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Social location

Sociologists often use the phrase social location  to describe the ways in which each person’s collective, intersecting social identities affect their position in the world, including the opportunities and challenges they face and the perspectives from which they perceive and experience reality.

All our social identities contribute in some way to our social location, making it a complex and nuanced phenomenon.

One way that social identities may be represented is as a circle or wheel that portrays various identities as existing in closer proximity to power and resources, and others as further away from these.

 

Exploring identity categories

Take a moment and look through some of the categories included on the version below. Are there any here that you might not have thought of?

 

This is the Wheel of power or privilege which adapted from ccrweb.ca. An image description can be found from the following accordion.
Duckworth, S. Wheel of power/privilege [Infographic]. Flickr. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Instructions

To explore the content below, select the “>” icon to expand the section.

If you’re using keyboard navigation, use the Tab, Up, or Down arrow keys to move between sections, and press Spacebar to expand or collapse them.

 

Another example of an identity wheel was developed by the team at FORRT, and might resonate more strongly with you. This version explores many of the factors that go into shaping the relative privileges and barriers faced by those in the world of higher education.

Perhaps you can recognize some of the ways you have experienced challenges in your own career in terms of your various positions on this wheel.

 

Academic Wheel of privilege portrays various privilege factors through wheel. Privilege increases to the center. An image description can be found from the below accordion.
FORRT. Academic Wheel of Privilege. This item was first introduced in the preprint “Bridging Neurodiversity and Open Scholarship: How Shared Values Can Guide Best Practices for Research Integrity, Social Justice and Principled Education” by Elsherif et al., available from “Understanding the Impact of Instructor Identity on Student Engagement and Belonging (preprint)”. Used with permission.

Instructions

To explore the content below, select the “>” icon to expand the section.

If you’re using keyboard navigation, use the Tab, Up, or Down arrow keys to move between sections, and press Spacebar to expand or collapse them.

 

License

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Understanding Social Identities Among Faculty and Students Copyright © 2025 by The Manitoba Flexible Learning Hub is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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