Kath Woodward is Staff Tutor in Sociology at The Open University and Co-Chair of the Course DD100.

This text provides an exploration of identity as a contemporary concern in everyday life and as a key concept in social science. Our world is an increasingly unstable place, but current changes offer new opportunities as well as new challenges. Drawing on work from a variety of disciplines and focusing on the key social divisions of gender, class and nation, this book shows how these challenges and opportunities work out in practice. What is really happening when people either individually or in groups identify with particular definitions of themselves or strike out to take up new identities? Do gender, class and ethnicity offer some stability and even certainty about who we are, or are they to be seen as limitations on our freedom to choose our own identities? Are we in the end bound by the social constraints and inequalities with which we started out? This text should be of interest to all students starting out in the social sciences and for anyone with an interest in the dilemmas of identity-making in contemporary society.