“Social Identities in Transforming Societies”

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The Department of Sociology at Novosibirsk State University (NSU), Siberia, Russian Federation has launched a three-year project sponsored by Higher Education Support Program (HESP):

REGIONAL SEMINAR FOR EXCELLENCE IN TEACHING

SOCIAL IDENTITIES IN TRANSFORMING SOCIETIES

Russian

Project Rationale and Goals

Societies are transforming reflecting global socio-cultural processes, such as globalization and fragmentation of social, cultural, political and economic spaces. This has led to growing uncertainty, ambivalence and confusion about social identities, as individuals try to adapt to changing circumstances. On the other hand, this is an exciting opportunity as individuals try to re-construct their social rights, responsibilities, norms and obligations to others. The proposed project aims to engage together project participants and resource faculty members in understanding and explaining how identities are being re-constructed in the transforming societies, and what are their social, political, economic and cultural implications.

The main idea of the project is to integrate the experience and expertise of conceptualizing, empirically studying and teaching identity-related issues in social sciences: sociology, cultural studies, political science, psychology and social psychology.

The project will critically reflect on how issues relating to social identities are addressed in university curricula across the region. The participants will learn and teach the methodological bases of “identity” concept and different aspects of the process of social identity formation in the post-socialist space. Examining and comparing their research and teaching experience, the participants will analyze contemporary social trends, in particular:

·        the shift from labor-based or/and politically-based to consumption, life-style and possessions-based identities

·        the shift from nation-based to regional, ethnic or, on the contrary, cosmopolitan identities

·        transformation of organizational and professional space (in the world in general and in post-socialist countries in particular) that results in new organizational and professional identities

·        transformation of traditional male/female roles and formation of new gender-based cultural categories

These trends also find their reflection in how identity is theorized in the social sciences, for example:

·        the social construction of identity as an explanatory tool for identity formation

·        the formation of multiple identities and identities interplay as a response to post-modern challenges

·        situational identities as conceptual tool to account for multiple identities and their actualization

The core resource faculty members will collaborate with the participants to combine current scholarship, original research and interactive learning and teaching strategies. In so doing, the proposed project will critically re-think traditional ways of conceptualizing and teaching social identities, and offer more dialogical and engaging interpretations and learning methods. In effect, the proposed project aims to provide a systematic account for identity in social sciences in uncertain transitional societies and develop teaching courses that explore identity issues.

The interdisciplinary background and inter-changeable roles of the faculty members and participants will ensure an exchange of ideas and facilitate a mutual process of learning that will progress gradually in three years. This will bring a new quality to the participants’ and resource faculty members’ understanding of identity-related issues. In this way, the scholarship and learning will be dialectic, developmental and evolving, rather than didactic, static and fixed.

Finally, the proposed project aims to assist participants to be self-reflexive of their own teaching and learning methods and techniques during contact sessions and inter-sessions. The interactive character of the project will facilitate the introduction of interactive teaching techniques. Furthermore, inter-session activities and discussions via online forums and mailing lists will contribute to increasing and systematic knowledge and allow monitoring of work conducted during the summer and winter contact sessions. The resource faculty members will supervise the development of participants’ course syllabi, essays, presentations, research projects and group discussions.

The project is designed as a three-year series of contact sessions and intersession activities with the participation of the leading figures in the field of identity research in social sciences and regional junior faculty members dealing in their courses with the concept of identity.

The selection process is already completed, and the first contact session started on August 7. However, anyone feeling like joining the project discussions is welcome to participate via the web-site.

Please address all the questions you have about the project to Olga Etchevskaya, Project Coordinator: etchevskaya@ngs.ru