The Third Euroacademia International Conference
‘Identities and Identifications: Politicized Uses of Collective Identities’

Palazzo Bernardini, Lucca,Tuscany, Italy
19 – 20 June 2015

CALL FOR PAPERS
Deadline for Paper Proposals: 15 May 2015

Conference description:

Identity is one of the crown jeweleries in the kingdom of ‘contested concepts’. The idea of identity is conceived to provide some unity and recognition while it also exists by separation and differentiation. Few concepts were used as much as identity for contradictory purposes. From the fragile individual identities as self-solidifying frameworks to layered in-group identifications in families, orders, organizations, religions, ethnic groups, regions, nation-states, supra-national entities or any other social entities, the idea of identity always shows up in the core of debates and makes everything either too dangerously simple or too complicated. Constructivist and de-constructivist strategies have led to the same result: the eternal return of the topic. Some say we should drop the concept, some say we should keep it and refine it, some say we should look at it in a dynamic fashion while some say it’s the reason for resistance to change.

If identities are socially constructed and not genuine formations, they still hold some responsibility for inclusion/exclusion – self/other nexuses. Looking at identities in a research oriented manner provides explanatory tolls for a wide variety of events and social dynamics. Identities reflect the complex nature of human societies and generate reasonable comprehension for processes that cannot be explained by tracing pure rational driven pursuit of interests. The feelings of attachment, belonging, recognition, the social processes of values formation and norms integration, the logics of appropriateness generated in social organizations are all factors relying on a certain type of identity or identification. Multiple identifications overlap, interact, include or exclude, conflict or enhance cooperation. Identities create boundaries and borders; define the in-group and the out-group, the similar and the excluded, the friend and the threatening, the insider and the ‘other’.

Beyond their dynamic and fuzzy nature that escapes exhaustive explanations, identities are effective instruments of politicization of social life. The construction of social forms of organization or imaginary (as Cornelius Castoriadis theorizes it) and of social practices together with their imaginary significations, require all the time an essentialist or non-essentialist legitimating act of belonging; a social glue that extracts its cohesive function from the identification of the in-group and the power of naming the other. Identities are political. Multicultural slogans populate extensively the twenty-first century yet the distance between the ideal and the real multiculturalism persists while the virtues of inclusion coexist with the adversity of exclusion. Dealing with identities means to integrate contestation into contestation until potentially an n degree of contestation. Due to the confusion between identities and identifications some scholars demanded that the concept of identity shall be abandoned. Identitarian issues turned out to be efficient tools for politicization of a ‘constraining dissensus’ while universalizing terms included in the making of the identities usually tend or intend to obscure the localized origins of any identitarian project. Identities are often conceptually used as rather intentional concepts: they don’t say anything about their sphere but rather defining the sphere makes explicit the aim of their usage. It is not ‘identity of’ but ‘identity to’.

The Third Euroacademia International Conference ‘Identities and Identifications: Politicized Uses of Collective Identities’ aims to scrutinize the state of the art in collective identities research, to bring once more into debate the processes of identity making, identity building in both constructivist or de-constructivist dimensions. It is the aim of the conference to open the floor to dynamic multi-dimensional and inter-disciplinary understanding of identities today.

Conference panels include the following topics:
~ Welcome to the Land of Disputes: Theoretic Contributions to Understanding Identity ~ Modernity and Identity ~ Identities as Endogenous Factors in the Study of Organizations ~ Critical Approaches to Understanding Identity ~ Universal and Local in Identity Making ~ Processes of Identity Building ~ Practices of Identification ~ Identity and Inclusion ~ Identity and Exclusion ~ The Politicization of the European Identity ~ European Union and the Claims of an Emerging Supranational Identity ~ America as a Soft Power: Attraction Through Identitarian Constructs ~ Normative Powers and the Export of Identities ~ Identity and the Power of Naming the Other ~ In-Group – Out-Group Dynamics in Identity Formation ~ Identities as Endogenous Factors in Explaining Political Behaviours ~ Religion and Identities ~ Imagined Communities: Preserving Identity as A Foreigner ~ Art as an Identity Making Process ~ Folklore and the National Identity Narratives ~ History Reading and Identity Making ~ Ideal and Real Multiculturalism: How Inclusive Our Societies Are? ~ Regions and Identities ~ East/West – North/South: Imaginary Geographies of Identities ~ Core/Periphery Claims in Shaping Identities ~ Nested Identities ~ Identitarian Threats ~ Symbols of Identities: Flags, Coins, Stamps and Anthems ~ Cosmopolitanism and Supra-National Identities ~ Film and the Visual Narration of identities ~ Music and the Identitarian Signifiers ~ Literature and Identities ~ Groups, Gangs, Movements and Identities ~ Protest and Identities ~ Ethnicity and Identity ~ Regional Integration Projects and Identity Appropriations ~ Globalization and Identities ~ Uses and Miss-uses of Identities for Political Purposes ~ Organizations and Identities ~ Markets, Products and Identities ~ Consumerism and its Impact on Identity Building ~ Corporate Identity ~ Brand Identity ~ Identity and Conflict ~ Crises of Identity

For more details please see:
http://euroacademia.eu/conference/third-identities-and-identifications/