Innovations and Challenges in Identity Research

In his oft-cited monograph Second language identities (2007), David Block made his thorough foray into examining issues surrounding second language acquisition and identities from a poststructuralist lens. Since then, his work has been essential reading for second language researchers and practitioners interested in how identity plays out in social contexts. In 2022, Block’s new book Innovation and Challenges in Identity Research comes out as a timely response to the intricate ways in which identity should be made sense of and researched in times of social change. Compared to his previous related monographs (see Block 2003, 2007), this well-written volume features Block’s new thinking shaped by Marxist political economy, which leads to the critical realist stance he has taken to capture and evaluate innovations and challenges in identity studies. Reading through this book, I was particularly drawn to Block’s disciplinary transcendent approach to delivering a historically situated and thoroughly compelling framing of identity, which constitutes one of the primary strengths of the book. I also learned that identity is not simply a matter of individual agency but largely rests upon the social structure which envelops and shapes our ways of being in the complex and uncertain world.