Let us take the urban construction of a self in the face of city violence. How do city dwellers deal with the danger they feel menaces them?
City inhabitants who perceive
their neighbourhood as ‘out of control,’ or lacking a sense of community
cohesion, experience a consequent lack of confidence in their ability to cope
with attack, or may suffer a highly perceived level of physical vulnerability.
People in such instances devise tactics (narrative) to help deal with, or in
some cases increase their fear through a 'dialogic' interaction with a range of
different circuits of communication.
Thus, it is claimed, they agentively construct and reconstruct themselves via their mix of narrational performances, which are co-present and co-dependent with their 'liturgical' understandings of 'good person/bad person' narratives and their city's 'landscapes of fear'.
This is the kind of appropriation of 'crime' that Thompson (1999 ) describes as 'a narrative of self-identity'.10 In this way, city inhabitants reconstruct their subjectivity, via their mix of narrational performances.
Out of this, the self unfolds as a project that the individual actively constructs out of the available cultural materials, to weave into a coherent account of who he or she is. It is a narrative of self-identity. This narrative will change over time as people draw on new materials, encounter new experiences and gradually refine their identity in the course of a life’s trajectory.
Peter Cheevers' short stories are published by Ether Books
http://catalog.etherbooks.com/Authors/1118
published by Ether Books, download on Kindle
(the above article is an extract from Peter P. Cheevers' PhD available
at:
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