Randomness and Happenstance

This week, I am thinking deeply about the ways that I have come to conceptualize identity thus far. Each of these readings pushed me in new ways to consider the shortcomings and limitations of my personal conceptualizations (especially as I reflect on my synthesis paper). I found the article by Leander and Frank (2006) to contain the most salient and transparent descriptions of how they are defining identity.  They write, "identity cannot be conceived in either macro (social and cultural) or micro (psychological) units, but must rather be thought of as always in circulation between intensely personal and powerful social forces" (p. 186). When I first read this, I thought…wait, how is that so different from what we've read previously? Doesn't that sound the same as the way that Holland et al (1998) defined identity in figured worlds? As I read on, I came to find that Leander and Frank (2006) were drawing on Holland et al (1998), too (that was a relief…I'm not going crazy…yet :)) as they come to consider hybrid identities in practice and lamination.

Still, I wondered, I'm supposed to be finding something new that includes novel ideas about identity. Why isn't there a different definition in here? What am I supposed to be discovering? That's when I realized that it wasn't only the definition, these researchers were using to describe what identity is but also the way that researchers theoretically and methodologically oriented their pieces that spoke to how they accounted for these macro and micro units happening altogether. A single line stuck out to me from Leander and Boldt (2012) that spoke to the way these research projects were situating identity. It reads, "it matters not only where we look but also when we look where" (p. 27). This spoke to me as I am thinking about nonrepresentation emergence (rhizomes) and assemblage theories as placing an emphasis on the unknown, the constant state of unpredictability that we live in and when we choose to enter into explorations of aspects of identities in the research, recognizing that these performances are tied up within a never ending multitude of possibilities that lack organization and happen to come together in particular ways.

In addition to this exploration of when, I also am focusing on the theme among these articles to decenter the text in literacy explorations of identity. Leander and Frank (2006) emphasized this major point in their departure from the New London Group and the research aspect of this departure was apparent in the ways that Leander and Boldt (2012) explored Lee's identity throughout a single day. It was Lee's being in time and space, often a randomness and happenstance, that created various identity performances. Much of this involved his interactions with his reading of Manga but many of his identity moves did not. In this way, I came to see Leander and Boldt's (2012) emphasis on the text as a piece of the identity performance that viewed "texts [that] are artifacts of literacy practice but do not describe literacy practice itself" (p. 36).

The freshness this brings to my lens of exploring identity centers on this idea of messiness and randomness. Kuby and Vaughn (2015) describe the process of attempting to capture these moments as "literacy desiring" in which the researcher accounts for the "unfolding, unexpected, agentic and in-the-moment aspects of creating multimodal artefacts" (p. 435). As I consider my own future research, I often think about the messiness of my former classroom and the ways I might go about doing research in that classroom. Especially as I think about the learners who I seek to represent, I can't help but be cautious about how much I interpret or assume based on what happens in specific interactions with identities, moments of agency and systems of power. This post-structural orientation that Kuby and Vaughn (2015) describe as historically being situated in issues of power but also encompassing departures from the expected and notions of becoming almost provides me with a sense of relief. Yes, it is ok that the research is and will inevitably will be messy. So goes life.

I'll leave this with one final thought. Perhaps the most profound statement I take from all of these articles came from Kuby and Vaughn (2015) who wrote, "any identity that a child enacts is always partial" because we are constantly performing and negotiating "particular aspects of our identities but other aspects might not be revealed" (p. 442). In the messiness, we perform parts of ourselves…not all of ourselves. We choose to translate ourselves in certain ways and those around us translate us simultaneously (Alim et al, 2016). Some of these identity negotiations and co-translations are conscious. Some aren't. It is in accounting for the randomness and partiality of our shifting existences that I am coming to consider the role identity plays.