Personal Identity Through a Language Lens (Lodz, May 2010)

Reflecting upon their identity, people are faced with a paradox of staying the same by continuously changing. To resolve this paradox they need to look at identity from two seemingly contrastive, yet compatible and complementary perspectives. Firstly, many philosophers, since John Locke, have sought the basis of personal identity in the mind: in our psychological continuity over time, mediated by memory. However, more recently, some scholars, philosophers and psychologists alike, have emphasised the role played by the physical continuity of the body. While each approach captures some aspects of identity, neither gets to the heart of the matter. What is more, the role of language in the process of identity creation remains at best a secondary concern, not a focused goal of the field. In accordance with this research focus, the conference will aim at exploring identity as constituted in and represented by linguistic interaction. The need for such an approach has become apparent in recent years; as linguistic research on identity has become increasingly central within sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, discourse analysis, and social psychology the concomitant development of linguistic approaches to identity has been neglected.

The aim of the conference is to bring together scholars of varied disciplines to explore the issue from a range of perspectives. By applying a variety of analytical tools and concepts, contributors will hopefully show how people construct images of themselves through language, how they shape, perform and re-shape their personal identities within and across local and dominant discourses and finally how language resources are selected and used to perform desirable versions of identities.