Self-Identity

This week's show featured a talk by Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen entitled "The Idea of Identity." Sen is the first scholar to hold the visiting professorship at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University.

According to Sen, classification of identities ignores the complexity of each human's identity. In this lecture, he argued that our knowledge of ourselves must include how our concerns and priorities are influenced by our attachment to one group of people. Other issues he discussed in the lecture included the feelings associated with self-identity, the conflict between choosing and being assigned an identity, and the complexities of having multiple identities.