Trajectories of identity change : new perspectives on ethnicity, nationality and identity in the Cultural Social Sciences and Research in Ireland

The cultural social sciences work at the point of intersection of social structure, institutional change and change in mass public perceptions and collective identities. They look for the links between power relations, collective action and social and symbolic boundaries. Marx theorized this for class relations. The most exciting area of the cultural social sciences today, however, is ethnicity, where some of the insights developed in class analysis are used to look at the constitution of ethnic categories and collectivities and the ways the categories of ethnicity and nationality are embodied, manipulated,
strategically adapted, and transmitted.