Reconstructing Identity

Book excerpt: This book examines the notion of identity through a multitude of interdisciplinary approaches. It collects current thinking from international scholars spanning philosophy, history, science, cultural studies, media, translation, performance, and marketing, each with an outlook informed by their own subject and a mission to reflect on a theme that is greater than the sum of its parts. This project was born out of a dynamic international and interdisciplinary pedagogical experience. While by no means a teaching guide or textbook, the authors’ experience of sharing the module with their students reinforced the fluidity and elusiveness of identity and its persistent facility to escape disciplinary classification. Identity as a subject for analysis and discussion, and as a lived reality for all of us, has never been more complex and multi-faceted. Each chapter of this singular collection provides a lens through which the concept of identity can be viewed and as the book progresses it moves from ideas based in disciplinary contexts – biology, psychiatry, philosophy, to those developed in multi and inter disciplinary contexts such as area studies, feminism and queer studies.