A terrible beauty is born: teaching about identity salience and conflict

Teaching students about the impact of identity and identity salience and its impact on conflict can be very challenging for many students who have not experienced discrimination, oppression or violent conflict. The two exercises laid out in this article can be used in classes to help students understand how identity can be formed by experiences with discrimination and violence and how these experiences can shape people's choices in politics as well as choosing to mobilize for causes. Our exercise first seeks to have students confront their own identity and its salience to themselves. The second part of the exercise utilizes highly mobilized identity rhetoric in the form of nationalist poetry to provide the students with an opportunity to sample, quickly but effectively, the impact and nature of identity politics in conflict cases. Using this exercise, students are able to grapple with their own identity formation, its potential salience and possibility for mobilization, as well as the power of identity mobilization writ large, in a powerful but controlled and relatively apolitical manner that supports teaching about identity as a political phenomenon.