Navigating Social Identity: A Young Adult Story of Time

Book excerpt: This book is focused on youth and young adults. We explore aspects of how youth are socialized and how they frame and form their self-identity. Our book looks at Kuwait, a multifaceted society which is often misunderstood by the Western world as mired in a legacy of war, hard-line Islamic values and oil. However, Kuwait is a sophisticated cosmopolitan where Islamic values mesh with Western ideals on consumerism, dating, media consumption and liberal arts education. Our book is centered on the youth and young adults in a society who are modernizing Kuwait beyond its concrete and glass skyscrapers and Western luxury brands. We explore the numerous aspects of the lives of young adults from media consumption, to the effects of gender segregation in university life, to altruism, to social media habits, the effects of Western cultural imperialism on their body image to depression and coping skills, and most recently, the effects of living with a pandemic.