Podcast: has the term ‘identity politics’ become unusable?

At any given moment, the identities we have can be politicised or we can politicise them, in order to either gain equality or to gain supremacy. That’s one of the things I think is often lost in 'identity politics’: dominant people also have an identity.

Author, broadcaster and editor-at-large for the Guardian Gary Younge joined Professor Ann Phoenix FBA to discuss how identity politics has effectively come to mean anything you want it to, so long as you don’t like it. In this conversation, recorded at the British Academy, they explore the meaning of identity, how it intersects with politics, and how the term has been applied to American elections over the past decade.

Gary Younge's Angry, White and American documentary was broadcast on Channel 4 in 2017. He expands on the ideas in this podcast in an October 2018 Guardian column entitled It comes as no shock that the powerful hate 'identity politics'. His most recent book, Another Day in the Death of America, is published by Guardian Faber.

Professor Ann Phoenix is a Fellow of the British Academy and serves as chair of the Education Group. She is Professor of Psychosocial Studies at University College London's Institute of Education and specialises in social identities; psychosocial processes; parenting practices and everyday family lives; intersectionality; young people; racialisation, ethnicity and gender. She has written for the British Academy blog on the importance of intersectionality in the #PressforProgress campaign and understanding the protests against President Donald Trump's UK visit.