Research

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Identities

People walking in Downtown Chicago, reflected in the Anish Kapoor sculpture ‘Cloud Gate’

The Identities research theme provides a coordinating network for the wealth of interdisciplinary identities research taking place across 31 schools and departments within the faculties of Arts, Medicine and Dentistry, Science and Social Sciences and Law.

There is a long and outstanding tradition of research and scholarship within this field stretching across all aspects of the University’s activities. The identities research theme promotes synergy, develops capacity and maximises impact across a range of interrelated interdisciplinary research interests. The theme brings together interests in:

  • Challenging, conceptualising and theorising constructs of identity and of a multiplicity of identities
  • Negotiating, developing and performing professional, national, trans-national, cultural, religious, learning, digital and personal identities, as well as piecing together identities from the material cultures of ancient worlds and across time place and space
  • Investigating connexions between identity construction/deconstruction and other global forces, concepts and events such as patterns of migration, ecology, climate change and sustainability and experiences of trauma and warfare.

Currently a variety of different work is being undertaken, edited highlights include:

  • Two interdisciplinary projects initiated by the identities theme advisory group:
  • In the School of Geographical Sciences, Yvonne Whelan is currently researching the relationship between landscape memory and diasporic identity
  • In the Department of Drama: Theatre, Film, Television, Jacqueline Maingard’s current work focuses on how identities are represented in the cinema
  • In the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, Dimitrios Theodossopoulos’s recent research explores the impact of increased visibility on the identity amongst the Embera peoples of Panama, and Tamar Hodos (together with Shelley Hales from the Department of Classics and Ancient History) has recently (2009) co-edited a book exploring the relationship between material cultures and social identities in the ancient world.
  • An interdisciplinary group of researchers from the Faculty of Social Sciences and Law, including Leon Tikly, from the Graduate School of Education Harriet Bradley from the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies and Simon Burgess from the Economics Department have conducted a pilot study into white working class learner identity and educational achievement within British schools. In a similar field, Harriet Bradley and Anne-Marie Bathmaker from the School of Education (University of the West of England) have acquired Leverhulme Trust funding to conduct a study longtitudinal study of higher education students from different class backgrounds at the different Bristol universities.
  • Further identity research within the Graduate School of Education includes an exploration of learning, place and identity amongst indigenous Australian students (Ruth Deakin Crick) and an ongoing study of shifting identities within collaborative academic writing communities (Jane Speedy).
  • Paddy Ladd and colleague Steve Emery at the Centre for Deaf Studies have successfully obtained the first UK Deaf-designed and led social sciences research project Genetics, power and deafhood: identifying opposition to eugenicist policies from the Leverhulme Trust - to undertake research into Deaf people's concerns about the advances of genetic technology.

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