Chapter 6: Exploring Exploration As A Recursive Process

Exploration is one of the core concepts in identity research. Identity theorists thus far mainly concentrate on exploration as the process in which future selves are compared to current selves. This process is triggered in a number of ways. In this chapter, we will emphasize culturally normative as well as non-normative identity exploration among adolescents and young adults. Through analysis of case studies, we find that people not only compare future to current, but also past selves to current selves, and in the process revise their identity histories. We explore how recursivity and revisiting inform the exploration process and do this by looking not just into the future, but backward, too, which is a process we know relatively less about in identity literature.