What is ‘identity’?

Supervisors:

• Naomi de Ruiter
• Marian Counihan

Identity is something that we all have some kind of understanding of, opinions of, and experiences with.

But what are we actually talking about when we refer to the phenomenon of ‘identity’? Identity is understood in a range of ways across disciplines; from something cultural to something linguistic, from something that we can reflect upon and ‘know’ to something that we inadvertently ‘do’. What should we make of this bag of mixed phenomena? In this project, we will explore this together. Each sub-team will select a specific disciplinary orientation to ‘identity’ to focus on and conduct empirical work on.

Together, we will attempt to understand how these endeavors to understand ‘identity’ relate to each other.