Description:

The debate surrounding the construction of identities in their collective and individual dimensions has become central in contemporary sociopolitical discourse. With the continued rise of social media and digital mass media, the distinction between the private and public spheres has become increasingly porous and dynamic as the individual and the intimate have become more visible, often as interventions in public life. To consider identity as a concept that is in de/re/construction that both resists and is subject to hegemonic systems of power allows us to examine the many aesthetic, corporeal, symbolic, and legal manifestations in which identity is formed and legitimated. At the same time, categories of identity, such as race, sexuality, gender, class as well as political affiliation are some points of departure for an exploration of identities in movement. Finally, it is crucial to consider identity as a space of resistance and struggle for subjects and minoritarian communities from which they can articulate important modalities of activism that bring the social, political, and affective dimensions of identity to the fore.

Taking this intersectional topic and critical framework as a point of departure, the Departments of Spanish and Portuguese at Northwestern University, the Department of Hispanic and Italian Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the Program of Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Studies at the University of Chicago invite participants to consider identities in movement – from center to periphery, from totalities to fragments, from permanence to ephemera, from linearity to rupture and vice versa. We propose an exploration of these multidirectional movements and their dynamics, which are sometimes ambivalent, but always reveal social, political, and social alternatives.