Multiple Identities In the Digital Society: Risks and Opportunities

Digitalization has transformed the ways individuals construct, express, and negotiate multiple identities across civic, ethnic, religious, linguistic, generational, and cultural domains. This session examines the risks and opportunities associated with multiple identities in digital society, with particular attention to how online platforms, networked communication, and algorithmic environments reshape social boundaries, trust, belonging, and civic consensus.

The session invites theoretically informed and empirically grounded papers that explore how digital spaces enable new forms of self-representation, participation, solidarity, and intercultural dialogue, while also generating fragmentation, polarization, exclusion, surveillance, misinformation, and identity-based conflict. Particular interest will be given to studies addressing the interaction between online and offline identities; the transformation of religious, ethnic, and civic belonging; youth identity formation; digital inequalities; platform governance; and the role of digital communication in either reducing or reinforcing social distance.

The session seeks to bring together research from different national and regional contexts, in order to identify both common patterns and context-specific dynamics. Contributions may employ quantitative, qualitative, comparative, computational, or mixed-method approaches.

The session will consist of oral paper presentations followed by moderated discussion and a collective question-and-answer segment. Presenters will be encouraged to reflect not only on the risks of digital identity fragmentation, but also on the potential of digital environments to support inclusive citizenship, mutual recognition, social cohesion, and democratic participation. The session aims to advance a comparative sociological understanding of how multiple identities are negotiated in increasingly digital societies.