Definition Of Identity

43 the static and singular condition implied by the term ‘identity’. This position offers a more flexible and fluid construct with which to frame the vast number of potential and temporal identifications a person can make (ibid). Identifications present opportunities for belongings and rejections (all of which are potentially contradictory), through which people individually and collectively understand their locatedness and social relationships (Weeks, 1990). We all create, and continually rework, a sense of who we are and what we do. These identifications provide a means of making sense of lived experiences. Through the stories and descriptions of their work, as they envisage themselves undertaking treatments and describing their treatment
preferences, the participants reveal the sense they make of their learning (Giddens, 2013) and the formation of professional identifications.
Giddens (2013) suggests that when tradition dominates, we do not have to think much about our actions but, in a situation of change, the self is challenged to a greater extent. The globalisation processes of easier travel and communications, as well as global economics have facilitated health worker migration from one culture to another and, hence, have stimulated huge challenges to ‘self’ as these workers start a new life in a different environment. Students moving from one geography and culture to another physically embody the life trajectories or journeys suggested by Giddens (ibid) and Bauman (1996) to describe postmodern life experiences. When faced with the tension and confusion that altered identifications create, the response of the self is to generate new selves (Humphreys & Brown, 2002b) and new ways of being become apparent (Holland et al., 2001).
Exposure to English assumptions about physiotherapy practice generates new understandings for the research participants that go beyond their acquisition of knowledge and skills, to include identification effects. These are the transformations they express as they negotiate the tensions and ambiguity between what they were and what they could be in the new situation in which they find themselves (Lincoln, 1997). Howells (2002) suggests that these changes arise through social interaction and through collaboration with other learners in a shared social, organisational and cultural situation. It is these
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located practices of the classroom, as well as the professional content of the course, that come to the fore in this research.
The classroom becomes a place of interaction and communication between cultures and, according to social learning theories, also a place where practice knowledge can be shared about the complex behaviours, skills and attitudes involved in working as a physiotherapist (Sarpong, 2008). So the remembered world of practice in India, the perceived world of practice in England and also the contemporary setting of the interviews (the world of UK Higher Education) are the social and creatively imagined worlds through and within which our discussions
flowed.
There are different views of identifications, and these form a spectrum ranging from entirely individual to completely social constructions and these form different areas of study.
For example, psychological perspectives focus on identification as a mechanism through which the issues relating to personhood and psychotherapy can be explored (Craib, 1998). At the other end of the spectrum, Foucault (1988), early on in his career, argued that, despite appearing to come from within, identifications were in no way individual or internal. He suggested that society - with its power constraints, rules and regulations - forms restraints, and what is internally felt are actually projections onto individuals from the outside. However a compromise view suggests that identifications can be used to explore the understanding of both individual and collective ways of being (Humphreys & Brown, 2002b) and reveal both the psychological and social environments in which narratives are located (Holland et al., 2001; Merriam & Heuer, 1996). It is this understanding that I use in my research, one that recognises the structural forces that contain and shape our practices, but also embraces individual
agency.