This book explores the changing meanings of place for our identities and life stories in the 21st century, using an empirical approach developed in narrative and discursive psychology.

Explores the changing meanings of place for our identities and life stories in the 21st century, using an empirical approach developed in narrative and discursive psychology

Annotation. Christou explores the phenomenon of 'return migration' in Greece through the settlement and identification processes of second-generation Greek-American returning migrants. She examines the meanings attached to the experience of return migration. The concepts of 'home' and 'belonging' figure prominently in the return migratory project which entails relocation and displacement as well as adjustment and alienation of bodies and selves. Furthermore, Christou considers the multiple interactions (social, cultural, political) between the place of origin and the place of destination; network ties; historical and global forces in the shaping of return migrant behaviour; and expressions of identity. The human geography of return migration extends beyond geographic movement into a diasporic journey involving (re)constructions of homeness and belongingness in the ancestral homeland. This title can be previewed in Google Books - http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN9789053568781. This title is available in the OAPEN Library - http://www.oapen.org.

By examining the connections between place and identity in the Classic Maya culture that thrived in the Yucatan peninsula and parts of Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras from 350 to 900 CE, Alexandre Tokovinine addresses one of the crucial research questions in anthropology: How do human communities define themselves in relation to landscapes?

The editors bring together an interdisciplinary and international group of creative researchers and theorists to examine the way the stories we tell create our identities. The contributors to this volume explore how, beginning in adolescence and young adulthood, narrative identities become the stories we live by.

Narratives of place link people and geographic location with a cultural imaginary through literature and visual narration. Contemporary literature and film often frame narratives with specific geographic locations, which saturate the narrative with cultural meanings in relation to natural and man-made landscapes. This interdisciplinary collection seeks to interrogate such connections to probe how place is narrativized in literature and film. Utilizing close readings of specific filmic and literary texts, all chapters serve to tease out cultural and historical meanings in respect of human engagement with landscapes. Always mindful of national, cultural and topographical specificity, the book is structured around five core themes: Contested Histories of Place; Environmental Landscapes; Cityscapes; The Social Construction of Place; and Landscapes of Belonging.

In this book, Powell examines the ways that identities are constructed in displacement narratives based on cases of eminent domain, natural disaster, and civil unrest, attending specifically to the rhetorical strategies employed as barriers and boundaries intersect with individual lives. She provides a unique method to understand how the displaced move within accepted and subversive discourses, and how representation is a crucial component of that movement. In addition, Powell shows how notions of human rights and the "public good" are often at odds with individual well-being and result in intriguing intersections between discourses of power and discourses of identity. Given the ever-increasing numbers of displaced persons across the globe, and the "layers of displacement" experienced by many, this study sheds light on the resources of rhetoric as means of survival and resistance during the globally common experience of displacement.

Annotation This text evolved out of a December 1995 conference at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies (IFK) in Vienna, attended by scholars from psychology, psychiatry, philosophy, social sciences, literary theory, classics, communication, and film theory, and exploring the importance of narrative as an expression of our experience, as a form of communication, and as a form for understanding the world and ourselves. Nine scholars from Canada, the US, and Europe contribute 12 essays on the relationship between narrative and human identity, how we construct what we call our lives and create ourselves in the process. Coverage includes theoretical perspectives on the problem of narrative and self construction, specific life stories in their cultural contexts, and empirical and theoretical issues of autobiographical memory and narrative identity. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

Northern Ireland is frequently characterised in terms of a two traditions paradigm, representing the conflict as being between two discrete cultures. Demonstrating the reductionist nature of this argument, this book highlights the complexity of reality.

How does context shape biography? How do language and relationships affect the development of people′s work lives? An international group of scholars from diverse disciplines addresses these and other issues in this volume of The Narrative Study of Lives. They explore what it means to take narrative seriously and how an empathic stance in narrative research opens out on the dialogic self. The contributors also consider questions of how participants make meaning out of their experience in the framework of available interpretive horizons. In addition, there are sections that use narrative approaches to develop a deeper understanding of loneliness and the "coming out" process in homosexuality. This volume examines the many ways in which people interpret their experience and explores conceptual avenues to make use of these understandings in the analysis of human life. Those interested in qualitative methods, evaluation, and education research will find Interpreting Experience to be an invaluable contribution.