Identities: alternative narratives from France

By Mariana (Elan)

How do you define yourself? How did (and still does) this process of identity(ies) construction take place? What do you think about empowerment through the construction of our identities?

Attracted by these questions, youngsters living in France spent two days with the 1000Layers project team searching for reflection.

Giving the complexity of the subject, it might have sound as a challenge - and it was. Our mainly goals were: Understand the conflicts and challenges related to identity; understand the identity debate at various levels and engage with it respectfully; develop skills to understand and decode the discourses used (and abused) in the media, or as they appear in personal stories: and to share, test and co-construct activities on popular education issues. We presented the workshop as a pedagogical space, which is not intended to transmit theoretical knowledge, but to encourage dialogue and sharing of experiences between participants and themselves.

In every activity, the phrase that would always appear was: our identities are fluid - altought it might seem challenging for yougsters at the beggining, at the end of the workshop they were happy to conclude that.

We arrived with questions, and luckly we left with a bunch more: are you aware of your privileges? which black woman am i? how to deal with identity assignment? how to find my identity balance? in an intercultural encounter, do we have to go beyond our identities?

#1000layerseu