"Designing Identity: Technology, Media and Politics in Complexity"

During historical transitions, it is a common practice to question the boundaries of identity. Indeed it becomes strategically important to analyse and decodify both the new emerging symbols and the discourses on the Self which define the dynamics of identity representation. Since in our contemporary age contradiction and conflict permeate the categories of values and the mechanisms of representation of reality, it is interesting to investigate the following issues: - the ways in which literature connects cultural innovation, new kinds of knowledge, cognitive practice, and the ethical and the moral dimension of civil and social coexistence. If not fully identified, the 'new' takes on the character of the monstrous; - the renewed individual and/or collective narrative logic(s) and its(their) fields of action, as for example social media storytelling or unsettling web-culture phenomena such as digital after-death; - the complexity of contemporary social systems, including migration and terrorist policies which move the concept of inter/multiculturalism further and mark even more intensely a clear conflict with all those cultural key factors that we perceive as belonging to our cultural identity or heritage. Think, for example, about the sociological concept of ‘super-diversity.’ - the role law plays in describing these new collective dynamics in a renewed negotiation between rights and duties, and the necessity to repossess a strong ethical dimension. The panel aims at investigating the ways in which we can shape, enact/re-enact our existence and our being in the contemporary world within the design of culture, intended as a sense-making intellectual framework.