Identity: the management of meaning

Increasingly in recent years scholars working in social sciences, philosophy, the arts and the humanities have taken an intense interest in questions concerning identity. While debates remain lively within and between these disciplines around what identity is and what this means to individuals, the concept is now quite common in popular discourse. In everyday use the word is drawn upon unproblematically to mean individual and / or social belonging that evokes the idea that the two are somehow bound together. In contemporary times we all know how to employ the word and we understand it in other peoples' interactions, it is mainly within academic discourse that the concept is problematized and hence attracts continued attention from scholars. Since the first edition of this volume academic scholars’ interest in identity has increased. The continued study of identity as a concept which locates the individual in a social and symbolic world enables a study of those worlds and thus renders its study both vital and problematic.