Problematizing Identity: Everyday Struggles in Language, Culture, and Education

This book argues that identity as a term needs to be problematized, not taken for granted - for both the risks and the potential that the concept offers to educators for understanding issues of social inequality and how social inequality is being reproduced, and for exploring possible alternative ways educators can work with identity de/formation processes to seek to break the social reproduction structures mediated through identity fixing and essentialization. It provides some of the meta-language and theoretical, analytical tools to embark on such a practice of making the familiar strange, problematizing the taken-for-granted, and uncovering the linguistic, discursive, and cultural processes that serve to subordinate some people while privileging others.

The chapters are organized around three themes: Identity, Class, and Difference; Gender, Ethnicity, and Education; and Gender, Ethnicity, and Language. The diverse sociocultural contexts in which the data and analyses are situated help to illustrate symbolic struggles and identity politics that are being engaged in by peoples in different cultures, languages, and societies of the world, offering insights from multidisciplinary, trans-cultural, and trans-local perspectives.

By offering a comprehensive integration and clarification/ delineation of the different ways identity has been thought about and used in different theoretical traditions, and discussing the implications of different theoretical senses of identity for language educators, this volume will be useful to undergraduate and graduate students, researchers, and educators in sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, discourse analysis, sociology, education, gender studies, and cultural and media studies.