The researchers in this volume have studied individuals' definitions of their marked or stigmatised identities. The diversity of identities and the incorporation of marginalized social groups into society reflects both social developments and new forms of prejudice revealed in social labels. Both the construction of individuals' and groups' identities and the descriptions made by authoritative sources need to be studied.
There are eight chapters besides an introduction and an afterword. One set of chapters shows how people's understanding of social groups is affected by social marking. Based on semistructured interviews with Irish women travellers in the south of England, Roberta Piazza studied their self images as providers of decent living standards for their families and how they actively dealt with society's negative stereotypes of their community. Hilary Bruffell conducted a qualitative content analysis of 115 articles on teenage mothers in major UK national daily newspapers in 1999 and 2003, to find out how the mothers resisted negative stereotypes to construct an identity as good mothers who are responsible for their children and positive about their future. Molly Andrews interviewed East Germans, studying how they reconceptualised their relation to the state, why they had a strong sense of themselves as East German, and how East German life was represented in pop culture.
Other chapters show how the views of professionals might influence people's identity construction. Georgia-Zetta Kougiali analysed the life stories of drug users to explore their changes from addiction to recovery, suggesting that ‘identity shapes and is shaped through the personal experience of time’ (167). Similarly, Alessandra Fasulo studied the autobiographical texts of Philip, who suffered from Asperger syndrome. His self-understanding of this social group is contrary to notions about them as withdrawn and antisocial.
A further set of chapters shows how marked groups may express their own definitions of identity. Roberta Piazza & Antonia Rubino analysed interviews with Italian Jewish witnesses of racial laws, who were persecuted under the Mussolini regime. The authors studied how the witnesses transformed their historical identity into a positive collective identity as members of the Memory Project, and how they tried to heal their suffering by remembering and recounting. Phoebe Trimingham interviewed five homeless people in Brighton, UK, in 2012, investigating how their multiple and changing identities and individuality were reconstructed and how they preserved distinctiveness against their stigmatised identity in order to justify themselves and be treated equally. Maria I. Medved & Jens Brockmeier interviewed Aboriginal Canadian students with heart disease who attended residential schools. By studying their use of language, life stories, conceptions of health and illness, and interviews, the researchers explored their uniqueness and their sense of care for their Aboriginal community members.
In sum, the researchers in this volume have studied how different social groups see themselves in relation to others and how their identities are constructed in their life narratives so as to change others' views about them. This volume is a useful reference for researchers and graduate students interested in identity studies, the ethnography of communication, social psychology, and politics.
