The links below provide an outline of the material for this lesson. Be sure to carefully read through the entire lesson before returning to Canvas to submit your assignments.
Note: You can print the entire lesson by clicking on the "Print" link above.
In the previous two lessons, we introduced you to human geography and cultural geography, and to the intersections of human geography with intelligence and military operations, which have implications also for human security. In this lesson, we will begin diving into some of the theoretical concepts used in cultural geography that have particular significance to issues of intelligence and human security.
This lesson and the two that follow focus on identity. In this lesson, we lay out the theoretical foundation for how identity is conceptualized and used in cultural geography, which we will expand on in lessons 4 and 5.
Warning: this lesson has some of the heaviest and longest lecture notes that you will encounter this term. We strongly recommend that you pace yourself accordingly. It also includes several exercises intended to get you thinking about the material. We expect that you will do them as you read the content. They are not graded, and you do not need to turn them in.
Upon completion of this lesson, you will be able to:
If you have any questions now or at any point during this week, please feel free to post them to the GEOG 571 - General Discussion Forum. (That forum can be accessed at any time in Canvas by opening the Lesson 0: Welcome to GEOG 571 module in Canvas.)
This lesson is one week in length. Please refer to the Calendar in Canvas for specific time frames and due dates. To finish this lesson, you must complete the activities listed below. You may find it useful to print this page out first so that you can follow along with the directions.
Step | Activity | Access/Directions |
---|---|---|
1 | Read the Lesson 3 online lecture notes. | The lecture notes can be accessed by clicking on the Lesson 3: Identity I - Foundations link in the Lessons menu on this page. |
2 |
Required |
Ehrkamp, P. (2008). Risking publicity: Masculinities and the racialization of public neighborhood space. Social & Cultural Geography, 9(2),117-132. Hopkins, P., Botterill, K., Sanghera, G., and Arshad, R. (2017). Encountering misrecognition: Being mistaken for being Muslim. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 107(4), 934-948. Note: Registered students can access the readings above in Canvas by clicking on the Library Resources link. Krogstad, J. M. (2014, March 24). Census Bureau explores new Middle East/North Africa ethnic category [1]. Pew Research Center. Wang, H. L. (2018, January 29). No Middle Eastern or North African category on 2020 census, bureau says [2]. NPR. |
3 | Optional Reading |
Dowling, R. and McKinnon, K. (2014). Identities. In R. Lee, N. Castree, R. Kitchin, V. Lawson, A. Paasi, S. Radcliffe, and C. W. J Withers (Eds.), The Sage handbook of human geography (pp. 627-648). Sage. Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. New York: Vintage Books. Note: Penn State students should be able to access the optional readings though the Penn State Librareis. (Penn State Access ID login required.) |
4 | Complete the Lesson 3 Discussion Forum. | Post your answer to the Lesson 3 Discussion Forum in Canvas and comment on classmates' responses. You can find the prompt for the assignment in the Lesson 3 Discussion Forum in the Lesson 3: Identity I - Foundations module in Canvas. |
5 | Submit the Lesson 3 Written Brief Assignment. | Instructions for the assignment can be found on page 3.10 [3] of this lesson. Submit your written assignment to the Lesson 3 Written Brief assignment dropbox in the Lesson 3: Identity I - Foundations module in Canvas. |
Much like culture, identity is a slippery concept. In its most basic form, we think of identity as answering the question “Who are you?” — but this is a far more complicated question than it first seems.
Exercise 1:
Consider the question “Who are you?” Set a timer for 30 seconds. Use that time to list as many answers for yourself to that question as you can. Don’t think about your answers as you list them; just go with whatever comes to mind during the time allowed. Do not move on to the next exercise until you have completed this one.
Exercise 2:
After finishing the exercise above, consider your response. How many answers did you come up with? Did you run out of time, or were there more answers you could have provided? Are there commonalities or patterns that you notice within your answers? Do you give equal weight to all of your answers? If not, which ones do you prioritize? Do you think your answers would stay the same regardless of who was asking? Do you think your answers would stay the same regardless of where you were when you were asked? For both of these last two questions: why or why not?
As you may have discovered in the exercises above, it is difficult to pin a person’s identity to a single answer. If you were to compare your answers with other students, you might find that there are several different ways that people respond to the question.
Perhaps because of this complexity, the question of identity is a thread that has wound its way through the humanities and social sciences. A substantial corpus of scholarship has developed around identity in a number of disciplines, including philosophy (luminaries such as Plato, Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, and Kant are just a starting point; see also the work of Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault and Daniel Dennett for vastly different perspectives), psychology (see, e.g., the work of Freud, Erikson, or Tajfel), anthropology (see, e.g., the work of Anthony Cohen, Nigel Rapoport, or Martin Sökefeld), and sociology (from Erving Goffman to Sheldon Stryker). More recently, fields such as cognitive science and neuroscience have taken up identity as an area of research (see, e.g., Bechtel, 1988; Clark, 2000; Pickersgill et al., 2011; or Sheepers & Derks, 2016).
There is no clear consensus on what identity means or what about it is worthy of studying: a philosopher might be concerned with identity as some essential quality, or with the sameness of a thing to itself (does a person remain identical over the course of life?); a psychologist might define it as a person’s sense of self that emerges during adolescence; and a sociologist might emphasize a distinction between personal identity and group or collective identity.
Given the wide array of perspectives on identity, there has been considerable debate about its effectiveness as an analytical tool. Just as we saw with culture, some theorists argue that identity is a meaningless or analytically useless concept because it accounts for too much of human experience, and suggest that it should be jettisoned entirely in favor of other, more precisely defined terms such as “self-understanding,” or more processual terms like “identification” (see, e.g., Brubaker & Cooper, 2000). Despite the theoretical critiques leveled at identity, it remains an important concept within human geography, particularly within the subfields of cultural geography and political geography.
Geographers borrow from sociologists and social theorists, including the late cultural theorist Stuart Hall, whose later publications provided a major theoretical framework for the ways that human geographers think about identity. Hall combined strands of discourse theory and psychoanalytic theory to argue that identity is multiple, contingent, and always in a process of becoming rather than a state of being. Yet while Hall is a prominent figure, some geographers overlook serious theoretical discussions of identity and instead rely on looser, less-articulated notions that come from a wide variety of theoretical perspectives (see Dowling & McKinnon, 2014 for a deeper discussion).
Despite this eclectic approach, we generally agree on a couple basics: first, that identities are relational (that is, they are based on the positions we occupy in various social categories); amd second, that they are also complex and socially constructed (that is, they depend in part on dynamic external factors). Geographers rarely talk about the formation of identity (this is better situated within the domain of psychology), but many would argue that identity results from both internal and external processes (i.e., self-identity and categorization, respectively). The remainder of this lesson will explore these aspects of identity in greater detail. The final section of this lesson will consider the role of place in identity.
Dowling, R. and McKinnon, K. (2014). Identities. In R. Lee, N. Castree, R. Kitchin, V. Lawson, A. Paasi, S. Radcliffe, and C. W. J. Withers (Eds.), The Sage handbook of human geography (pp. 627-648). Sage.
Bechtel, W. (1988). Philosophy of mind: An overview for cognitive science. Erlbaum.
Brubaker, R., and Cooper, F. (2000). Beyond “identity.” Theory and Society, 29(1), 1-47.
Clark, A. (2000). Mindware: An introduction to the philosophy of cognitive science. Oxford University Press.
Dowling, R. and McKinnon, K. (2014). Identities. In R. Lee, N. Castree, R. Kitchin, V. Lawson, A. Paasi, S. Radcliffe, and C. W. J. Withers (Eds.), The Sage handbook of human geography (pp. 627-648). Sage.
Pickersgill, M., Cunningham-Burley, S., and Martin, P. (2011). Constituting neurologic subjects: Neuroscience, subjectivity and the mundane significance of the brain. Subjectivity, 4(3), 346-365.
Scheepers, D., and Derks, B. (2016). Revisiting social identity theory from a neuroscience perspective. Current Opinion in Psychology, 11, 74-78.
At its heart, identity has to do with what makes us unique as well as what makes us similar to others; and, by extension, what makes us individuals and what makes us belong to larger collectives (see Jenkins, 2008). The apparent paradox suggested here is resolved if you think about identification as a process by which we determine the ways that we relate to other people — how we balance the qualities we share with others and the differences between ourselves and others.
In this regard, identity is neither essential nor necessarily stable. As Dowling and McKinnon argue, identity is
something that changes with time, something we construct, something that is closely connected with operations of power in the contemporary world, whether at the level of global politics or that of the politics of everyday life. Here, scholarship is more likely to think about identity in the plural and imagine how human beings inhabit multiple identities in the course of daily life. (2014, p. 628)
Human geographers work with various theoretical approaches toward identity (including, to name a few, feminist, Marxist, post-structuralist, and psychoanalytic theory). Many human geographers borrow loosely from social theorists and sociologists, theorizing identity as relational and socially constructed. We’ll focus on the second part of this description in the next section of this lesson; for now we turn our attention to what it means for identity to be relational.
To say that identity (or, as we will see, identities, plural) is relational is to argue that identity is not founded on some unchanging, essential kernel of selfhood, but rather on people’s social positions relative to one another. This happens through a careful balancing act in which we recognize what differentiates ourselves from others, as well as what creates commonalities between us. Following Hall (1996), we might argue that identity forms through processes that force us, often unconsciously, to reconcile our social positions relative to others—and these processes create social spaces of inclusion and exclusion.
Consequently, in discussions of identity we often hear or see lists of traits that might describe a person. Consider, for example, the designations on forms given out by human resources departments, doctors' offices, or even the US Census Bureau. On any one of these, people might be asked if they are male, female, or intersex; Black, White, Asian, Latino, Native American, or Middle Eastern; man, woman, transgender, or nonbinary; Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Wiccan, agnostic, or atheist; abled or disabled; working class, middle class, upper-middle class, or upper class; straight, gay or lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, or asexual; elderly, middle-aged, a young adult, teenager, tween, or preschooler—and this list is far from exhaustive.
Yet notice that each of these sets of traits coalesce around some broader social category. That is, each of the items above reflects some aspect of sex, race, gender, religion, dis/ability, class or socioeconomic status, sexuality, or age. We could add other broad categories such as ethnicity (e.g., Italian American, Pakistani British, etc.) or nationality (i.e., the state in which one claims the right of citizenship), among others.
The point here is that, given a list of categories, anyone can tick off a series of boxes that theoretically indicates some aspect of their identities. How strongly we feel about any of these descriptors may change depending on any number of things—for example, who is in the room, the event or circumstances under which these descriptors are relevant, whatever is happening in the world at large, and so on. For some categories, we might not feel that any of the available options reflect who we are. Finally, how relevant one’s particular position is at any given moment is affected by several factors, many of which are beyond our control. We will revisit this point in the next section of this lesson.
Further complicating our identities is the fact that they are complex and multilayered. Think back to the first exercise in this lesson: was any single answer that you provided sufficient to fully identify you? Chances are, your immediate response is something like, no, it is the collection of those things that makes me who I am.
Consider the various categories (e.g., sex, race, age, religion) presented above. In any given moment we all occupy some position within each of those categories. A person might be simultaneously -- and among other things — Asian (race), Christian (religion), queer (sexuality), a woman (gender), American (nationality), and middle-aged (age). Someone else might be White, Jewish, straight, nonbinary, Israeli, and a teenager. A third might be White, agnostic, straight, a woman, and middle-aged. All three of these individuals are complex people whose life experiences may differ — or be similar — in part as a result of their relative social positions.
One important point to bear in mind is that we can in no case reduce anyone to a single aspect of their identity (no one is ever just a man, just Black, just an atheist, and so on). As Hall puts it, identities “are never unified and, in late modern times, increasingly fragmented and fractured; never singular but multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic discourses, practices and positions” (1996, p. 4). And as we will see in the next section, we cannot say definitively what any given identity means because identity is neither natural nor essential.
Dowling, R. and McKinnon, K. (2014). Identities. In R. Lee, N. Castree, R. Kitchin, V. Lawson, A. Paasi, S. Radcliffe, and C. W. J. Withers (Eds.), The Sage handbook of human geography (pp. 627-648). Sage.
Hall, S. (1996). Introduction: Who needs “identity”? In S. Hall and P. Du Gay (Eds.), Questions of cultural identity (pp. 1-17). Sage.
So far, we’ve considered the ways that identities are relational and complex. We have determined that people identify in multiple ways simultaneously, that the process of identification creates relationships (in the most basic sense of the word) of inclusion and exclusion, and that our emotional engagement with identity may vary. Now we turn our attention to what it means for something (and in particular, for identity) to be socially constructed.
As discussed in the Dictionary of Human Geography, social construction can be briefly defined thus:
The idea that the social context of individuals and groups constructs the reality that they know, rather than an independent material world. Knowledge is always relative to the social setting of the inquirers, the outcome of an ongoing, dynamic process of fabrication. (Gregory et al. 2009, p. 690).
In other words, to say that things are socially constructed is to say that they “are real if people think they are” (Jenkins, 2008, p. 45). On first glance, this is an unsettling idea; students are quick to argue that it suggests that all of reality is based only on people’s opinions, and thus it follows that everyone is right about everything and there is no objective reality. This response, common as it is, is a misunderstanding of what social construction means.
To say that something is socially constructed is to say that the forces or structures within our environment — the social and cultural context in which we live — have identified it as something meaningful or worthy of note, and that there is broad enough social and cultural consensus about the thing that people accept the thing as real, and have agreed on what that thing means, and how to perceive, discuss, or engage with that thing. A couple of examples will help illustrate what we mean here.
First, consider money. No one would dispute that the $5 bill one might use to buy a cup of coffee exists. Yet there is nothing inherently valuable about a $5 bill. We generally agree that we can exchange it for goods or services, but objectively speaking, it is nothing more than a piece of paper with some symbols on it, and while we can use it freely within the United States, no one outside the US is required to accept it as legal tender (though we might exchange it for euros, yen, pesos, lira, etc., depending on where we are). One might argue that it is inherently valuable because the US government says it is — but here’s the catch: there’s nothing inherently valuable in it if our entire ability to use it is predicated on some human collective’s decision that it’s valuable. The fact that the power of a $5 bill to buy things fluctuates over time as prices increase or decrease is an indicator that there is nothing objective about its value. That value — and, indeed, the concept of money itself — is socially constructed.
Second, consider the Olympic Games. The games exist only because a group of people decided to hold them, yet there is no single, canonical list of sports that belong in the Olympics, nor is there a single location where they take place, nor is there a natural ordering of events within the Olympics; these are all decided by the International Olympic Committee. While no one would dispute the prestige that countries take when their athletes medal in Olympic events, that prestige exists only because people collectively agree that medaling is a desirable and prestigious thing. The Olympics as an event, the games that take place during the Olympics, and the social, cultural, and political capital associated with winning — all of these are socially constructed.
To reiterate: no one taking a social constructionist view would argue that money or the Olympics are fictional or nonexistent. On the contrary, they would agree that these things are very real, and that they have real uses, meanings, or consequences for people (and nations). Likewise, a social constructionist would not hesitate to agree that features on the landscape (e.g., rivers, mountains, etc.) are real — but that person would remind us that the thresholds that determine which bodies of water are rivers (as opposed to creeks or streams) and what constitutes a mountain (as opposed to a hill) are somewhat arbitrary and socially constructed.
Just as money, the Olympics, and features on the landscape are socially constructed, so are identities. Both the broad categories that we use (e.g., age, religion, race) are socially constructed, as are the relative positions within those categories (e.g., Black, White, Asian, Middle Eastern, etc.). To illustrate how these are socially constructed, consider, for example, how we determine what constitutes religion as opposed to myth or philosophy. Or, as in the exercise below, consider how we think about race.
Exercise 3:
Use the following link (or click on the image below) to examine this interactive timeline [4] from the Pew Research Center.
On it, you can trace the racial identities included in the decennial census since 1790. Compare the various racial designations that appeared on the census in the past to those on the 2020 census. How have these racial designations changed? Which designations have been consistent, and how consistent have they been? There are some that are no longer used today; do you recognize these as racial categories?
What this tells us about social constructs is that, while they are meaningful and consequential, they are not natural, but are instead contingent on some external factors. You might be wondering who determines, for example, what constitutes a social category that’s worthy of recognizing? And who determines, again, which positionalities exist within that category?
There are a number of forces and agents that create structure and define various constructs within society and what they mean for us. These guide the construction of some of the most pervasive and fundamental social constructs in society. We trace this idea to Michael Foucault, a French philosopher and historian who developed a theory of discourse. Writing from structuralist and post-structuralist traditions, Foucault’s major works — including Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity In the Age of Reason (originally published in 1961), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (originally published in 1975), and The History of Sexuality (originally published in five volumes between 1976 and 1984) — laid out a historically-grounded explanation for the ways that institutions such as government, law, medicine, and education use their power to create and shape social constructs through the strategic use of language and terminology.
For example, in Madness and Civilization, Foucault follows the historical treatment of people who were constructed as ‘mad’ or ‘insane’ by European societies, noting they were regarded as a source of wisdom during the Renaissance, as morally-corrupt outcasts in need of confinement during the Enlightenment, and as sick people who might be cured during the Modern era. The changing social construction of mental illness, he argues, was brought about by institutional shifts that entailed new terminologies, institutional attitudes, legal constructions, and social beliefs about mental health (see Foucault, 1995). In fact, my very use of the terms ‘mental health’ and ‘mental illness’ reflect what Foucault might describe as our contemporary discourses of ‘madness’: discourses that codify diagnoses of ‘mental disorders’ in documents like the ICD-10 and the DSM-V, and that entail treatment such as medications, therapy, or short-term hospitalization (as opposed to earlier discourses that might have revolved, instead, around the marginalization and imprisonment of people with mental health issues).
Just as identities are socially constructed through a critical mass of everyday activity that creates new positionalities through activism and visibility via popular culture and social media, identities are also discursively constructed. We have seen this already in the example of racial designations in the US Census. The Census Bureau, as an arm of the government, has the ability to determine which positionalities count as legitimate through its use of language and terminology. As we see in the readings by Krogstad (2014) and Wang (2018), discussion about whether to include Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) as a racial category in the census provides an excellent example of discursive processes that have taken place within the last decade.
It is crucial to recognize here that both social and discursive constructions of phenomena (especially identity positions) vary from culture to culture. This is in large measure due to differences in things like migration histories, the presence of different minority populations, and institutional policies that determine which groups of people should be recognized for protection or persecution. That is, social constructions (and discursive constructions) are rarely universal. Even if the same designations exist in two different cultures, the policies, beliefs, and expectations surrounding those designations may vary drastically.
As a final note about both the social and discursive constructions of identities, it is important to be aware that some identity designations or positions become normalized through the processes of construction. That is, certain designations take on the connotation of being ‘normal’ and are assumed to be the standard, neutral, or ‘unmarked’ (see Tannen, 1993 and Brekhus, 1998) positions — and because of this, these positions are sometimes left as undefined or are presumed to be self-evident, and thus unworthy of inquiry. These positions are typically dominant within a particular culture; those positions that are considered different or other are given new terms.
We can see a clear example of this at work in the US Census Bureau’s racial designations that you explored in the exercise above. Notice that the designation ‘White’ barely changes throughout the entire history of the census. In the earliest years, the designation is “Free white males and free white females,” which changes to “White” for the 1850 census and remains unchanged from that point forward. Contrast this with the very visible and more rapidly changing racial designators for everyone else. This is an indicator (along with its status at the top of the list) that “White” is the dominant, unmarked racial designator.
It is important to bear in mind that normalized identities still qualify as identities, even if they are dominant. They may be less obvious because of their dominance, but this does not make them any less effective or important an identity than any other designation.
Krogstad, J. M. (2014, March 24). Census Bureau explores new Middle East/North Africa ethnic category [1]. Pew Research Center.
Wang, H. L. (2018, January 29). No Middle Eastern or North African category on 2020 census, bureau says [2]. NPR.
Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Vintage Books.
Brekhus, W. (1998). A Sociology of the unmarked: Redirecting our focus. Sociological Theory, 16(1), 34-51.
Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Vintage Books.
Foucault, M. (1973). Madness and civilization: A history of insanity in the age of reason. Vintage Books.
Gregory, D., Johnston, R., Pratt, G., Watts, M. J., and Whatmore, S. (Eds.). (2009). The dictionary of human geography. Wiley-Blackwell.
Jenkins, R. (2008). Social identity. London: Routledge.
Tannen, D. (1993, June 20). There is no unmarked woman. The New York Times Magazine.
We have seen that any individual’s identity is complex and multilayered, and also that some identities become normalized while others are marked (or deemed other). Although these may seem like unrelated aspects of identity, one of the potential consequences of this is that people become marginalized because of a particular combination of identities. This complex interaction between structures of power and people’s multilayered identities is referred to as intersectionality.
Lawyer and legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw presented the idea of intersectionality in a landmark paper in 1989, in which she reviewed three court cases that demonstrated the complexity of discrimination that Black women often face in the workplace. In the first of these, a Black woman sued an employer who refused to hire her, arguing that she had been discriminated against for being a Black woman. The judge dismissed the case, arguing that the company did hire women and did hire Black people — overlooking the fact that the company did not hire Black women.
In her review, Crenshaw argues:
…Black women can experience discrimination in ways that are both similar to and different from those experienced by white women and Black men. Black women sometimes experience discrimination in ways similar to white women's experiences; sometimes they share very similar experiences with Black men. Yet often they experience double-discrimination-the combined effects of practices which discriminate on the basis of race, and on the basis of sex. And sometimes, they experience discrimination as Black women — not the sum of race and sex discrimination, but as Black women. (1989, p. 149)
What is significant about the cases Crenshaw discusses is that the courts treated the women in question as either women or as Black with regard to discrimination. Yet identity is multilayered, and the plaintiffs in these cases were both Black and women simultaneously, and it was that overlapping (or intersection) of gender and race that rendered them legally marginal in both the workplace and the courtroom. Crenshaw’s work presents an interesting and clear case study of the ways that legal discourses (in this case, the failure to recognize intersectionality) may have significant consequences for individuals and social groups alike.
Cultural geographers working in identity are keenly aware of intersectionality as a factor that casts individuals vis-a-vis their identities into complicated relational and spatial networks with others. For example, Dwyer (1999) considers the intersections of sex, ethnicity, and religion for Muslim women in Britain; Schroeder (2014) addresses intersections of religion, sexuality, and class in the transformation of LGBT neighborhoods in Toledo, Ohio; and Eaves (2017) examines intersections of race, sexuality, and, to a lesser extent, religion in the American South.
Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989(1), 139-167.
Dwyer, C. (1999). Veiled Meanings: Young British Muslim women and the negotiation of differences. Gender, Place and Culture, 6(1), 5-26.
Eaves, L. (2017). Black geographic possibilities: On a queer Black South. Southeastern Geographer, 57(1), 80-95.
Schroeder, C. G. (2014). (Un)holy Toledo: Intersectionality, Interdependence, and Neighborhood (Trans)formation in Toledo, Ohio. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 104(1), 166-181.
So far, we have discussed identity as though it is something that is socially and discursively constructed, but we have also noted that the intensity with which people identify may vary. This suggests that identification as a process is something that people choose to do.
To some extent, this is correct: people do in many cases adopt various social identity designations. Yet this is not always the case. Identification is not a singular process, but one that takes place both internally and externally. Consequently, our identities are something that we might feel or express — but also something that, in some cases, might be imposed upon us. Some theorists conceptualize this as a dichotomy between self-identification and categorization, respectively (see Jenkins, 2008).
Exercise 4:
Try to think of at least one situation in which someone other than you imposed an identity on you. How accurate was this imposed identity? What, if any, impacts did it have on your sense of who you are? What, if any, consequences did it have for you in your everyday life?
In order to understand how identity operates in any given culture, it is important to understand the different ways that self-identification and categorization work. A person might self-identify in some way and not be fully satisfied with what that means for them in society. Yet identities that are imposed upon people are another matter altogether; as Jenkins puts it, “identification by others has consequences” (2008, p. 43). For example, a person who is identified by a doctor as being mentally ill may be at risk of being involuntarily hospitalized; likewise, someone who is identified as an “at-risk youth” might face increased scrutiny by teachers or other authority figures — or they might be shuttled into programs intended to prevent criminal activity or provide job training. Identification, especially by social structures that hold some real power within a culture, can have real and significant impacts on people’s lives.
Jenkins, R. (2008). Social identity. Routledge.
We have spent considerable space here laying out a theoretical foundation for identity — what it is, what forms it takes, and how it operates within the framework of a given culture or society. At this point you may be wondering what any of this has to do with geography (or maybe you already have some ideas about how identity and geography are related). We conclude this lesson with a more direct discussion of that relationship, with special attention to place identity, and the spatial implications of identity.
It is a common experience that, when encountering someone new, one of the first questions we often ask is, “Where are you from?” This seemingly simple question gets at an aspect of identity that is often overlooked in identity research.
Exercise 5:
If someone were to ask you where you are from, how would you answer? How simple is that answer? How consistently do you tend to answer this question? If you have more than one answer, what factors impact which answer you choose to give? How strongly do you feel about your answer(s) to this question — is it a source of pride, a source of embarrassment, are you neutral about it? What, if anything, do you think your answer reveals about you?
Conceptually, place identity refers to an aspect of a person’s self-identity as it is related to, and impacted by, the place(s) where that person has lived, with the understanding that the environment in which we live impacts how we relate to the world. It filtered into human geography from environmental psychology in the 1970s and 1980s (see, e.g., Proshansky et al., 1983) when it was adopted by humanist geographers.
Research into place identity demonstrates first, that people feel significant attachments to places, and second, that the scale of attachment varies from intimate (e.g., one’s apartment) to distant (e.g., the region) (see Cuba & Hummon, 1993; Gustafson, 2001; and Hidalgo & Hernández, 2001). Significantly, it turns out that the scale at which people conceptualize place identity seems to depend on who is doing the identifying (Gustafson, 2001). When describing their own place identities, people tend to identify at relatively narrow scales such as the city or neighborhood — yet when they conceptualize other people’s place identities, they tend to do so at broader scales such as the region or country.
To backtrack a bit, recall that both self-identification and classification of others creates spaces of inclusion and exclusion (Jenkins, 2008). When it comes to place identity, this can become a point of contention between people. In some cases, the question of place identity is used to determine a person’s ethnicity or national origin — and when phrased as “where are you really from?” it can call into question a person’s credibility as a citizen, effectively imposing upon them an outsider status (see, e.g., Cheryan & Monin, 2005).
Place identity is not the only site of interaction between identity and geography. Consider, for example, the ways that identities are encoded in spaces. There are the obvious examples — public restrooms are often marked as spaces designated exclusively for men, women, or families; and religious establishments such as churches, synagogues, or mosques proclaim their religious affiliations to attract adherents. Yet there are other, subtler ways that spaces are designated for specific identities with the result that they include some, exclude others, and that complicate interactions between people by setting culturally mediated and tacitly accepted expectations on our behavior.
For example, classrooms can be broken down into spaces that ‘belong’ to the teacher or to the students. Similarly, the spaces within a restaurant are socially constructed such that patrons are expected to stay out of the kitchen and are prohibited from stepping behind the bar, and restaurant staff have their own domains: cooks are expected to limit their time on the dining floor or behind the bar, bartenders are given priority over the space behind the bar, servers may be responsible for serving tables in specific areas of the dining floor, and servers and bartenders may be warned not to go “behind the line” in the kitchen.
Entire establishments may be socially constructed in ways that make their spaces more accommodating to some people than others based on their cultural expectations. For example, in the United States, women may find themselves the recipients of skepticism or of unwanted or unnecessary advice from associates at a hardware store, while men are often assumed to know exactly what they are looking for (even if they don’t). Likewise, neighborhoods that have sizeable populations of visible ethnic or racial minorities, queer people, or people with low incomes may be perceived by people outside those groups as unwelcoming or unsafe (even if they have low crime rates).
The following readings provide case studies that delve into the relationships between space, place, and identity.
Ehrkamp, P. (2008). Risking publicity: Masculinities and the racialization of public neighborhood space. Social & Cultural Geography, 9(2),117-132.
Hopkins, P., Botterill, K., Sanghera, G. and Arshad, R. (2017). Encountering misrecognition: Being mistaken for being Muslim. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 107(4), 934-948.
Note: Registered students can access the readings in Canvas by clicking on the Library Resources link.
Cheryan, S. and Monin, B. (2005). “Where are you really from?”: Asian Americans and identity denial. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 89(5), 717-730.
Cuba, L., and Hummon, D. M. (1993). A place to call home: Identification with dwelling, community, and region. The Sociological Quarterly, 34(1), 111-131.
Gustafson, P. (2001). Meanings of place: Everyday experience and theoretical conceptualizations. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 21(1), 5-16.
Hidalgo, M. C., and Hernández, B. (2001). Place attachment: Conceptual and empirical questions. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 21(3), 273-281.
Jenkins, R. (2008). Social identity. Routledge.
Proshansky, H. M., Fabian, A. K., and Kaminoff, R. (1983). Place-identity: Physical world socialization of the self. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 3(1), 57-83.
Throughout your academic life, you’ve been told to start with a broad concept and work your way to more specificity about your research and topic. You’re expected to write eloquently, sometimes for many pages at a time. The traditional academic paper is written more like an hourglass: you introduce your topic and hypothesis, provide an overview of relevant literature, discuss your methods, then get to your results, and finally your conclusions and implications. A reader must read all the way to the bottom in order to gain your insights and conclusions.
When writing a brief, you want to forget that construct. Remove it from your brain. Do the opposite.
I know, easier said than done.
The purpose of a written brief is to be…well…brief. You need to be able to convey the most important information to your customer as quickly, concisely, and clearly as possible. The key here is knowing who your customer is, what they need to know to do their job, and putting your bottom line up front. Many refer to this style of writing as the “inverted pyramid,” where your conclusions are actually the first sentence of your paragraph (Brown, 2020) (Figure 3.1). This can be difficult for academically trained analysts to wrap their minds around.
Spoiler alert, if you haven’t watched the Avengers Infinity War and plan to, I’m so sorry. This is merely for illustration purposes only. The example briefs below are each about 120 words, your briefs will need to be more robust.
The Avengers were victorious over the evil villain Thanos and saved the universe, but not without the loss of Tony Stark (aka Iron Man) and Natasha (aka Black Widow). During the final battle, Tony Stark was able to get all of the Infinity Stones from Thanos and used them to get rid of Thanos and his army. Previously, Thanos acquired the Infinity Stones, wishing to get rid of half of the life in the universe, including many of the Avengers team, including but not limited to Star Lord, Scarlet Witch, T’Challa,and Groot. The Avengers used time magic to retrieve all of the stones from the past to help undo Thano’s previous wish, allowing them to battle Thanos and his army.
What this brief does well:
After acquiring the Infinity Stones, the evil villain Thanos wished to get rid of half of the life in the universe. This included many of the Avengers team, including but not limited to Star Lord, Scarlet Witch, T’Challa, and Groot. The Avengers then used time magic to retrieve all of the stones from the past to help undo Thano’s previous wish, allowing them to battle Thanos and his army. During the final battle, Tony Stark was able to get all of the Infinity Stones from Thanos and used them to get rid of Thanos and his army. Ultimately, the Avengers were victorious over the evil villain Thanos and saved the universe, but not without the loss of Tony Stark (aka Iron Man) and Natasha (aka Black Widow).
What this brief does poorly:
Brown, Z. T. (2020, July 16). How you can write like an intelligence analyst [7]. Zachery Tyson Brown.
Welch, B. (2008). The Analyst’s Style Manual [8]. Mercyhurst College Institute for Intelligence Studies Press.
You are providing recommendations to your city council to make a public space more inclusive. Frame your recommendations around your experiences of inclusion and exclusion in various spaces and places, and the role that identity played in those.
Example: There is a city-owned skate park that is dominated by teenage boys, almost all of them white. Parents of younger kids, particularly elementary-school-age girls who want to skate there, have complained that their kids are frequently excluded from the space.
Using this example as a guide, develop a situation that might occur in a space you are intimately familiar with.
When you have completed your written brief, return to the Lesson 3: Identity I - Foundations module in Canvas and look for the Lesson 3 Written Brief dropbox. The dropbox has instructions for submitting the assignment.
Please check the Canvas Syllabus or Calendar for specific time frames and due dates.
In this lesson, we laid out the conceptual underpinnings of identity. We demonstrated that identity is relational, complex and multilayered, socially and discursively constructed, and is both internally and externally determined. We discussed the ways that identities can interact with social structures of power in ways that marginalize individuals and groups of people, as well as the ways that dominant identities become normalized. Finally, we looked more closely at the ways that identities are related to place, space, and scale through place identity, and the ways that spaces are constructed to be inclusive or exclusive along lines of identity.
Please return to the Lesson 3 module in Canvas where you will find the Lesson 3 Discussion Forum which contains the discussion prompt and specific instructions for the assignment.
Please check the Canvas Syllabus or Calendar for specific time frames and due dates.
You have reached the end of Lesson 3! Double-check the to-do list on the Lesson 3 Checklist page [10] to make sure you have completed all of the activities listed there before you begin Lesson 4.
Links
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/03/24/census-bureau-explores-new-middle-eastnorth-africa-ethnic-category/
[2] https://www.npr.org/2018/01/29/581541111/no-middle-eastern-or-north-african-category-on-2020-census-bureau-says
[3] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog571/node/489
[4] https://www.pewresearch.org/interactives/what-census-calls-us/
[5] http://www.pewresearch.org/interactives/what-census-calls-us/
[6] https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
[7] https://zacherytysonbrown.medium.com/write-like-an-intelligence-analyst-34d06738d2ef
[8] https://ncirc.bja.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh326/files/media/document/analysts_style_manual.pdf
[9] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog571/node/495
[10] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog571/node/148