Identities in Motion: Practices, Enactment, Narration CGLG Seminar with Guest Speaker Professor Jeffrey Checkel

If identity — as theoretical construct or lived reality — was ever some stable and ‘neutral' entity, those days are rapidly disappearing. Identity has been weaponized, with people experiencing it less as an act of deliberation or calculation, and more as a process of rupture to the routines and practices that shape ‘who they are.' Given these developments, I argue that scholarship on identity needs a meta-theoretical, theoretical and methodological rethink and expansion. The argument is developed in three parts. First, I introduce relationalism as ontology and its implications for how we think about theory. Second, the bulk of the paper then draws upon relational identity scholarship in sociology, feminist theory, everyday nationalism, and visual ethnography. This allows me to develop a rich and diverse roster of social practices, enactments and narrations – accessed through immersive field methods – that capture identity formation in a world of flux and rupture. Third, I argue that the pluralism behind this roster is precisely the point. If political science takes its foot off the neo-positivist meta-theoretical accelerator, the result will be a deeper conceptual space for creating new theory and data on identity formation. The discipline needs multiple gold standards for advancing the knowledge frontier.

Jeffrey T. Checkel joined the Department of Political and Social Sciences in January 2020, as Chair in International Politics, moving from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, where he held the Simons Chair in International Law and Human Security. He had previously taught at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Oslo.

Checkel's research interests include international relations theory (identity formation, constructivism, international institutions, civil war, domestic-international linkages) and qualitative methods (meta-theoretical foundations, process tracing, practice analytics, bridging positivist-interpretive techniques). He has published broadly on these topics, including four books from Cambridge University Press and one volume from Yale University Press.