Communicating Identity: Critical Approaches provides a poststructuralist engagement with contemporary theories of identity, which view identity as a construction, negotiation, and a process of communicative messages. Embracing an intersectional investigation of identity and examining the critical interworkings of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation, this edited anthology contemplates the shifting and fluid dimensions of identities within spatial, temporal, and discursive contexts.
Bringing together works from scholars in the disciplines of organizational communication, critical/cultural studies, rhetorical and media studies, performance studies, and intercultural communication, the text is divided into four sections:
- Theorizing Identity provides a poststructuralist introduction to identity through differing conceptual frameworks that highlight the performative, relational, and intersectional dimensions of identity formations.
- Organizing Identity looks to institutional and national contexts to examine how systems of power and hierarchal structures within organizing discourses work to shape, mold, constrain, and produce disciplined identities.
- Representing Identity looks to popular culture, online environments, and personal accounts of experience as sites of identity production and negotiation.
- Performing Identity shifts attention to the spatial, temporal, and embodied dimensions of identity work, theorizing performative dimensions that resist and rearticulate identity discourses.
Jason Zingsheim (PhD, Arizona State University) is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Governors State University, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in interculturalƒ*