Date:
Location:
"Identity Change, Identity Politics and Identity Traps: How Pluralism Turns from Political Virtue to Political Vice"
Speaker:
Jennifer Todd, Professor, School of Politics and International Relations; Director, Institute of British-Irish Studies, University College Dublin.
Contact:
Ana Inoa
ainoa@fas.harvard.edu
Chair:
Michèle Lamont, Center Director; Executive Committee; Steering Committee; Faculty Associate; Chair, Weatherhead Research Cluster on Comparative Inequality and Inclusion. Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies; Professor of Sociology and of African and African American Studies, Departments of Sociology and African and African American Studies, Harvard University.
Abstract:
This paper offers a dynamic empirical analysis of micro-identity change and its (potential) macro-impact in politics and social life. It outlines some of the concepts, measures and conclusions from my recently published qualitative research on both parts of Ireland (with a control study in France). Its focus on individual identity innovation – set against analysis of social boundaries and cultural grammars - allows comparative empirical analysis of incipient processes of identity change in very different social settings. Its typology of identity change, oriented to project, content and argumentation, shows the obstacles specific to each type of change and the existence of social traps, where individuals’ resources and opportunities lead them to types of change almost certain to fail. Its conclusions go against contemporary wisdom. Identity change is pervasive, even more so in conflict-ridden situations than in consensual ones. It takes a limited number of forms, working from given national and religious bases rather than rejecting them. And it meets predictable social traps. The paper shows how this leads to a distinctive approach to explaining political reversals – in Northern Ireland from flags to Brexit. Neither pluralist nor cosmopolitan ideologies grasp the process, and there is a need for new constitutional signposts beyond identity politics.
Biography:
Jennifer Todd is Professor, Member of the Royal Irish Academy, Director of the Institute for British Irish Studies at UCD, UN Global Expert, and member of the advisory board of a number of projects, including the Northern Ireland Peace Monitoring Project. She gained her degrees in philosophy from University of Kent at Canterbury (BA) and Boston University (PhD). The focus of her work, from early analyses of aesthetics and politics to current work on conflict and settlement, state change and identity shift, has been on the interrelation of socio-economic and political processes and processes of cultural change. She has extensive publications, individually and jointly, on ethnicity, identity, conflict and Northern Ireland: the most important include her 1996 Cambridge UP Dynamics of Conflict in Northern Ireland, and her studies of ethnicity and identity. She publishes in a range of journals from West European Politics to Theory and Society, from European Journal of Sociology to Political Studies, from Political Psychology to Nations and Nationalism and many more. Her recent externally funded collective research projects have generated two major data sets - on state elite understandings of the Northern Ireland peace process, and on everyday identity change in each part of Ireland in the 2000s. This has formed the focus of her ongoing publications. She has supervised 12 PhDs to successful completion over the last ten years and has mentored over 8 post-doctoral fellows.
For more information, please visit the Cluster website.
