As figured worlds are always embedded in systems of social relations, they are socially organised around positions of rank and influence and are populated by social personages. A positioning perspective helps us understand the way in which people comprehend and enact their positions. AA members’ personal stories in AA meetings not only mediate identity but index claims to certain social relationships, positions and perspectives.
Spaces, too, imbue and are imbued by the kinds of persons who frequent them; conventional forms of activity likewise become impersonated. The dialect we speak, the degree of formality we adopt in our speech, the deeds we do, the places we go, the emotions we express, and the clothes we wear are treated as indicators of claims to and identification with social categories and positions of privilege relative to those with whom we are interacting (Holland et al, 2003, p. 127).
The concept of positional identities forwarded by Dorothy Holland, William Lachicotte Jr, Debra Skinner and Carole Cain (2001) is closely entwined with the figured worlds inhabited. It is another facet of lived identities. It is a very important concept to explore further in that whilst agents may choose an identity in a given situation, that choice is always constrained. It depends on the affordances of the situation. Holland et al demonstrate vividly how figured worlds have their own valued qualities and means of assessing social worth. In carry out interviews in Naudada, a rural hill community in Nepal, an incident occurred that gives a first- hand picture of the social significance of a caste identity. Debra Skinner and Dorothy Holland were interviewing on the second-floor balcony of a three-story house. They were about to interview a woman called Gyanumaya. Debra Skinner called down to her that they wanted to interview her on the balcony, intending to bring her through the kitchen and up the
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stairs. Gyanumaya took a different route and scaled the outside of the house. She crawled up the vertical outside wall and made her way around the balcony to an opening in the railing. She climbed up the house because it was her way of not going through the house and polluting the hearth of another person. This event was very significant for Holland as it prompted her to unravel the cultural significance of caste and pollution learned from
childhood, which was an essential force inside Gyanumaya, directing her behaviour. Hence, positionality is about the way in which behaviour signals the nature of one’s social relations with others. As my view of identity in this chapter is built on identity formation in the day- to-day, moment -to-moment encounters, participants positionality or social relations with one another is a central aspect of their identities and the kind of people they become. It focuses on a person’s apprehension of their social position in a lived world. It depends on the others present, also their greater or lesser access to spaces, activities, genres, and, through those genres, authoritative voices, or any voice at all. Positioning is a central aspect of my
argument for the social development of identity. It is a good metaphor for understanding how people place themselves socially in interaction or take stances relative to those of other people, thereby serving to explain the meaning of those actions. Both positionality and figured worlds are conceptually rich in demonstrating how identities unfold in moment-by- moment interactions.
Positional identities depend on who is present in the interaction (Holland et al, 2001). This is central to the kind of people we are allowed to become. Ray McDermott captures very well how people can be positioned or bounded by others. In his 2001 study, the acquisition by a child of a learning disability he illustrates how Adam has been labelled as learning disabled by the school system. Learning Disability is a category made real by the school system and it is a position that will be occupied. Adam is labelled: this is how he is positioned and as a result the opportunities for him to develop his identity are bounded.
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It probably makes more sense to talk about how learning acquires people more than it makes sense to talk about how people acquire learning. Individually we may spend our time trying to learn, but this phenomenon pales before the fact that however hard we try we can only learn what is around us to be learned (McDermott, 1996, p.277).
Hence for McDermott, identity unfolds in the everyday spaces and we become who we are allowed to become. Learning is a shift in identity and positionality, is a stepping stone into a learning space involving other people. It is this learning that leads to identity transformation. In any group engaged in jointly creating and participating in a figured world, day-to-day practices always position the participants situationally, relative to one another.
Positional identities have to do with the day-to-day, on the ground relations of power, deference and entitlement, social affiliation and distance with the social- interactional, social-relational structures of the lived world (Holland et al, 2001, p.127).
The unfolding of identity in the everyday sees participants in collaborative activities engage in conversation and interaction that serves to construct their own social position and their social relations with one another. (Holland et al, 2001:133). Hence identity in these terms is relational and can be explored through descriptions of daily activity and social relations in practice. Identity traces our participation in activities and is formed in these moment by moment interactions. The individual must be motivated to engage in the field of practice modelled by mature practitioners, who offer images of future identities. Mature participants must in turn be open to the transformative possibilities that may result from participation by newcomers. hence other people become the active instruments of one’s agency. We must be mindful that even though this research site is a dynamic place with boundless possibilities for the making of new selves, people can be positioned and bound up by those around them. My view of learning as a shift in identity sees people allowed to display different competencies as they shift their participation. They can be positioned differently and their experience and participation have the power to transform them in the every- day encounters of this social
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space. As any group engaged in jointly creating and participating in a figured world, day-to- day practices will call upon participants to make sense of this space in their quest for a new identity. In the next section of the chapter I will explore how participants make sense of their figured worlds and learn to author a self from within.
It is through participation in a world with particular designs, structures, constraints and opportunities that identities become positioned. This newly amalgamated school is a new world that has to be discovered by its new participants. It will take time for the opportunities to develop for its participants. Identities are relational at all times, in that relational identity has to do with how one identifies one’s position relative to others. (Holland et al, 2001:127). Some positional identities and their associated markers are clearly figured. These figured aspects of relational identities become relatively conscious for anyone successfully recruited into the figured world (Holland et al, 2001:140). These positional identities develop
heuristically over time. People may develop a sense of their worlds, an expertise in the use of cultural artefacts, that may come to re-mediate their positions in them. These positional identities are arrived at over the long term. The long term happens through day-to-day encounters and is built, again and again, by means of artefacts, or indices of positioning, that newcomers gradually learn to identify themselves with, either positively or negatively, through either acceptance or rejection.
This next section continues to develop theoretical perspectives around figured worlds and how people make their mark on new spaces within them. This ensures that identities are indeed made in the everyday through daily interaction with those around us. Some identities become salient in different situations. This occurs as one engages in and performs practices, as we assume identities. This practice is of course always historical and evolves overtime. It has a context and a history which has to be recognised. I will explore the mediational tools,
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like language, that help participants to shape figured worlds and author their place in the story.
Holland continues to aid our understanding of how these identities grow and develop when she describes the space of authoring. This authorship is not a choice. It is a matter of
orchestration and the arrangement of the social discourses and practices available. Hence in meaning making we author the world. The author works within or against a set of
constraints. Language is not neutral.
All words have the “taste” of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour. Each word tastes of the context and the contexts in which one has lived its socially charged life; all words and forms are populated by intentions (Holland et al, 2003, p.171).
In essence, Holland et al. argue that our authored self is a fusion of how we see ourselves, how we are seen by others, and how we see others as seeing ourselves. Figured worlds and their situated realisations, rendered collectively and personally as spaces of authoring, are socially animated by groupings that may not be reified as social groups. The politics of participation in figured worlds, more specifically who may enter the social circle of a group of teachers or pupils and how members gain or lose place among themselves will determine the space for authoring available to my research participants. In the next section of this chapter I will explore further how figured worlds are opened up to participants through mediational means. Mediational means are the shaping resources for the acting and performing of the self and hence the carving tools of identities.
Holland et al, introduces the idea of making worlds, as a means of identity building,
reshaping selves and lives. Children’s play is instrumental in the building of their symbolic competencies. In a similar way, adults must engage in social play in order to develop new social competencies in newly imagined communities. Play is viewed as the medium of mastery of ourselves as human actors. It is the opening out of thought within the activity of
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play that allows for the emergence of new figured worlds, or of refiguring worlds that reshape selves and lifestyles. Bakhtin (1981), contends that having a space for authoring is central to the development of identity and this is now rationalised.