The Negotiation of Religious Identity of Muslim Women in Leh District, Ladakh

This paper examines the negotiation of religious identity among Sunni Muslim women in Leh, Ladakh. Although Muslims in Leh share the same socio-cultural environment with Buddhists, the differences between the two communities have become more pronounced in recent decades. The assertion of religious identity and increasing religiosity in the form of vegetarianism among Buddhists and strict veiling among Muslim women are fairly visible. Changes are also seen in religious practices, including the imposition of a strict prohibition on dance, music, and alcohol consumption among Muslims. Here, I explore the manner in which religious identity is perceived and propagated among Muslim women in urban Leh. I discuss processes of identity formation and examine the emergence of religion as the most salient source of personal and social identity among Muslim women. The research addresses the question of how women use their agency for religious activities, institutional learning, choice of dress and mobility. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, I depict socio-religious changes among them with reference to dress, mobility and lay sermons. The study discusses the motivations behind these changes and the reasons for Muslim women’s focus on the collective identity that distinguishes them from the wider Ladakhi society

Language motivation in a reconfigured Europe: access, identity, autonomy

In this paper, I propose that we need to develop an appropriate set of conceptual tools for examining motivational issues pertaining to linguistic diversity, mobility and social integration in a rapidly changing and expanding Europe. I begin by drawing on research that has begun to reframe the concept of integrative motivation in the context of theories of self and identity. Expanding the notion of identity, I discuss the contribution of the Council of Europe's European Language Portfolio in promoting a view of motivation as the development of a plurilingual European identity and the enabling of access and mobility across a multilingual Europe. Next, I critically examine the assumption that the individual pursuit of a plurilingual identity is unproblematic, by highlighting the social context in which motivation and identity are constructed and embedded. To illuminate the role of this social context, I explore three inter-related theoretical frameworks: poststructuralist perspectives on language motivation as 'investment'; sociocultural theory; and theories of autonomy in language education. I conclude with the key message that, as with autonomy, language motivation today has an inescapably political dimension of which we need to take greater account in our research and pedagogical practice

Identity and Mobility: Historical Fractionalization, Parochial Institutions, and Occupational Choice in the American Midwest

This paper examines the role played by identity, or a sense of belonging to a home community, in determining occupational choice and mobility. The analysis links competition between migrant networks in the Midwest when it was rst developing, and the in-group identity that emerged endogenously to support these networks, to institutional participation and occupational choice today. Individuals born in counties with greater ethnic fractionalization in 1860, where identity was more likely to have emerged, are (i) significantly more likely to participate in institutions such as churches and parochial schools that transmit identity from one generation to the next, and (ii) significantly less likely to select into mobile skilled occupations 150 years later. The effect of historical fractionalization on participation in these socializing institutions actually grows stronger over the course of the twentieth century, emphasizing the idea that small initial differences in identity can have large long-term effects on institutions and economic choices.identity, institutional persistence, networks, occupational choice, mobility

Intergenerational Educational Mobility and Identity: a French-Argentine Comparative Study

This study forms part of the author’s longstanding research regarding social, educational and professional mobility observed in Argentina across three generations, associated with the factor of Education and with the greater flow of immigrants in the last century. This research encompasses various smaller studies. Here we mention one, a French-Argentine comparative study in which we worked with PhDs from different institutions and different social science PhD programs. Our objective was: a) to analyze what factors (quantitative) and what reasons (qualitative) positively and negatively impacted professional pathways (career mobility); b) to observe the level of educational mobility present in families with PhDs, taking the issue from different paradigms (reproductionist/interactionist): University of elites? University of the masses? The methodology was both quantitative and qualitative, using semi-structured surveys (which included open-ended statements so respondents could expand); the hierarchical evocation technique and interviews. Results: a) we observed the intergenerational educational mobility of PhDs (quantitative-descriptive level); b) we understood some of the “reasons” and “sense” that underlie said mobility and that have either acted as driving forces or have not acted as driving forces of social and cultural-educational promotion (qualitative level). c) We found similar levels of intergenerational educational mobility for PhDs in France and Argentina (graduates of various PhD programs). This result is interesting in the face of well-held myths of educational “hypo mobility” , intergenerational drops in mobility, stagnation, a lack of educational/cultural promotion under “plafond” effects, or a saturation of degree holders, above all in developed countries. From the point of view of identity, this high level of intergenerational educational mobility impacted national, institutional and micro individual identity; three planes in sustained interaction using the author’s theory: The Three Dimensional Spiral of Sense ((2015 a and b).Fil: Aparicio, Miriam Teresita. Universidad Nacional de Cuyo. Facultad de Filosofía y Letras; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Mendoza; Argentin

Lifestyle travellers: Backpacking as a way of life

Scholarship on backpackers speculates some individuals may extend backpacking to a way of life. This article empirically explores this proposition using lifestyle consumption as its framing concept and conceptualises individuals who style their lives around the enduring practice of backpacking as ‘lifestyle travellers’. Ethnographic interviews with lifestyle travellers in India and Thailand offer an emic account of the practices, ideologies and social identity that characterise lifestyle travel as a distinctive subtype within backpacking. Departing from the drifter construct, which (re)constitutes this identity as socially deviant, the concept of lifestyle allows for a contemporary appraisal of these individuals’ patterns of meaningful consumption and wider insights into how ongoing mobility can lead to different ways of understanding identities and relating to place. Keywords: lifestyle consumption; backpacker; mobility; drifter; identit

Travel and “Homing In” in Contemporary Ethnic American Short Stories

In American ethnic literature of the last three decades of the 20th century, recurrent themes of mobility, travel, and “homing in” are emblematic of the search for identity. In this essay, which discusses three short stories, Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use,” Louise Erdrich’s “The World’s Greatest Fishermen,” and Daniel Chacon’s “The Biggest City in the World,” I attempt to demonstrate that as a consequence of technological development, with travel becoming increasingly accessible to ethnic Americans, their search for identity assumes wider range, transcending national and cultural boundaries

Design and implementation of the node identity internetworking architecture

The Internet Protocol (IP) has been proven very flexible, being able to accommodate all kinds of link technologies and supporting a broad range of applications. The basic principles of the original Internet architecture include end-to-end addressing, global routeability and a single namespace of IP addresses that unintentionally serves both as locators and host identifiers. The commercial success and widespread use of the Internet have lead to new requirements, which include internetworking over business boundaries, mobility and multi-homing in an untrusted environment. Our approach to satisfy these new requirements is to introduce a new internetworking layer, the node identity layer. Such a layer runs on top of the different versions of IP, but could also run directly on top of other kinds of network technologies, such as MPLS and 2G/3G PDP contexts. This approach enables connectivity across different communication technologies, supports mobility, multi-homing, and security from ground up. This paper describes the Node Identity Architecture in detail and discusses the experiences from implementing and running a prototype

Spaceprint: a Mobility-based Fingerprinting Scheme for Public Spaces

In this paper, we address the problem of how automated situation-awareness can be achieved by learning real-world situations from ubiquitously generated mobility data. Without semantic input about the time and space where situations take place, this turns out to be a fundamental challenging problem. Uncertainties also introduce technical challenges when data is generated in irregular time intervals, being mixed with noise, and errors. Purely relying on temporal patterns observable in mobility data, in this paper, we propose Spaceprint, a fully automated algorithm for finding the repetitive pattern of similar situations in spaces. We evaluate this technique by showing how the latent variables describing the category, and the actual identity of a space can be discovered from the extracted situation patterns. Doing so, we use different real-world mobility datasets with data about the presence of mobile entities in a variety of spaces. We also evaluate the performance of this technique by showing its robustness against uncertainties