Blog post by Monika Mokre, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austria
 
Identity politics were something like a buzz word in the 2024 US election campaign. On the one hand, media speculated why Kamala Harris did not play the ‘identity card’ of her multiethnic origin in a similar way as Barack Obama did. On the other hand, Republicans accused Harris precisely of using her minority identity as a campaign token and reject, at the same time, any kind of anti-racist or gender politics as identity politics of an elite neglecting the problems of the majority population.

Identities and their political usage, thus, might influence the outcome of elections and, in this way, play a role for the most important participatory practice of representative democracy. Their impact, however, goes far beyond ballot box agendas. When democracy is government of the people, for the people, and by the people, identity politics pose the paramount question if there is, in fact, a ‘people’ or if the citizenry consists of fundamentally irreconcilable subgroups

Blog post by Sara Amadasi, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy

In our Identities article, ‘Keeping two cultures together’: the binary construction of belonging in narratives of professionals on children’s cultural identity’, we investigated how the sense of belonging and cultural identity of children with a migration background[1] are socially constructed by Italian professionals who work at schools and in social services with young people. We also investigated whether narratives told by interviewees are affected by the gender of the children they are referring to.
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Our article is based on interviews conducted in the context of the Horizon 2020 project, ‘Child-Up: Children Hybrid Integration: Learning Dialogue as a Way of Upgrading Policies of Participation’. This project investigated the opportunities of children with a migration background to actively exercise their agency to change their social and cultural conditions. While the project involved several groups of people, our Identities article analyzed interviews conducted with teachers, educators, social workers and mediators in three cities in northern Italy.