Identity and Membership

Abstract

Researchers studying identity belong to a wide diversity of disciplines, ranging from anthropology, psychology, sociology, history and literature through to linguistics. Within the latter field, identity is studied by discourse analysts, interactional sociolinguists, conversation analysts and discursive psychologists. Identity is often also explicitly related to membership, as the following definition by Kroskrity illustrates. Social identity theory also recognises that though each individual is a member of a number of different social groups, these may differ in salience. Approaches to identity, such as discourse analysis, conversation analysis, discursive psychology and interactional sociolinguistics, tend to focus on naturally occurring oral data that are recorded and then transcribed. This chapter selects one interview with a thirty-three-year-old secondary schoolteacher (IE) who obtained a master's degree in French and Spanish. It discusses an excerpt from the interview in which the interviewer (IR) probes for situations in which the interviewee was the victim of racism.