How do we come to make “I” statements that feel deeply true, such as “I am a dancer” or “I am a psychologist” or “I am a mother”? How do we come to hold a sense of identity, particularly when it has changed from what it once was? Translator/ thinker Alphonso Lingis discusses the move from “performative to declarative identity,” in which we go from simply presenting an identity to the world to feeling that we are bound to this sense of who we are in a way that defines, complicates, and clarifies who we are. This is a basic question about lived experience, yet one that is sometimes hard to address, particularly as many of our approaches to meaning-making engage how we are defined in a social context but not how we come to feel an identity is truly ours. We are interested in how the political becomes the personal, how the psychosocial can shape and support individual emergence, and how we come to know ourselves when we are increasingly pulled toward polarization and precarity.

In this roundtable discussion, a group of qualitative researchers, students, and clinicians speak and invite conversation about the move from performative to declarative identity by discussing their own experience with declaring an identity and the transitional space that may precede this declaration.

Sources:

Lingis, A. (2017). Crossings: A Conversation with Alphonso Lingis. Mosaic: an interdisciplinary critical journal, 50(1), 289-307.