BEING, BECOMING & BELONGING [LIVE]

Social Cohesion & Identity Constructions

DESCRIPTION

If I ask you what identities you hold, you’d probably reply with gender, sexuality, romantic attraction and religion-based identities. Many of us are taught that identities are essentially fixed, something you are born with, and cannot be changed as you grow old. But what if we use a different lens when we look at identities? What these labels and categories are merely tools of communication? What if identities become categories only in societies where humans are viewed as fodder for the state? What if identities aren’t just personal but also communal? What if we come into identities when we negotiate our existence with the society, culture and politics of the land we live on?

This courses traces identity construction across history, geography, linguistic, psychological and political domains. It investigates this relationship of the self with the drastic changes in political, social and cultural economies of the colonial and post-colonial countries. It also delves into identity constructions and imagined communities that emerge during the process of building nation-states. This is said identity occupies overlapping territorial and multiple sovereignties, all the while displacing indigenous identities.

The course makes it a point to discuss autonomy, agency, freedom and manufactured consent. It broadens our scope of understanding identities from an individualized perspective to accommodating the plurality of being, becoming and belonging.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

1. At the end of the session, attendees will be able to analyze the structural differences between individualized, attraction-based identity frameworks and social, land-based, and kinship-based identity frameworks. [CKA: B, C, N, P; SET: B; STT: A; SCT:A]
2. At the end of the session, attendees will be able to evaluate how colonial and post-colonial state mechanisms, including legislative categorization and the construction of tradition, produce and enforce identity labels. [CKA: A, C, D, P; SET: C; STT: F; SCT: E]
3. At the end of the session, attendees will be able to contrast the gender, romantic & sexuality identification with kinship-based and politically-oriented identities, mapping the dimensions of experiences that attraction-based labels cannot account for. [CKA: C, D, E, F; SET:D; STT: A; SCT: B]
4. At the end of the session, attendees will be able to evaluate the ethical and clinical implications of imposing Western labels onto non-Western community-based identities. [CKA: A, O; SET: C, D; STT: F: SCT: E]
5. At the end of the session, attendees will be able to construct a practice-oriented position statement on how sexuality educators and clinicians can engage with identity across cultural contexts. [CKA: A, N, O; SET: B, D; STT: A, F; SCT: A, B]

EDUCATOR BIO