Identities on the Move

This book contains selected papers from the meetings «To think the Identity» and «Identities on the move» held in the Institute for Research into Identities and Society (University of Lleida) during 2010. The aim is to understand the reasons that allow social cohesion throughout the creation of identities and its adaptation. Identity is individual and collective, momentary and secular, apparently contradictory terms that can only coexist and fructify if they entail a constant adaptation. Thus, in a changing world, the identities are always on the move and the continuity of society requires a permanent move. Values, Culture, Language and History show the societies in permanent evolution, and demand an interdisciplinary perspective for studying. Attending this scope, outstanding historians, sociologists, linguistics and scientists offer here a diachronic and interdisciplinary approach to this phenomenon: how men and women have been combining the identity and the move in order to feel save into a social life from Middle Ages to current days, and how different items, in our present society, built the framework of identities.

Flocel Sabaté is professor in Medieval History and head of the Institute for Research into Identities and Society (University of Lleida, Catalonia, Spain). He served as invited professor in universities such as Paris-1, Poitiers, ENS-Lettres et Sciences (Lyon), Universidad Nacional de Mexico or Yale, and led international research projects from European institutions such as the European Science Foundation or Marie Curie Actions. He belongs to more than fifty boards for scientific journals and series and has written more than three hundred research works, including different books about medieval society.