Discourses of authenticity and national identity among the Irish diaspora in England

This thesis explores the ways in which Irish people in England draw on discourses of authenticity in constructing and articulating Irish identities. It is based on the theoretical assumption that identities are constructed through discourse, which is understood as a broad horizon of meaning-making. The Irish in England are discussed as a population that negotiate both their personal identities and putative collective identity within discourses of Irishness as diasporic and as a minority identity within multicultural England. It is argued that 'authenticity' is central to both these positionings, but that personal constructions of authentic Irishness may differ from hegemonic constructions. Additionally, a distinction is made between diasporic and transnational Irish identities. Using a convenience sample, participants who self-identified as Irish were recruited from three English cities. Thirty individual interviews and four group discussions were carried out - the interview schedules and analysis was informed by ongoing 'informal' participant observation. In analysing the corpus of data, narratives of a 'typical' Irish life were attended to as well as the rhetorical means by which Irishness was contested. A clear canonical narrative of a 'collective' Irish experience in post-war England emerges, alongside three major areas of contestation through which claims on authenticity were made: public displays of Irishness, local identities, and generational differences. It is concluded that 'authenticity' is central to understanding how individuals situate their personal identities within collective identities. In particular, three distinct but overlapping discourses of Irish authenticity are identified: authenticity through collective experience and memory; authenticity through transnational knowledge and authenticity through diasporic claim. The implications of these findings, the original contribution they make both to Irish Studies and the social psychological study of identity, and how they may inform future study are also discussed, with an emphasis on the need to further examine the importance of county identity

National Dress in the UAE: Constructions of Authenticity

It is easy to assume that national dress as it exists today was an integral part of people’s lives in the pre-oil era, and that this historical connection is the reason that many khaleeji citizens often hold on to it so dearly. However, this Quick Study will argue that the national dress represented as part of deeply rooted history and culture in the UAE is constructed and that the dishdasha and ʿabaya are not as authentic as commonly portrayed

Being authentic is the new image:A qualitative study on the authenticity constructions and self-images of Christian millennials in Africa

The article is a qualitative study that focuses on the authenticity and self-constructions of Christian millennials in Africa. While exploring how 15 respondents manifested their authentic self-behaviours using a case study design, the hallmark of the study was to observe the common coping mechanism of self-regulation, adopted by respondents to deal with their internal crisis. This coping strategy was employed as they remained true to self by creating new “authentic” images of themselves in the forms of the borderline self, the promissory self, the hyphenated self, and the religious self. By implication, looking at the issue of authenticity from an African context has produced an African conceptualisation of authenticity. I argue that African authenticity can be understood by interpreting Africa’s voices of self-expression and images of self-definition, resonating within various African contexts in hope for some kind of cathartic and authentic living experience

Rehabilitation of RC buildings from the late 19th - early 20th centuries - methodological discussion

Reinforced concrete (RC) constructions from the late 19th - early 20th centuries present new challenges associatedto their conservation and repair. The specificities involved in the conservation/rehabilitation of historicaland heritage RC constructions require a special approach that must account for several restrictions. Suchrestrictions are related to the safeguarding of the heritages cultural value, significance and authenticity thathave to be weighed against safety and durability requirements, as well as against duration and budget constraintsof the intervention. For the case of late 19th - early 20th centuries RC constructions, such issues aremore complex since materials have evolved and construction techniques of that era cannot be replicated.Some issues that are raised when dealing with the conservation/rehabilitation of these constructions are addressedherein based on a case study. A methodological approach for the conservation of these constructionsis discussed, highlighting challenges that need to be addressed

Combinatorial Bounds and Characterizations of Splitting Authentication Codes

We present several generalizations of results for splitting authentication codes by studying the aspect of multi-fold security. As the two primary results, we prove a combinatorial lower bound on the number of encoding rules and a combinatorial characterization of optimal splitting authentication codes that are multi-fold secure against spoofing attacks. The characterization is based on a new type of combinatorial designs, which we introduce and for which basic necessary conditions are given regarding their existence.Comment: 13 pages; to appear in "Cryptography and Communications

Rethinking authenticity in digital art preservation

In this paper I am discussing the repositioning of traditional conservation concepts of historicity, authenticity and versioning in relation to born digital artworks, upon findings from my research on preservation of computer-based artifacts. Challenges for digital art preservation and previous work in this area are described, followed by an analysis of digital art as a process of components interaction, as performance and in terms of instantiations. The concept of dynamic authenticity is proposed, and it is argued that our approach to digital artworks preservation should be variable and digital object responsive, with a level of variability tolerance to match digital art intrinsic variability and dynamic authenticity

Best Effort and Practice Activation Codes

Activation Codes are used in many different digital services and known by many different names including voucher, e-coupon and discount code. In this paper we focus on a specific class of ACs that are short, human-readable, fixed-length and represent value. Even though this class of codes is extensively used there are no general guidelines for the design of Activation Code schemes. We discuss different methods that are used in practice and propose BEPAC, a new Activation Code scheme that provides both authenticity and confidentiality. The small message space of activation codes introduces some problems that are illustrated by an adaptive chosen-plaintext attack (CPA-2) on a general 3-round Feis- tel network of size 2^(2n) . This attack recovers the complete permutation from at most 2^(n+2) plaintext-ciphertext pairs. For this reason, BEPAC is designed in such a way that authenticity and confidentiality are in- dependent properties, i.e. loss of confidentiality does not imply loss of authenticity.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figures, TrustBus 201