Navigating Multiple Identities: Race, Gender, Culture, Nationality, and Roles

by Ruthellen Josselson (Editor), Michele Harway (Editor)

Although questionnaires routinely ask people to check boxes indicating if they are, for example, male or female, black or white, Hispanic or American, many people do not fit neatly into one category or another. Identity is increasingly organized multiply and may encompass additional categories beyond those that appear on demographic questionnaires. In addition, identities are often fluid and context-dependent, depending on the external social factors that invite their emergence. Identity is constantly evolving in light of changing environments, but people are often uncomfortably fixed with societal labels that they must include or resist in their individual identity definition.

In our increasingly complex, globalized world, many people carry conflicting psychosocial identities. They live at the edges of more than one communal affiliation, with the challenge of bridging different loyalties and identifications. Navigating Multiple Identities considers those who are navigating across racial minority or majority status, various cultural expectations and values, gender identities, and roles. The chapters collected here by Josselson and Harway explore the ways in which individuals attain or maintain personal integration in the face of often shifting personal or social locations, and how they navigate the complexity of their multiple identities.

288 pages, Paperback

First published March 20, 2012

About the author

Ruthellen Josselson, PhD, is Professor of Clinical Psychology at Fielding Graduate University. She was formerly Professor at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Visiting Professor at Harvard University School of Education, and Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University. Dr. Josselson is a cofounder of the Society for Qualitative Inquiry in Psychology; coeditor of 11 volumes of The Narrative Study of Lives, a series dedicated to publishing qualitative research; coauthor of Five Ways of Doing Qualitative Analysis; and author of many journal articles and book chapters that explore the theory and practice of qualitative inquiry. She has conducted workshops on interviewing skills for qualitative inquiry in the United States, France, Norway, Finland, Israel, and the United Kingdom. Based on interviews she has conducted over 35 years, she has written two books exploring women’s identity longitudinally (Finding Herself and Revising Herself) and three other books (The Space Between Us, Best Friends, and Playing Pygmalion). Dr. Josselson is a recipient of the American Psychological Association’s Henry A. Murray Award and Theodore R. Sarbin Award as well as a Fulbright Fellowship.