Identities in Europe 2105-M-D4TOEU

During the course, the following issues will be discussed:
The distinction between subjectivity, self-identity, and social identity; Personality as a cultural product (identity as a construct, the meaning of acculturation); assumptions of this concept; Self-awareness as a modern Western concept arising from science and the "era of reason" (Norbert Elias); The issues of similarity and difference in approaches to the problem of identity.
Essentialism and Anti-Essentialism; The model of mechanical solidarity and the collective consciousness that guides it as a theory of the permanence of collective identity; The anti-essentialist concept of identity plasticity and its anti-universalism
Identity as a project (constructing a coherent narrative - A. Giddens); the importance of linguistic articulation; resources constituting the material for the identity project and different access to them.
Stuart Hall's fragmentary identity; enlightenment subject (Cartesian model of the human person; identity as the "center" - the inner core of the individual); a sociological subject ("I" socialized, "significant others"); postmodern (fragmentary) subject; the decentralized self of the individual.
Five "cracks" in the discourses of modern knowledge that led to the "decentralization" of identity: the Marxist historical subject (Althusser's approach), psychoanalysis and subjectivity, feminism and difference, the theory of the central role of language, the theory of Michel Foucault.
"I" articulated "; partial return to essentialism (Ernesto Laclan), the importance of places of interaction; the modern increase in their number (Anthony Giddens).
The causative activity and politics of identity (in Foucault's "agency", "structuring in Giddens): types of causative activities, choice and determination, originality, innovation and change, strategic essentialism.
Collective identities: ethnicity, race, nation, race ("racialization), various racisms (stereotyping), from racialization to ethnicization, ethnicity and power (Frederic Barth).
Religious identities in contemporary Europe. Secularization, extra-church religiosity (characteristics), possibilities of new identities emerging conditioned by changes: detraditionalization, disidentification, autonomy, little transcendence.
Gender and identity: various feminisms and gender studies; from biological reductionism to full plasticity of biological and cultural sex; sex entities; "Betrayed modern man" - problems of male identity.
Territorial identities in the EU: research on the identification of Basque and Catalan people versus declarations of other Europeans; conditions for the emergence of strong territorial identities (culture, coercive conflict, socioeconomic interaction, political institutions).
Models of European identity: the entity legitimizing the New Europe - demos; principles of European identity (primordialism and the narrative construction of Giddens); constructionism versus substantialism; models of European identity (Delanty); European heritage, universalist post-nationality, European pragmatism.
The obligatory element of the lecture is reading the indicated literature in a foreign language.