Innovations and Challenges in Identity Research

159 Pages·2021·15.213 MB·English

by  David Block

INNOVATIONS AND CHALLENGES
IN IDENTITY RESEARCH
Innovations and Challenges in Identity Research examines established and emergent
issues within identity research.
This innovative book adopts a disciplinary transcendent approach, drawing on a
range of social science, humanities and human science disciplines on the way to a
detailed consideration of:
• the history of identity as a construct
• the components of a poststructuralist/ social constructivist approach to identity
• the prospect of a Marxist political economy approach to identity
• the interrelationship between structure and agency and a model of structuring
spheres
• an expanded version of positioning theory
• the digital universe as the future of identity research.
Leading researcher David Block provides a personal take on this key topic of study
in applied linguistics and explains why and how discourse analysis is still a useful
means through which we can understand identity today. The book is essential
reading for students and academics studying and researching within the area of
language and identity.
David Block is Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (Catalan Institute
of Research and Advanced Studies) (ICREA) Research Professor in Sociolinguistics
at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. He has published books, articles and
chapters on a variety of topics, adopting in recent years a Marxist perspective in his
analysis of contemporary social phenomena. He is co- editor (with Sarah Khan) of
The Secret Life of English- Medium Instruction (Routledge, 2021).
INNOVATIONS AND CHALLENGES
IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS

Series Editor: Ken Hyland is Professor of Applied Linguistics in Education at the
University of East Anglia and Visiting Professor in the School of Foreign Language
Education, Jilin University, China.
Innovations and Challenges in Applied Linguistics offers readers an understanding of some
the core areas of Applied Linguistics. Each book in the series is written by a specially
commissioned expert who discusses a current and controversial issue surrounding
contemporary language use. The books offer a cutting- edge focus that carries the
authority of an expert in the field, blending a clearly written and accessible outline of
what we know about a topic and the direction in which it should be moving.
The books in this series are essential reading for those researching, teaching, and
studying in applied linguistics.
Titles in the series:
Innovations and Challenges in Applied Linguistics from the Global South
Alastair Pennycook and Sinfree Makoni
Innovations and Challenges in Language Learning Motivation
Zoltán Dörnyei
Innovations and Challenges: Women, Language and Sexism
Carmen Rosa Caldas- Coulthard
Innovations and Challenges in Grammar
Michael McCarthy
Innovations and Challenges in Identity Research
David Block
www.routledge.com/ Innovations- and- Challenges- in- Applied- Linguistics/ book-
series/ ICAL
INNOVATIONS AND
CHALLENGES IN
IDENTITY RESEARCH
David Block
Cover image © Getty Images
First published 2022
by Routledge
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© 2022 David Block
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asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
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and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing- in- Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Block, David, 1956– author.
Title: Innovations and challenges in identity research / David Block.
Description: London; New York: Routledge, 2021. |
Series: Innovations and challenges in applied linguistics |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Summary: “Innovations and Challenges in Identity Research
examines established and emergent issues within identity
research”– provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021032309 |
Subjects: LCSH: Sociolinguistics. | Identity (Psychology) |
Applied linguistics. | Discourse analysis– Social aspects.

Classification: LCC P40 .B45 2021 | DDC 306.44– dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021032309
ISBN: 978-0-367-40445-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-40446-8 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-42 9-35618-6 (ebk)

DOI:10.4324/9780429356186
Typeset in Bembo
by Newgen Publishing UK
Access the Support Material: www.routledge.com/9780367404451
CONTENTS
Preface vii
Acknowledgements xii
1 Revisiting identity: A short, selective history 1
2 Key elements in the poststructuralist/ social constructivist
approach to identity 20
3 Towards a Marxist approach to identity: From recognition
and redistribution debates to a historical materialist view
of being in the world 42
4 From structure and agency to structuring spheres 63
5 Expanding positioning theory 82
6 Applying the expanded model of positioning theory:
An example 98
7 Conclusion 115
References 125
Index 141

PREFACE
When Ken Hyland first approached me about writing a book on identity for the
book series Innovations and Challenges in Applied Linguistics, I was initially a little
unsure about taking up the suggestion. This was because of my off-a nd- on relation-
ship with the topic over the past three decades. I suppose my first contact with the
notion of identity was through my reading of key publications by Alan Firth and
Johannes Wagner (1997) and Bonny Norton (Norton- Peirce, 1995), who argued,
respectively, that second- language learners have identities beyond their positionings
as language learners and that there is a need to consider how they are not always
accepted as legitimate participants in exchanges with local interlocutors. From this
initial contact, I proceeded to orient more and more to identity as it became a key
construct in my work. In this sense, I began the 2000s with the notion of a social
turn in second- language acquisition research (Block, 2003), and then branched out,
so to speak, as this social turn evolved into an interest in identity and how it plays
out in a range of language contact situations, both those involving language learning
and those simply about ongoing life processes. Two key monographs published in
the mid- 2000s represent this orientation well, the first focusing on migrant lives in
London (Block, 2006) and the second examining identity in the different second-
language learning contexts (Block, 2007).
Then, in the latter part of the 2000s, the ‘Great Recession’ spread around the
world and this led me to explore new intellectual terrain, in particular Marxist pol-
itical economy. My main focus thus shifted from identity to an amalgam of new
constructs, including neoliberalism as the current dominant form of global capit-
alism; inequality in all its forms, but especially economic inequality; and finally, class
and related notions of class struggle and class warfare. This shift to Marxist political
economy as a frame for my inquiries had consequences, not least an epistemo-
logical shift that I experienced: I moved from a broadly poststructuralist perspective
on the social world to a view heavily influenced by critical realism. In practice,
viii Preface
this meant moving from ‘an approach to research that questions fixed categories
or structures, oppositional binaries, closed systems, and stable truths and embraces
seeming contradictions’ (Duff, 2012, p. 412), to one that takes as given ‘a real world
which consists in structures, generative mechanisms, all sorts of complex things
and totalities which exist and act independently of the [researcher]’ (Bhaskar, 2002,
p. 211). I will provide more detail about the meaning of this epistemological shift
at the end of Chapter 2.
Notwithstanding these changes in my orientation to academic work over time,
I never really abandoned identity completely as an area of interest. I say this for
two reasons. First, although not framed as an identity issue per se, class is, in my
view, about how we are situated in the different social milieus in which we move
on a day-t o- day and moment-t o- moment basis. It is, therefore, part of who we are,
interrelated with more traditional markers of identity such as gender, race, ethnicity
and so on. In Chapter 3, I make the case for a Marxist political economy approach
to identity and, more specifically, I argue that class is an important part of our sense
of who we are in the world.
Second, during the 2010s I delved into issues that might be seen as more meta
in nature, as explorations of research- related issues. Thus, I read and wrote about
the ongoing tension between structure and agency in research examining a range
of phenomena and events, including identity (Block, 2012, 2013, 2015), as well
as the need to take a multimodal approach to identity, moving beyond the corset
of ‘language and identity’ (Block, 2014a). I also worked on expanded versions of
positioning theory, as a means through which we can understand how identity
emerges in interaction (Block, 2017). In this book, I further develop my thoughts
on these issues which figure prominently in the general argument that I develop.
Thus, the relationship between structure and agency is the main focus of Chapter 4;
multimodality is discussed in Chapter 2 (but also resurfaces in Chapters 4 and 5);
and positioning theory is the main focus of Chapters 5 and 6.
I have written this book with two purposes in mind. First, I would like to think
that each of the main chapters – with the exception of Chapter 6, which forms a
tandem with Chapter 5 – can be read as individual, free-s tanding pieces. Indeed,
when I first started working on the book, I entertained the notion of framing it
as a series of essays, loosely interrelated, exploring key issues in identity research.
However, once I began to write the chapters, I realised that I was operating in a
non- linear way, always working on several chapters at the same time, as opposed
to writing one after the other. This led me to continuous editing, involving the
inclusion of this and the exclusion of that, as well as constant changes of heart with
regard to where particular sections should go. As I wrote in this back- and- forth
way, the book began to take on a more narrative form. It began to tell a story with
a beginning, middle and end, with one chapter clearly leading into the next. In the
end, the chapters can still be read separately, but I also think that there is a pro-
gression towards a conclusion from Chapter 1 to the final chapter, and that along
the way, there is an emergent storyline (to use a term from positioning theory that
will be relevant in Chapter 5). Thus, my second aim in this book is to tell a story
Preface ix
that moves from historical background and a general view of identity to more
specific issues, and then finally, a model for understanding identity as it emerges in
interaction.
Chapters 1 and 2 may be seen as my attempt to revisit, update and advance
on issues around identity that I dealt with in my 2006 and 2007 books and sev-
eral articles and book chapters that I wrote in the 2000s. In Chapter 1, I provide
a historical view of how identity came to be conceptualised as it is at present in
the social sciences and humanities (and, of course, applied linguistics). This pocket
history, as I would call it, is necessarily limited, given certain word constraints and
my inability to discuss everything that has ever been written or said about iden-
tities. It is also very biased, being my selective history of what I see as important
events, authors and concepts. However, I think that it does have a general appeal,
showing how from the 1950s onwards the term ‘identity’, along with related terms
such as ‘self’, ‘self-i dentity’, ‘social self’, ‘subject’ and ‘subjectivity’, began to become
increasingly central to discussions of issues in the social sciences and humanities.
Importantly, this chapter functions as a logical lead- in to Chapter 2, in which I stop
the clock and discuss what I see as key components of the broadly poststructuralist/
social constructivist view of identity that is dominant today. These components
include emergentism, heteroglossia, performativity, multimodality, indexicality, style,
belonging, stigma, authenticity, ambivalence and identity inscriptions. Again, my
discussion is admittedly partial and selective, although I have made an effort to
touch on as many relevant topics of general interest as possible.
Chapter 3 builds on Chapters 1 and 2, but it is also a departure from them. Here
I take on the task of marrying what look on the surface to be two separate con-
ceptual and epistemological universes. On the one hand, there is Marxist political
economy, historical materialism and Marxist humanism, which together comprise
a prism on the real- world realities of inequality and class struggle in contemporary
societies dominated by neoliberal rationalities and material practices. On the other
hand, there is my long-s tanding understanding of identity in poststructuralist/s ocial
constructivist terms, as emergent in ongoing interaction. This chapter is a labour
of love, in that for some time now I have wrestled with the difficulties inherent
in bringing together an alignment with much (most) of what is written about
identity through a poststructuralist/ social constructivist lens and an alignment with
Marxism and its implicit critical realist perspective on events and phenomena in
the world.
Chapter 4 constitutes a further shifting of gears. It takes on the interrelationship
between structure and agency, which, I have argued in recent years, is an important
issue in any attempt to understand events and phenomena in the real world, and
what is relevant here, the emergence of identity in these events and phenomena.
I have written about structure and agency on numerous occasions over the past
decade (see my comments above) and here my aim is to draw on my previous
thinking, but also to advance it considerably in the elaboration of a model of what
I call structuring spheres. The latter serve as the backdrop to a model of positioning
theory that I develop in Chapter 5. In this chapter I once again draw here on