New Standing Section for GNCS Launched: Identities

Identities

Márcia Gonçalves

Leiden University

marcia.goncalves[@]eui.eu

Identities

Márcia Gonçalves

Leiden University

marcia.goncalves@eui.eu

Identity has been a salient scholarly term across the humanities and social sciences since the mid-twentieth century. It can be understood as either an individual or collective phenomenon, as something that either persists through change or is unstable, as the result of self-identification processes or as something attributed by others. These ambiguities of meaning have inspired diverse and even contradictory theoretical approaches, leading to reflections on whether ‘identity’ is useful as an analytical concept. The categories of analysis developed by contemporary scholars, however, often differ from those that people in the past created and relied on to explain and organise their social practices. This section welcomes submissions that lay bare the contingent and possibly contradictory processes by which historical actors produced, organised, used, and contested identities and processes of identification in any particular setting — within and among imperial formations, regions, or nations — in the long nineteenth century.