I’ve been urging more public social science for years, but doing it in pretty traditional media - academic articles and essays on the web. My colleagues have convinced me to experiment with another medium. This posting launches a series of podcasts. My colleague Paul Price, the SSRC’s editorial director, is organizing interviews to bring out social science issues related to the US presidential contest. The first episode, “All Politics Are Identity Politics” takes up a theme that became especially prominent in the democratic primaries. There are good reasons to be troubled when people say predetermined identities dictate political outcomes. This is contrary to the very possibilities of the political process to reshape identities as well as the way issues are framed. But I part company with many critics of identity politics who imagine that there is some sort of pure world of rational interests where identities don’t matter. Rather, I think politics always includes establishing which of people’s many possible identities will shape their participation and their understanding of their interests. So there’s an identity politics in trying to convince wage-earners to identify with the working class rather than with racial or ethnic groupings; there’s an identity politics to nationalism and also to cosmopolitanism.

Check back in two weeks for another podcast in which Paul and I focus on the role of religion in this election and how it relates to the self-understanding of American citizens.

I hope you find this effort of interest, and I invite you to subscribe to the podcast series either through RSS here on my blog, or through iTunes. Your comments are also welcome.

 

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