Group identity, narrative and self-representations

The last decade has seen a growing interdisciplinary interest in the formation, negotiation, and development of identities. This new focus on identity is, at least partially, the product of the intensified contact between different communities brought about in post-modern societies by such social processes as globalization and massive migrations. The multiplication of the occasions for contact with the other has brought with it a problematization of the concept of identity itself and an effort to understand the relationship between people's sense of membership in a community, the beliefs and social practices that define that sense of membership, and its expression and manifestation in social behavior.