The theme of the 2012 Physics Education Research (PER) Conference was "Cultural perspectives on learners' performance & identity in physics".

As new research questions have emerged related to the variability of student reasoning and practices across contexts, the PER community has begun to attend to the relevance of culture and identity in the physics learning community and to draw results and methodologies from fields such as social psychology, anthropology, linguistics, and sociology.

In particular, these fields offer new ways of thinking about performance and may suggest different accounts of student understanding that are in tension with each other (or seemingly incongruent).  Additionally, the PER community has also begun to explore identity as a lens for understanding student development and participation in physics.  Students' past patterns of engagement may offer productive ways to examine and characterize identity drawing on data beyond the individual and using methodological tools that can account for this broader scope.

The PERC 2012 conference highlighted these emerging research directions and drew attention to the theoretical tools and methodological considerations of cultural practice perspectives on learning and performance.