Spanning several centuries and various academic disciplines including psychology, sociology, anthropology, philosophy and management, the scholarly conversation on the self is as relevant as ever.

In today’s globalised, hi-tech world identity has become malleable. Current generations have the freedom to make choices about who they want to be, and access to an unprecedented range of options from which to choose.

These developments have created new challenges for scholars hoping to understand how people create their sense of self.

Our purpose is to better understand these challenges, develop relevant theories and offer useful advice.

Research themes

We are developing ideas and knowledge within these areas:

• identity work
  
• the interplay between constructing one’s professional identity and navigating one’s career
  
• the dynamics of identity at the boundary between work and home
  
• the impact of specific experiences (such as living abroad, being in a dual career couple, being in a liminal state) on identity
  
• specific identities (e.g. professional identities, political identities, cultural identities, gender identities)
  
• alternative selves (i.e. people’s ideas about who they might have been if something in the past had happened differently)