I was regularly pulled out of class to accompany soloists and dancing groups rehearsing for annual Christmas and St. Patrick's Day concerts. Something about this made me feel special; I both reveled in and felt isolated by my difference from my classmates. I had found a sense of community through my music, and enjoyed a feeling of security in the knowledge that my schoolwork was strong enough... (shrink)

Political concerns about the importance of social identity are voiced equally across left, liberal, and right wing perspectives. Moreover, the suspicion of identity is not relegated to the discourse of intellectuals but is also manifest in the mainstream as a widespread public attitude, and not only among white communities.

In public health research, tracking folk racial categories (in disease risk, etc.) is a double-edged tool. On the one hand, tracking folk racial categories is dangerous because it reinforces a problematic but fairly common belief in biological race essentialism. On the other hand, ignoring racial categories also runs the risk of ignoring very real biological phenomena in which marginalized communities, likely in virtue of their marginalization, are sicker and in need of improved resources. Much of the conversation among epidemiologists and (...) philosophers of medicine concerning the issue of tracking folk racial categories in public health research springs forth from largely black/white binarized health inequities. While health inequities between black and white Americans are certainly a very important topic, I am interested in investigating the complications to this conversation about the potential harms of tracking folk racial categories in public health research generated by the consideration of Indigenous identities in the US—groups whose health inequities are typically tracked based on the folk racial category of “Native American” or “American Indian,” but whose unique identity categories and community membership problematize the current spectrum of approaches to tracking folk racial categories in epidemiologic research. This paper will draw on scholarship by and about Indigenous people in the US context to address an undertheorized facet of the conversations concerning the potential harms of tracking folk racial categories in public health research, including the potential undermining of American Indian sovereignty and Indigenous epistemologies. I will end on some methodological considerations inspired by the inclusion of Indigenous identities in the US in the conversation about tracking folk racial categories in epidemiologic research. (shrink)

As a country with a history of settler-colonialism, the land question in South Africa remains one of the critical issues of redress that is highly contested. Furthermore, opinions on the land question tend to be divided along racial lines. This paper uses white ignorance as a theoretical framework to explain these polarised views on the land question in South Africa post-1994. The paper also uses the concept of honorary whiteness/brownness to explain how differences among ‘people of colour’ serve to (...) sustain a hierarchical racial order in which whites remain the ultimate beneficiaries. While research on white ignorance mainly focuses on the socio-psychological and material benefits of white ignorance for whites, this paper argues that those classified as honorary white or ‘brown’ also benefit, albeit minimally, from endorsing willful white ignorance of past and present racial atrocities. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 46, no. 2. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 287 Julienne Obadia Responsibility, Respectability, Recognition, and Polyamory: Lessons in Subject Formation in the Age of Sexual Identity Introduction: It’s About Time “Sexuality” has become a strikingly capacious category in recent years. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans* have been joined by queer, questioning, intersex, pansexual, Two Spirit, asexual, and ally, as the acronym LGBT increasingly serves as (...) a base for expanded formulations such as LGBTQQIP2SAA. In light of this trajectory, perhaps it should not have surprised me to hear so many of my polyamorist interlocutors identifying polyamory as their sexual orientation. While polyamory’s emergence as a named practice in 1990 was more closely associated with the sexual revolution than the gay liberation movement, the increasing intelligibility of polyamory as a sexual orientation, I argue, offers important insights into how, and to what effect, the category of sexuality is expanding, and illuminates contemporary mechanisms of subject formation in American late liberalism. It is tempting to analyze this phenomenon solely within the historical context of the twentieth century rise of identity politics. However, a focus on recent decades is insufficient for understanding the increasing capaciousness of the sexual orientation framework. I argue that, more than simply demonstrating a proliferation of sexual identities, polyamory ’s reconfiguration also highlights the powerful demands made of subjects of sexual orientation to be respectable by espousing particular forms of intimacy over others. These demands call for a longer historical 288 Julienne Obadia view of marriage, monogamy, and whiteness as constitutive of US social, political, and legal recognition. Consider my encounter with Steve: At the 2013 annual “Poly Living” convention in Philadelphia, organized by the polyamory advocacy group, Loving More, I gathered with the other attendees in a large circle in the main hall. After a brief welcome by the organizers, we introduced ourselves one by one and then dispersed for drinks and informal mingling. I took a seat alone and, after a moment, a man in his sixties with a graying ponytail and wearing a Hawaiian shirt approached me. “You’re an anthropologist?” he asked. “Can I talk to you for a minute?” I smiled and gestured at the seat across from me, and he introduced himself, putting his beer on the table beside mine and sitting down. Fidgeting nervously, he explained that he and his wife had been married for over twenty years, but the last several years had been sexless, with her desire waning while his had not. After learning about polyamory, he cautiously suggested it and she reluctantly agreed to let him do some sexual exploring outside the marriage, but with tight restrictions: He could go to events like these and could have limited sexual interaction with others, but he could not have penetrative sex, nor could he pursue any emotional or more-than-casual intimacy with anyone. He found these constraints difficult, understandably so at such events, where people were in fact encouraged to seek out emotional intimacy and enjoy a wide range of consensual connections. Such limitations ran counter to polyamory’s ethos, which, as indicated by the organization’s name, sought more love, although particular arrangements varied significantly. As he elaborated on these details, I realized that Steve was not simply sharing as people often did, unprompted, at these events, which seek to foster open communication, curiosity, and self-exploration. He was torn about how to identify his sexual desire and make sense of his difficulty finding fulfillment within his wife’s conditions. He paused, looking at me searchingly with a mix of distress and hope, and asked if his desire to see other people was natural. “Is it possible,” he asked, “that being poly is a sexual orientation I was born with, like being gay?” He hoped that, precisely in my capacity as an anthropologist, I might have some definitive expert knowledge about human sexuality—an incontrovertible yes or no about the provenance of his desire and the legitimacy of his dissatisfaction. Julienne Obadia 289 As Steve’s conundrum makes clear, the intelligibility of polyamory as an immutable sexual orientation is very recent. Its inclusion marks a dramatic shift from Eve Sedgwick’s observation nearly three decades ago... (shrink)

Since 2009, the Norwegian public service broadcaster NRK has produced a number of slow TV shows. Some of the programmes have had a surprisingly big success in terms of public engagement and audience share even though the majority of the audience was from the oldest age groups. These programmes are not only slow, lasting a long time and lacking dramatic development and progress, they also engage in a particular, traditional version of national identity. The current article argues that, through (...) slow TV, the Norwegian public service broadcaster has found a new way to reflect a particular version of Norwegian identity and to tap into the central values of Norwegian culture. Taken together, the shows cover all regions of the country—the coastal areas as well the inlands and mountains. In terms of representation, the programmes highlight nature and traditional Norwegian values such as closeness to nature, rural life, and “friluftsliv” (living the outdoor life). Urban areas and the non-white population are conspicuously absent. (shrink)

I examine the implications of stereotyping and its intersections with the political realities facing American Indian communities. Specifically, I examine the typification of Indian as ecologically noble savage, as both employed and refuted by environmentalists, through the lenses of cognitive and social psychological perspectives and then bring it within the context of a broader cultural critique. I argue that the noble savage stereotype, often used to promote the environmentalist agenda is nonetheless immersed in the political and ideological parameters of the (...) modern project. Finally, I reassert the right and, more importantly, the authority of Native American peoples to ultimately define for themselves their respective identities and destinies. (shrink)

How can persons shaped by oppression grow into members of what Martin Luther King Jr.’s1 envisioned as “beloved community”2? We may be shaped – or even constituted -- by relations of domination (and/or resistance to domination), regardless of our explicit values about the value about all human beings. Given how legacies of oppression that can leave deep traces upon us, how can we learn to build and embody “beloved community“? To borrow Sara Ahmed’s words, how can we learn “not to (...) reproduce what we inherit?”3 in the way of oppressive “forms of life.”4 In what follows, I consider these issues in relation to character (though not in a strictly Aristotelian moral framework), showing how issues of oppression (focusing upon racism in particular) may be thus framed. I relate work on “attention”- derived in part by Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil, drawing upon Bridget Clarke’s framing of this idea. I read Minnie Bruce Pratt’s auto-biographical narrative on racism in terms of such “moral attention,” pointing toward what I call “critical moral attention” as embodying the sort of development of “white self-criticality”5 that can inform ongoing reflection and practices from oppressive to liberatory ones. However, as Pratt’s account shows, there is no simple “before” and “after” or triumphant arrival of a once-and-done or new-and-improved anti-racist self. As Chandra Mohanty and Biddy Martin write (reflecting on this same essay by Pratt) “There is no linear progression based on ‘that old view,’ no developmental notion of her own identity or self.”6 I suggest this notion of “critical moral attention” highlights the process orientation of such work. It is not, however, merely an individual effort. It requires critical interaction with others, specifically in working for social change along these lines. Further, such work consists of “immanent critique” (done from within the messy world in which one lives, without recourse to an external standard by which one may assess and guide one’s development).7. (shrink)

Experiences whether personal or collective, sometimes evoke a psychological satisfaction of being superior to others. This could be due to inappropriate perception or some prejudice. When misperception takes a systematic and permanent form, it becomes an illusion. Several scientific works imply possible racial cognitive illusions. In this work, I treat honorary whiteness as a diminutive way of referring to some categories of human beings. Honorary whiteness is an ideology based on the belief of being superior to others on (...) the basis of colour. It is the practice of acting white or like European in order to gain some benefits or for some interests. This attitude pervades the political, economic, legal and social life of human beings. Hence, this research initiates the urgency to revisit the discourse on racial superiority and how it informs some cognitive misrepresentations of human biological givens. I examine the above theme with the aim of explaining honorary whiteness, racial cognitive illusion and finally, explore the psychological perspectives in view of proffering innovative solutions on racial cognitive illusion. (shrink)

A cursory observer of Cree Indians in the small Canadian community we will describe would conclude that they are an “ acculturated “ but “deviant” company of persons. They give the appearance of being acculturated in that there is little in evidence of the distinctive culture they once had. White members of the community see nothing in visible Indian behavior which evokes the image of Charles Russell's noble warrior savages. To the contrary, whites regard Indians as social outcasts and renegades, (...) and base this judgment on that Indian behavior they choose to see. Indians drink to excess, men and women alike; they get in fights and get arrested by the police; they panhandle; and they break all sorts of rules governing the conduct of respectable people in respectable public places. All of this whites abhor, and use to explain Indian authorship of Indians’ social and economic marginality. If they wished to, so the argument goes, Indians could easily better themselves— they merely and simply want in initiative. (shrink)

In High Schools, Race, and America’s Future, Lawrence Blum offers a lively account of a rigorous high school course on race and racism. Set in a racially, ethnically, and economically diverse high school, the book chronicles students’ engagement with one another, with a rich and challenging academic curriculum, and with questions that relate powerfully to their daily lives. Blum, an acclaimed moral philosopher whose work focuses on issues of race, reflects with candor, insight, and humor on the challenges and surprises (...) encountered in teaching—the unexpected turns in conversation, the refreshing directness of students’ questions, the “aha” moments and the awkward ones, and the paradoxes of his own role as a white college professor teaching in a multiracial high school classroom. High Schools, Race, and America’s Future provides an invaluable resource for those who want to teach students to think deeply and talk productively about race. (shrink)

On 27 March 2014, Loreal Tsingine, a 27-year-old Navajo woman was shot and killed by Austin Shipley, a white male police officer, also 27 years old, who said he was trying to apprehend her for a suspected shoplifting. Shipley was never charged, and the Department of Justice declined to investigate the Winslow police on the matter. This article explores Shipley’s killing of Loreal Tsingine and the police investigation of the shooting as quotidian events in settler colonial states. Police shootings of (...) Indigenous people and the legal response to police use of force (along with everyday settler violence) are a part of the racial terror that is a central part of settler colonialism. Both the shooting and the official narratives of it as a justifiable use of force reveal the psychic and material underpinnings of a settler state, a state that continually imagines and consolidates itself as a community of whites imperiled by Indians among others. White settler violence directed at those imagined as threats lives just beneath the surface of everyday settler life, and importantly, flows through institutions such as policing, embedding itself in everyday professional routines. The extractive relations that are the basis of settler colonialism require and produce white subjects for whom Indigenous lands and bodies are the resource for white identity; policing is one site where white men and women (as well as those aspiring to whiteness), can enact racial hierarchy on behalf of the colonial state with impunity. (shrink)

Los Alamos, New Mexico has an enduring and complicated relationship with its past. During World War II, its residents worked to create the world’s first atomic weapons. The nuclear legacies of the Manhattan Project are global, but in contemporary Los Alamos the Project is often primarily considered a local history before a national or international one. The community’s modern identity is constructed in part through creating its history, and this article studies two children’s performances of the Manhattan Project past. (...) The plots of these performances attempt to sidestep difficult history by avoiding nuclear weapons, which can ironically raise their uncanny specter in the imagination of the audience. The community history created in the performances privileges white scientist perspectives and at times flattens differences between past and present. This performed Manhattan Project is not only domestic – Los Alamos domesticates its complex history through these performances. (shrink)

In her essay collection First, Second, and Other Selves: Essays on Friendship and Personal Identity, well-known scholar of ancient philosophy Jennifer Whiting gathers her previously published essays taking Aristotle's theories on friendship as a springboard to engage with contemporary philosophical work on personal identity and moral psychology. Whiting examines three themes throughout the collection, the first being psychic contingency, or the belief that the psychological structures characteristic of human beings may in fact vary, not just from one cultural (...) context to another, but also from one individual to another. The second theme is the belief that friendship informs an understanding of the nature of the self, an idea that springs from Whiting's uncommon reading of Aristotle's writings on friendship. Specifically, Whiting explains a scenario in which a "virtuous agent" adopts a kind of impersonal attitude both towards herself and towards her "character" friends, loving both because they are virtuous; this scenario ties in with an examination of the Aristotelian concept of the ideal friend as an "other self," or a friendship that evolves from character rather than ego, as well as Whiting's meditation on whether or not a virtuous individual should have a "special" sort of concern for her own future self, distinct in kind from the concern that she has for others. The third theme is that of rational egoism, a concept that Whiting critiques, especially in the context of Aristotle's eudaimonism. The central tenet of the collection is the message that taking "ethocentric" attitudes both towards ourselves and towards our friends sheds light on the nature of personal identity and helps to combat ethnocentric and other objectionable forms of bias, a message that is becoming increasingly urgent in light of the recent deaths of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. (shrink)

Arbitrariness and systematicity are two of language’s most fascinating properties. Although both are characterizations of the mappings between signals and meanings, their emergence and evolution in communication systems has generally been explored independently. We present an experiment in which both arbitrariness and systematicity are probed. Participants invent signs from scratch to refer to a set of items that share salient semantic features. Through interaction, the systematic re-use of arbitrary signal elements emerges.

Roger White; X*—Wittgenstein on Identity, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 78, Issue 1, 1 June 1978, Pages 157–174, https://doi.org/10.1093/arist.

When talking about personal identity in the context of medical ethics, ethicists tend to borrow haphazardly from different philosophical notions of personal identity, or to abjure these abstract metaphysical concerns as having nothing to do with practical questions in medical ethics. In fact, however, part of the moral authority for respecting a patient’s self-regarding decisions can only be made sense of if we make certain assumptions that are central to a particular, psychological picture of personal identity, namely, (...) that patients will remain psychologically connected to a certain degree with their future selves. I draw this out, show problems with approaches in medical ethics based on alternate theories of personal identity that do not recognise this, and explore some important implications. Namely, I show how this recognition can better explain the circumstances under which we should respect advance directives and why, and how it can better make sense of patient fears that they will not "survive" personality-altering deep brain stimulation procedures, and provide guidance on approaching patient decisions concerning this type of procedure in a manner that captures and addresses such concerns. (shrink)

Nancy Jecker and Andrew Ko (2017) wish to present an account of personal identity which captures what matters to the patient and places the patient at the center of medical decisions. They focus particularly on medical interventions in the brain that can cause drastic changes in personality; under what circumstances should we say the patient has 'survived' these changes? More specifically, how can we best understand the notion of survival in a way that captures what is of concern to (...) the patient? This goal is laudable, however, their chosen account of narrative identity is ill-suited to this task for one reason in particular; it does not give sufficient guidance in predicting which medical decisions are likely to be experienced as disruptive to identity. (shrink)

White's dense article on narrative discusses the ways that different groups of 20th century historians, particularly historical theorists (see pp.8-9), have constructed and deconstructed narrative as a means of communicating history. White himself acknowledges that narrativity challenges the scientific of history, but suggests that narrativity is not only unavoidable, but also offers a form of literary or allegorical truth.\n\nWhite first discusses the critiques of narrative as a means of communication--it focuses too heavily on political players, it is "unscientific," it is (...) inherently limited because narrative itself cannot be objective (although it's authors sometimes claim it to be).\n\nHe then moves on to discuss other, heavily theoretical, takes on why narrative is still useful as a means of historical communication: that narrative works because it performs as a trope which readers can easily recognize from myth and fiction, or, that narrative works because it allows us to transform events from the present to a synthesized past.\n\nWhite's article is difficult to read, but important background for anyone who wants to see what people have said about narrative in the past 100 years--and why it is still important. (shrink)

The Solitary Following and leading are hateful to me. Obey? No! But lead? No way! Who's not himself a terror frightens no one. And only the terror-maker can lead others. To me it's hateful even to lead myself! I love it, like creatures of wood and sea, For a good little while to lose myself, In lovely madness meditatively sit, From the distance homeward entice myself, Me myself to me myself—seducing.1.

In The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard describes selfhood as an achievement, specifically claiming that the self’s task ‘is to become itself’ (SUD, 29/SKS 11, 143). But how can one can become who or what one already is, and what sort of achievement is it? This chapter draws on the work of Christine Korsgaard, another philosopher who sees selfhood as an achievement, using her notion of practical identity to explore Kierkegaard’s accounts of the structure of the self and of selfhood (...) as achievement. Kierkegaard’s treatment of selfhood—as aspirational and, if undertaken well, appropriately grounded in one’s facticity (i.e. the concrete facts of one’s situation)—suggests how consciously endorsed identities can guide (or fail to guide) our agency. Having a practical identity involves striving to inhabit adopted roles by aligning our actions with relevant normative demands, but also sometimes embracing and consciously adopting identities already tacitly guiding our engagement with the world. This framework also suggests several ways we can be alienated from desires, actions, or, more generally, our selves. Putting Kierkegaard in conversation with contemporary agency theory, this chapter has two guiding lines of inquiry. First, what does it mean to achieve selfhood and how can the notion of practical identity illuminate or be illuminated by this question? Second, how can this analysis clarify the experience of not being oneself, whether resulting from self-deception, self-ignorance, or the potentially frustrating gap between who one is and who one wants to be? (shrink)