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Against a backdrop of shifting political climates, digital transformations, and evolving cultural landscapes, Volume 63 of Studies in Symbolic Interaction offers a timely and incisive exploration of how identities are built, performed, and negotiated within contemporary social worlds, demonstrating the enduring relevance of symbolic interactionism for understanding how individuals make sense of themselves and others.
Across its chapters, contributors examine identity work in both everyday life and specialized contexts - from political self‑fashioning and the negotiation of religious practice to relational dynamics in the act of coming out. Further studies illuminate online identity performance, digital storytelling as a tool for meaning‑making, and the stigmatization faced by people experiencing homelessness. Together the chapters not only reveal the diverse sites and strategies of identity construction but also show how these processes continue to refine and extend symbolic interactionist theory.
This collection is illuminating reading for scholars, students, and practitioners interested in identity and social interaction. By illustrating how identities are continually shaped through interaction, it offers both theoretical advancement and rich empirical insight for those seeking to understand the complexities of selfhood in the contemporary world.
Shing-Ling S. Chen is Professor of Mass Communication in the Department of Communication and Media at the University of Northern Iowa, USA. Trained by Carl J. Couch as a symbolic interactionist, she studies information technologies and social orders, as well as communication processes and social relationships.
Part A. Symbolic Interaction and Identity Construction
Chapter 1. Introduction: The Complex and Strenuous Interaction Work of Identity Construction; Dirk vom Lehn
Chapter 2. MAGA and #MeToo: Trump Women’s Political Identity Work; Christine Matragrano and Douglas P. Schrock
Chapter 3. Negotiating Religious Identity in Secular Public Spaces: A Symbolic Interactionist Analysis of Hindu Practices in Urban Kenya; Waithanji Mutiti
Chapter 4. A Relational Theory of Coming Out; Jimmie Manning
Chapter 5. Being “Normal” Online: Negotiating Reputation and Authenticity for University Students in Singapore; Wei-Jhen Liang and J. Patrick Williams
Chapter 6. Digital Storytelling as Symbolic Interaction: Negotiating Meaning and Managing Impressions in Personal Narratives; Amanda Hill
Chapter 7. Not a Virus, Nor a Scum: Repelling the Stigmatizing Generalized Other by the Homeless; Jenna Gerdes, Shing-Ling S. Chen, and Michael Katovich
Part B. New Interactionist Research
Chapter 8. Intellectual Craftsmanship: Guidelines from 12 Angry Men on How to Do Quality Work in the Social Sciences; Vidar Halldorsson