About
“Fashioning the Self” is an interdisciplinary student seminar sponsored by the Hurford Humanities Center. The seminar is devoted to exploring questions of personal identity, particularly as manifested in the seemingly universal sense of being a person effortlessly situated in a narrative. One compelling facet of modern personal identity is the “digital self”: the internet allows the individual to create a new individuality, to shape a new narrative for him or herself. This freedom brings into sharp relief the performative aspect of personal identity, and allows one individual to present publicly two or more identities, confusing our usually unconfused sense of a unified self.
The “Fashioning the Self” blog will serve as a quasi-public forum to explore directly narrative constructions of identity by constructing, or performing, them. The blog will host content with the creators’ names attached: it will serve as a kind of blank slate on which the participants in the seminar can create whatever quasi-public persona they like, delimited by the form of the blog itself. We hope this will do at least these three things: publicize the seminar, involve the larger Haverford community in our discussion, and deepen our understanding of how we actively shape our identities and the narrative structures in which we frame them.