Strikingly often, they come from regions with strongly independent identities, such as Catalonia or Wales.
It's more that until recently the political culture ignored the importance of other identities such as gender, race and sexual orientation.
But popular culture, even as it prizes difference, rarely captures the variety that resides within identities such as black, or queer, or immigrant.
Their most recent sci-fi epic, Jupiter Ascending, was another rebellion story, entertaining notions of hybrid identities such as humans who are part-bee or dog.
Many of them suggest that casting experience as an intersection of super-abstract social identities, such as "femaleness" and "blackness," elides historical specificity.
The Jolly Roger also was versatile enough to be adapted when necessary, like today's "hybrid brand identities," such as Google's constantly changing corporate logo.
And during that period a very powerful sense of Chinese cultural identity has evolved which has subsumed and taken precedence over other identities such as ethnic, regional and religious for the great majority of the population.
Brand identities, such as a perception of a university being a regional hub with a fantastic student life, resonate with existing students while attracting new ones, too, the roundtable heard.
The same seemed true for sexuality, as orientations beyond the straight found new acceptance – and a new vocabulary too, as identities such as "pansexual" (attracted to all genders) and "asexual" (without any particular sexual feels) gained currency.
Over that period once-mighty town halls with distinctive municipal identities (such as Birmingham's, pictured) withered in influence as councils became more and more the agents of Whitehall, rather than of local people.The government's critics say that what is really being devolved from the centre are painful spending cuts and some of the attendant unpopularity.
But there is also some evidence that new identities, such as the entrepreneurial identity, are emerging.
