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
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
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