Conflicts and Crisis in the Faculties: The Humanities in an Age of Identity (original) (raw)
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The crisis of 'identity' in high modernity
British Journal of Sociology, 2002
The concept of 'identity' is central to much contemporary sociology, re ecting a crisis that manifests itself in two ways. Firstly, there is a view that identity is both vital and problematic in this period of high modernity. Secondly, while this awareness is re ected in sociology, its accounts of identity are inconsistent, under-theorized and incapable of bearing the analytical load required. As a result, there is an inherent contradiction between a valuing of identity as so fundamental as to be crucial to personal well-being, and a theorization of 'identity' that sees it as something constructed, uid, multiple, impermanent and fragmentary. The contemporary crisis of identity thus expresses itself as both a crisis of society, and a crisis of theory. This paper explores the diverse ways in which 'identity' is deployed before turning to case-studies of its use by Anthony Giddens and Manuel Castells. This strategy demonstrates the widespread and diverse concern with identity before exploring how problematic it has become, even in the work of two of the world's leading sociologists.
The Quandary of the Identity Debate
DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals - DOAJ, 2017
Concepts of identity, identity formation, identity politics, and collective identity, despite being vague, are among the most used notions in social theory, historical analysis, and everyday life and politics. In the last four or five decades "identity" has become a catchword that could explain almost any political or cultural development. In this paper, I discuss existential and social dimensions of identity and identity formation, decode the relational and historical conditions of their construction and argue that identities at any given point of time represent a general (albeit multiple) and fragmented expression of human's capacity. I further contend that identity is a social relation: an embodiment of power structures and power discourses. I end up with some reflections on how we can imagine communities compatible with human emancipation by replacing the particularity of identity with the universalism of humanity and focusing on humanity and discourses of human emancipation. This paper reconstructs the "identity debate" as a part of a conceptual deliberation of the narrative of historical change.
This special issue of Cultural Analytics tackles the urgent question of how social identities can be addressed through computational methods. In particular, it probes the extent to which large datasets can be used to elucidate the kinds of questions that humanities scholars want to ask about historical and representational processes that structure social relations and positions. The papers to be published here emerge from the work of the Text Mining the Novel research partnership, which chose identity as one of its themes of inquiry. This issue is thus situated at the intersection of literary studies and sociology, looking outward toward the novel's construction of ethnicities, genders, class categories, and racial terminology. It is also situated in an emerging scholarly publishing ecology that allows the journal to release articles progressively, as they pass through the peer review process and reach completion, rather than waiting for an entire set to be complete. This introd...
Screening Campus Identity Politics: Cultural Studies, Dear White People, and the American University
Mapping Fields of Study: The Cultural and Institutional Space of English Studies, 2019
http://www.lcdpu.fr/livre/?GCOI=27000100485260&fa=sommaire Identity politics is a vexed term in both academic and popular discourse. Nevertheless, its historical and contemporary influence on American society and culture is indisputable. This is especially true in higher education. This article first introduces contemporary debates about the political efficacy and contemporary practices of identity politics within the space of the American university. Next, it briefly recounts the history of identity politics and the attendant rise of cultural studies as mutually entangled tendencies working both in and against traditional humanistic study. It then turns to an analysis of the contemporary Netflix serial Dear White People to explicate American culture’s own continuing preoccupations with identity politics. Finally, it couches discussions about this series within the universe of circulating cultural narratives which inform our contemporary understandings of the university as a space for the unavoidably political production, consolidation, and evolution of American identities, and the role of English Studies therein. http://www.lcdpu.fr/livre/?GCOI=27000100485260&fa=sommaire
From Identity Politics to Identification Studies
International Journal of Communication, 2011
Today, identity politics seems almost quaint. Faded into memory are NEA funding battles and culture wars over representations of identities, dismantling of identity-based social programs such as college admissions and affirmative action, and the spawning of an all-purpose, anti-progressive code phrase, "politically incorrect." Moreover, scholars, particularly those working in critical/cultural areas, have theorized identity away in a multitude of ways: combining categories into hybrids and cyborgs, challenging its liberal humanist assumptions, critiquing its biases, tracing its processes of discursive constitution, queering its dualisms, and envisioning its aftermath in a post-identity world. Identity-at least insofar as
Even before the term identity-politics came into use, there were those who engaged in a political thought process based in identity. These individuals critiqued not only mainstream culture and society, but the ways in which they believed the left had overlooked the significance of race, gender and sexuality in favor of perspectives it deemed more foundational, such as class, economic structure and later philosophical questions of meaning in form. Frantz Fanon, Ralph Ellison and Simone de Beauvoir were but a few writers who directly criticized the left, pointing out perspectives overlooked in the discourse of social equality and fair distribution of resources. Those who took up the cause of critique from the standpoint of identity had a major task. They were charged with informing the world of leftist thoughtboth in the academy and in the arts-of the urgency to address race, gender and sexuality. Moreover, they had to exhibit the ways in which these critical perspectives could illuminate omissions within the accepted discourses of social and political justice and their cultural manifestations.
Identity and Difference: Contemporary Debates on the Self
Identity and Difference: Contemporary Debates on the Self
The intellectual landscape of the humanities has since the 1960s been overshadowed by the question of identity and differencepolitical and national identity, ethnic and racial identity, gender identity, and, in philosophy, the question of the identity of the self and of the knowing, acting and desiring subject. This is partly due to
Rethinking Identity in Political Science
Political Studies Review, 2020
Political science engages similar types of identity on different terms. There are extensive literatures describing phenomena related to national, ethnic, class, and gender identity; however, these literatures in isolation give us little insight into broader political mechanics of identity itself. Furthermore, many of the theoretical approaches to identity in political science tend to proceed from the macro-level, without conceptualizing its building blocks. How should we conceptualize and operationalize identity in political science? In this article, we examine the existing literature on identity in ethnic politics, nationalism studies, and gender politics to show this disconnect in conceptualizing identity across research agendas. We then provide an integrated model of identity, focusing on how gradations of visibility, conceptualization, and recognition form the basis of claims and conflicts about the politics of identity. We conclude by elucidating a path to overcoming these issues by opening space for a rethinking of identity in political science.