Performing Identities in Urban Spaces; Kampala, Uganda - Royal ...

Key findings:
The increasing focus on identity in western academia is indicative of its importance;
influential and nuanced work puts identity and the individual at the centre of human,
social and cultural geographical concern (Hall 1992; Butler 1990; Valentine 2001; Pain
2001; Little 2002; Jackson 2005). Poststructuralists’ have moved away from static and
essentialist notions of identity, towards an understanding of self that is socially
constructed, shifting and multiple (Little 2002:35), explaining the ways in which
identities are fragmented, dislocated and de-centred, rather than stable, single and
integrated, influenced by multiple cultural landscapes (Hall 1992: 274). Identities are
constructed and transformed by dominant categories of gender, class, age and faith;
they are a site of constant negotiation, affected by expectations of ‘appropriate’ and
‘inappropriate’ behaviours or dress.
The role of Space and Institutions
Though conventionally institutions such as schools and universities have been thought
of as stable, built environments made of bricks and mortar, more recent studies
reconceptualise institutions as networks of resources, knowledge and power; which
both transform and are transformed by the people and places which create and sustain
them (Valentine 2001:141-2). The school as a social institution is understood, therefore,
not as a bounded entity, but as a network of power relations; between the students,
their families, the staff, the government and the spaces they interact in and across.
Institutions, such as schools, become characterised by power relationships of control
and discipline (Holloway and Hubbard 2001:187) and thus (re)produce social
hierarchies and inequalities. Within institutions particular behaviours and attitudes
become “predictable and routine” and are thus institutionalised (Goetz 1997:5).
Social and feminist geographers are interested in the ways in which identities and
spaces are constructed and gendered through performance (Little 2002:36). Social
identities and subjectivities are “intimately tied to the spaces through which people
practice and perform them” and are constructed in relation to systems of authority
which mark out the behaviours and identities which are deemed “appropriate” and
“inappropriate” (Del Casino 2009:203). Powerful agents in society control the way
spaces are constructed and as such they reflect the structural hierarchies of society
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