Identity Development: Shaping Future Research and Application

Contemporary society both poses many challenges and offers many opportunities regarding how youth are adjusting in the world.

The present proposal concerns a national three-day-conference, open to researchers and practitioners in the field of identity development (an area that that fits several of Forte’s areas of research and coordination).

The purpose of the conference is: To enhance theory, research, and practice on psychosocial understandings of identity development within social contexts and examine how different domains of identity intersect with each other. The conference will be held in the vicinity of Gothenburg.

Approximately sixty Swedish participants will take part, including a mix of senior and junior researchers and practitioners. Also, ten international experts will be invited as speakers at the conference.

As research on this subject has proliferated in recent years, there has been a lack of coordination among researchers, and between researchers and practitioners The conference will thus bring together researchers and practitioners to discuss and exchange experiences regarding major unresolved issues in the field and develop a path forward. (1) Half of the participants will be Ph.D. students, for which the conference will serve as a major training opportunity to learn from and interact with international experts on the subject of identity; (2) The conference will facilitate both Swedish researchers learning from international experts, along with the international experts learning more about Swedish research on this topic; (3) We envision assembling two edited books, and two special issues in open access journals; (4) To further communicate beyond an academic audience, we will create two pamphlets containing key insights from the conference.

These will be brief, “fact sheets with relevant information that can assist practitioners, teachers, etc. concerned with improving the life conditions of young people.