Identities are not only individual, but also social, cultural, relational, and pluralistic. Identities are navigated as social resources to exercise power, assert presence, and secure belonging. Identities are socially constituted, negotiated, and reinforced in complex, multidimensional ways. They are tied to structural and interactional dynamics of power, privilege, and marginalization. Identities are inherently social phenomena and, as such, they are of central sociological importance.

This book is focused on exploring the ways that social scientists interpret identities. We bring together a selection of chapters from scholars who use various interpretive lenses to analyze identities. Two major substantive themes in this volume are: an emphasis on power/inequalities and on the social dynamics of navigating competing attributes of unmarked privilege and marked marginality; and a focus on the balance of experiences and non-experiences (such as missed opportunities and unrealized aspirations) in shaping identities.

The marked and unmarked substantive theme arises from a cognitive sociology approach to studying attention and inattention as they relate to social categories and to the production and reproduction of social inequalities (see Brekhus, 1998; Zerubavel, 2018). The concept of markedness was first developed in linguistics to note how one item of a linguistic contrast was actively highlighted with the presence of an articulated attribute (markedness) while the other was passively defined by the absence of an attribute (unmarkedness) (see Jakobson, 1972; Trubetzkoy and Jakobson, 1975, p 162).