CONCEPT
Identity and the Practice
Wenger's thesis that identity is not a psychological attribute preceding practice but is constituted through practice — through the community's recognition, the learning trajectory, the multimembership that makes the practitioner who she is.
Most frameworks treat identity as a psychological attribute — a self that precedes disruption and must decide how to respond. Wenger's framework is more radical. Identity is not something the practitioner possesses prior to practice; it is constituted through practice, built layer by layer through years of participation in communities that recognize developing competence and assign increasing responsibility. This reframing changes the diagnosis of the AI moment. The senior engineer who oscillates between excitement and terror is not experiencing a psychological threat to a pre-existing self. He is experiencing the destabilization of an identity that was constituted through a practice now being transformed — and the appropriate response is not individual resilience but the reconstitution of identity through new communities of practice.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Wenger identifies five dimensions of identity, each illuminating a different facet of what AI destabilizes. Identity as negotiated experience: the daily reality of being treated as a