Making Moves: Identity in Modernity

One of the things about teaching “Identity” is that it can be difficult to anchor the concept sociologically: to help students make sense of how and why identities shift and change over time.

All-to-often, perhaps, the temptation is simply to describe “changing identities” without embedding them in either an historical or social structural context so they become a kind of free-floating set of individual attributes, feelings, styles and desires cut-adrift from wider social influences and changes.

This PowerPoint Presentation, therefore, has been designed to help students understand both how “classic identities” (such as class, gender and nationality) have evolved historically throughout Modernity and the broad structural shifts (industrialisation, urbanisation…) that underpin these changes.

In this respect, the Presentation is built around “7 moves” that trace changing forms of identity from the dawn of modernity to the late-modernity of the 21^st century.  

The Presentation has been designed as a back-drop to teaching in that it provides a general overview of the ideas involved but then leaves their development and discussion to teachers. In basic terms, it’s just a more-sophisticated “bullet list” of talking points – but one, I hope, that’s wrapped in an interesting set of ideas…

Talking of which, there are 7 steps in the Presentation covering the following, very loose, very, very, broad, historical periods that I’ve defined for convenience more than anything. They are designed to provide a memorable set of anchor points against which to locate the notion of changing historical identities:

Step1: The Enlightenment: late 17th – 18th century

Step 2: Industrialisation: late 18^th – early 19^th century

Step 3: Bureaucracy:  late 19^th – early 20^th century

Step 4: Collective Identities: mid-20^th century

Step 5: Consumer Society: mid-20^th century

Step 6: Late Modernity: late 20^th – early 21^st century

Step 7: Digital Identities: early 21^st century – present.

In the Presentation each of these steps displays an “Evidence Board” style graphic that has clickable elements (the “bullet points”…) you can reveal to move the narrative along. There’s usually 3 or 4 such elements on each slide. Although navigation is fairly basic (click on the hyperlinked texts) you might want to familiarise yourself with how it all works before trying it in front of a (semi?) live audience.

You will also notice these “clickable elements” exist against a background of newspaper headlines, photographs, articles and other artefacts. Although these provide a certain sense of window dressing each artefact on the Board exists for a purpose, not just for show. This means that if you want to expand the discussion around the content of any Board you can do so by referencing any of the background pieces. Step 5 (Consumer Society), for example, has headlines about “Mods and Rockers” that lead into a possible discussion of youth subcultures while the album cover of London Calling by the Clash references Punk as the last flowering of the kinds of youth subcultures common in the 1960s and ‘70s. This, in turn, leads to speculation about why “Spectacular Youth Subcultures” developed in the first place – and also why they disappeared. These discussions can also link to earlier or later artefacts – such as the K-Pop-Hip-Hop hybrid identities referenced on a later Board (Step 6: Late Modernity).

What this means, of course, is that you should probably familiarise yourself with all the artefacts on all the Boards. I had toyed with making a list of all of these (some of the photographs are immediately recognisable – Weber, Beck, Bauman…) but others might be more obscure (a picture of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre…) for reference purposes but then found I couldn’t be bothered was a bit too busy.

Alternatively, don’t bother talking about them and hope your students don’t ask. At the moment the Presentation is only available as a PowerPoint Show because it means you can run it independently of PowerPoint. It also uses the Morph and Zoom transitions which won’t work properly on older versions.