How do we construct identity?

Rosa Grieser

• Publisher: GRIN Verlag
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9783656402503
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Essay from the year 2012 in the subject Communications - Intercultural Communication, grade: 1.7, Charles Darwin University, language: English, abstract: What is Identity?Identity as an abstracted and immaterial term or construct has been taken onby different academics. The philosophy, for instance delves into identity on apersonal level and asked for "Who am I?", "Where do we come from?" and"How do we think?" (Hoffmann: 2010: 70). The psychobiology assumes thatsome parts of our identity are pre-determent by our RNA, a part of our identitywould therefore be a mixture of our parent's ones (Barkhaus: 1996: 31-38).Academics of pedagogic and education are interested in the process of selfdiscoverywithin the puberty (Osterloh: 2010: 31-36). There are many moreschools which are dealing with identity, all of them intersect and influence eachother. The perspective of the Culture Studies1offers in matters of identity multipleapproaches as it is an interdisciplinary field in which perspectives from differentdisciplines can be selectively chosen to observe the relation of cultureand identity (Baker: 2005: 7). The term identity emerged during the 90s as thecentral theme into the cultural studies and raised the question "What is identity?"(Backer: 2005: 219), in order to explain the "…consciousness of self foundin the western world …" (Longhurst/Smith/Bagnall/Crawnford/ Ogborn: 2008: 142).Purpose of this paper is to use the approach of the culture studies to find outhow we, as human, constructed identity. Therefore it is imported to include and analyse elements which make up identity and to embrace how we exhibitone's own identity.