While previous research has explored the academic adaptation or acculturation processes of Chinese students studying abroad, limited attention has been paid to students’ own perspectives and narrations of their experience. To contribute to a more nuanced understanding of this highly mobile group, this study takes a closer look at the students’ self-identity narratives. How do they make sense of their foreign adventure? How do they position themselves among their peers and their family members, as well as within the greater transnational context? Based on 29 in-depth, biographical interviews with Chinese students in the United States, the findings show the participants’ continuously interpreting and revising their individual, academic, and cultural identities. In the familial context, a recurring narrative of the high-potential only-child could be observed. Many students (and their family members) felt that their unique talents and personalities were not appreciated within the Chinese educational system and thus sought more holistic environments abroad.

"Tell me what you eat, I'll tell you who you are," said Anthelme Brillat-Savarin. Today, "You are what you consume" is more apt. Barbara Krueger’s ironic twist of Descartes - "I shop therefore I am" - has lost its irony. Such phrases have become commonplace descriptions of our identity in the contemporary world. In our materialistic world it seems as if there is no debate that our consumption behaviour is fused with our self-identity - shaping it, changing it and often challenging it. The Routledge Companion to Identity and Consumption introduces the reader to state-of-the-art research, written by the world’s leading scholars regarding the interplay between identity and consumption. The book addresses the diverse issues regarding the ways identity affects our consumption behaviour and vice-versa and in doing so, presents a broad perspective on the dynamics of self-identity and consumption. With chapters discussing the theory, research and practical implications of these dynamics, including the way they change across our life span and their expression within different social, cultural and religious contexts, this book will be a valuable reference source for students and academics from a variety of disciplines.

This innovative book applies contemporary and emergent theories of identity formation to timely questions of identity re/formation and development in immigrant families across diverse ethnicities and age groups. Researchers from across the globe examine the ways in which immigrants from Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America dynamically adjust, adapt, and resist aspects of their identities in their host countries as a form of resilience. The book provides a multidisciplinary approach to studying the multidimensional complexities of identity development and immigration and offers critical insights on the experiences of immigrant families. Key areas of coverage include: Factors that affect identity formation, readjustment, and maintenance, including individual differences and social environments. Influences of intersecting immigrant ecologies such as family, community, and complex multidimensions of culture on identity development. Current identity theories and their effectiveness at addressing issues of ethnicity, culture, and immigration. Research challenges to studying various forms of identity. Re/Formation and Identity: The Intersectionality of Development, Culture, and Immigration is an essential resource for researchers, professors, and graduate students as well as clinicians, professionals, and policymakers in the fields of developmental, social, and cross-cultural psychology, parenting and family studies, social work, and all interrelated disciplines.

This book explores how China, and especially China’s Belt and Road Initiative, is viewed in European media and by European think tanks, thereby uncovering European elites’ views of China. Looking across Europe—the European Union, Western Europe (including the United Kingdom), Central Europe, and Eastern Europe—the book reveals a complex picture, with different views in different places, and with different aspects of China disproportionately emphasized in some places. As China’s importance in the world continues to grow, it is crucial to understand how distorted views of China are shaping international relations.

Strategic Narratives, Ontological Security and Global Policy provides a pathbreaking account of why some states successfully convince others to join their policy initiatives, and why others fail. Examining China’s Belt and Road Initiative and COVID-19, Thomas Colley and Carolijn van Noort argue that strategic narratives can help persuade states to join global policy initiatives if they convincingly promise audiences material gain while avoiding undermining their ontological security. They make their case by analysing eight diverse countries: India, Italy, Kazakhstan, Mexico, the Maldives, the Netherlands, the UK and the USA. Theoretically novel and global in scope, this book provides a compelling explanation of how strategic narratives can help achieve the global policy coordination needed to confront vital challenges in contemporary international relations. The proposed strategic narrative buy-in framework is applicable to many global policy issues, be it promoting trade and infrastructure projects, mitigating climate change or managing pandemics.

Identity is one of the most extensively studied constructs in the social sciences. Yet, despite the wealth of findings across many disciplines, identity researchers remain divided over such enduring fundamental questions as: What exactly is identity, and how do identity processes function? Do people have a single identity or multiple identities? Is identity individually or collectively oriented? Personally or socially constructed? Stable or constantly in flux? The Handbook of Identity Theory and Research offers the rare opportunity to address the questions and reconcile these seeming contradictions, bringing unity and clarity to a diverse and fragmented literature. This exhaustive reference work emphasizes the depth and complexity of identity processes and domains and presents perspectives from many different theoretical schools and empirical approaches. Contributing authors provide perspectives from psychology (e.g., narrative, social identity theory, neo-Eriksonian) and from other disciplines (e.g., sociology, political science, ethnic studies); and the editors highlight the links between chapters that provide complementary insights on related subjects. In addition to covering identity processes and categories that are well-known to the field, the Handbook tackles many emerging issues, including: - Identity development among adopted persons. - Identity processes in interpersonal relationships. - Effects of globalization on cultural identity. - Transgender experience and identity. - Consumer identity and shopping behavior. - Social identity processes in xenophobia and genocide. The Handbook of Identity Theory and Research lends itself to a wealth of uses by scholars, clinicians, and graduate students across many disciplines, including social, developmental, and child/school psychology; human development and family studies; sociology; cultural anthropology; gender, ethnic, and communication studies; education; and counseling.

What happens when Chinese American youths travel to mainland China in search of their ancestral roots, only to realize that in many ways they still feel out of place, or when mainland Chinese realize that the lives of the Chinese abroad may not be as good as they had imagined? By considering programs designed to facilitate interactions between overseas Chinese and their ancestral homelands, Andrea Louie highlights how these programs not only create opportunities for new connections but also reveal the disjunctures that now separate Chinese Americans from China and mainland Chinese from the Chinese abroad. Louie focuses on “In Search of Roots,” a program that takes young Chinese American adults of Cantonese descent to visit their ancestral villages in China’s Guangdong province. Through ethnographic interviews and observation, Louie examines the experiences of Chinese Americans both during village visits in China and following their participation in the program, which she herself took part in as an intern and researcher. She presents a vivid portrait of two populations who, though connected through family ties generations back, are meeting for the first time in the context of a rapidly changing contemporary China. Louie situates the participants’ and hosts’ shifting understandings of China and Chineseness within the context of transnational flows of people, media, goods, and money; China’s political and economic policies; and the racial and cultural politics of the United States.

Counternarratives from Asian American Art Educators: Identities, Pedagogies, and Practice beyond the Western Paradigm collects and explores the professional and pedagogical narratives of Asian art educators and researchers in North America. Few studies published since the substantial immigration of Asian art educators to the United States in the 1990s have addressed their professional identities in higher education, K-12, and museum contexts. By foregrounding narratives from Asian American arts educators within these settings, this edited volume enacts a critical shift from Western, Eurocentric perspectives to the unique contributions of Asian American practitioners. Enhanced by the application of the AsianCrit framework and theories of intersectionality, positionality, decolonization, and allyship, these original contributor counternarratives focus on professional and pedagogical discourses and practices that support Asian American identity development and practice. A significant contribution to the field of art education, this book highlights the voices and experiences of Asian art educators and serves as an ideal scholarly resource for exploring their identity formation, construction, and development of a historically underrepresented minoritized group in North America.

One of the "Best Books of 2011" from the Center for Optimal Adult Development The fields of adult development and the study of learning have traditionally been considered separate, with development falling under psychology and learning under education. However, recent ideas, research, and practices that have emerged in these fields of study effectively emphasize the inherent reciprocal relationship that exists between them: advances in development frequently lead to learning, and conversely, learning almost necessarily fuels development. In this second edition of The Oxford Handbook of Reciprocal Adult Learning and Development, the synchronicity between development and learning is explored further, as expert authors advance the latest theories to provide a rich foundation for this new area of study and practice for this interrelated field of study. At the border of two disciplines, this handbook focuses on the capacities of intelligence, meta-cognition, insight, self-efficacy, spirituality, interpersonal competence, wisdom, and other key adult attributes as they relate to positive changes and personal growth in adults. Contexts for development and learning (e.g., the work role and environment) are also addressed, and mixed in throughout the volume are emanating implications for research, practice, and policy. What emerges is a thoughtful handbook for all who promote optimal aging, and is a must-read for academics, psychologists, and practitioners in adult development.