How do we construct identity?

Abstract or Introduction

What is Identity?
Identity as an abstracted and immaterial term or construct has been taken on
by different academics. The philosophy, for instance delves into identity on a
personal level and asked for “Who am I?”, “Where do we come from?” and
“How do we think?” (Hoffmann:2010:70). The psychobiology assumes that
some parts of our identity are pre-determent by our RNA, a part of our identity
would therefore be a mixture of our parentʼs ones (Barkhaus:1996:31-38).
Academics of pedagogic and education are interested in the process of selfdiscovery
within the puberty (Osterloh:2010: 31-36). There are many more
schools which are dealing with identity, all of them intersect and influence each
other. The perspective of the Culture Studies1offers in matters of identity multiple
approaches as it is an interdisciplinary field in which perspectives from different
disciplines can be selectively chosen to observe the relation of culture
and identity (Baker:2005:7). The term identity emerged during the 90s as the
central theme into the cultural studies and raised the question “What is identity?”
(Backer:2005:219), in order to explain the “…consciousness of self found
in the western world …” (Longhurst/Smith/Bagnall/Crawnford/ Ogborn:
2008:142).
Purpose of this paper is to use the approach of the culture studies to find out
how we, as human, constructed identity. Therefore it is imported to include and analyse elements which make up identity and to embrace how we exhibit
oneʼs own identity.