Spaces and Identities in Border Regions 36 2.3 P ROCESSES OF (S ELF)I DENTIFICATION Sonja Kmec and Rachel Reckinger If the recent publication of two handbooks (Wetherell/Mohanty 2010; Elliott 2011) may serve as indicator, identity studies are in the process of establishing themselves as a feld of cross-disciplinary investigation. Early critics of such studies objected to the very notion of ‘identity’, mainly due to the semantic reference to sameness (being identical to oneself or, in the case of collective identity, to someone else) and its function of domination and exclusion of ‘others’ as well as the implicit refusal of the contingency and the heterogeneity of an individual’s self-conception. However, the concept of identity has since been revised, taking onboard such criticism (Renn/Straub 2002: 12). Most identity theorists nowadays understand identity as an ongoing, always provisional and open-ended yet ambivalent process of self-defnition – as the term Identitätsarbeit (Keupp et al. 2006) suggests – shaped by social (inter)actions and mediated through discourse and knowledge: “The person, that is, the concrete individual, whom the I understands itself to be [or to have become] is cast always anew, in a process that is never closed, never free of the intervention and – as the case may be – confirmation by others and finally mediated through public language, is linked to identity, not directly to that which is identical with the I […]” 49 (Renn/ Straub 2002: 11). The focus is thus on “the gap between the I who has a relation with something and the I who functions as the something in that relation” 50 (ibid.: 10-11). The investigation of this “gap” can only be understood with reference to the theoretical framework of post-structuralism, which will be sketched out below. In a second step we will seek to render the notion of identity operational for empirical studies, before presenting the concrete approaches to identity and space constructions within border regions that will be developed subsequently in the chapters 3, 4 and 5. 49 | Personal translation of: “Die Person, aufgefasst als das konkrete Individuum, als das sich das Ich immer wieder neu, nicht abschliessbar und niemals frei von der Intervention und gegebenenfalls von der Bestätigung durch andere, schliesslich im Medium der öffentlichen Sprache ‘versteht’, ist auf Identität bezogen, nicht unmittelbar auf sich als das mit dem Ich Identische […].” 50 | Personal translation of: “[…] Abstand zwischen dem Ich, das zu etwas ein Verhältnis unterhält, und dem Ich, das in diesem Verhältnis als das Etwas fungiert.”