Abstracts

For my Ph.D. I am analyzing how authority manifested and understood itself during and after the Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic. I approach my corpus from a new historicist perspective, meaning that I attempt through the historiographic fiction selected to give a complementary discourse to official historical documents. In other words, I will give a voice to the subaltern of the Trujillo regime, which in mainstream historicism can be argued to be left voiceless, or at best, that his story is written by the faction in power. The corpus can be argued to have the quality to give that voice because it is comprised of works in which the authors took testimonies from people who participated actively or were contemporary with important events of the era in question. The research will prove that the regime manifested authority, making use of the country’s colonial background by redefining the tools of oppression left behind from the imperial age. It will also analyze how it mixed the tool with the concept of masculinity, which, in short, can be understood as a Latin version of toxic masculinity.

In my presentation, I wish to detail my methods and approach, drawing from scholars such as Hutcheon, Trouillot, Greenblatt, Weber, Oyarzun, and others. I also wish to present the findings I have discovered until this point.

This paper looks at understandings of nation and nationalism through the lens of a national educational institute in Wales, namely ‘Urdd Gobaith Cymru’. The paper will inquire into the work of Urdd Gobaith Cymru over the past century using historical and thematic analysis to plot the discourses and processes involved. Through formation and participation in cultural events and identity building practices, the work situates The Urdd as a key institution of nation and nationalism in Wales. The work uses a Foucauldian framework of thinking as well as key concepts of banal and effective nationalism, where the discourse of nation can produce and felt subjectively by citizens through the work of The Urdd. The work aims to expose and better understand processes of discourse formation of nation and nationalism in Wales today.

In this paper I will emphasise the importance of practice in research. Embodied archive is the theoretical material residing in a theatre practitioner; it is not just providing the context for work, it inhabits. 

In my case my knowledge of two conflicting cultures - Russian and Ukrainian; and my refugee experience because of the war in Ukraine enables me to create better embedded practice work with refugees, as this theory is embodied in me already. 
In my PhD I am aiming to enable a first drop of understanding to fall into the sea of hatred now existing between current Russian and Ukrainian communities through the methodology that I have developed over the years as a theatre practitioner.
I will give example of Applied Theatre methodology that employs a table for information sharing and dialogue facilitation among diverse groups. I will discuss the role of the theatre workshop facilitator regarding trust, encompassing both the relationship between the facilitator and participants, as well as trust dynamics within the group, specifically addressing the complexities associated with national identities. I will conclude by reflecting on the potential of Applied Arts to serve as a bridge between conflict and justice.

Multiple geo-political changes in territory and legislature through border delineation, migration, colonialism, war, and nationalisms situate the Bengal region as a site of contested socio-history and memory politics. With Bengal being spread across the eastern Indian state of West Bengal and the nation of Bangladesh, being Bengali is increasingly positioned as being bordered by Indian and Bangladeshi nationalisms. Centring Bengali communities in Britain, this research queries whether these national (hi)stories and ideas of nationhood influence identity construction of Bengali migrants and diasporas on a long-distance scale.

Drawing upon studies of nationalism, migration, and memory, this research adopts a transnational and intergenerational approach to exploring Bengali identity across multiple generations of Bengalis in Britain, and positions the role of the memory-nationalism nexus as crucial to long-distance nationalism. This paper presents preliminary findings from 50 semi-structured and narrative interviews, with a particular focus upon the internal divisions within and between Indian Bengali and Bangladeshi communities. With ‘Bengaliness’ being shaped by competing discourses of religionised and territorialised Indian and Bangladeshi nationalisms, these divisions are manifested through everyday regional geo-politics, rising religiosity, and a subsequent destabilisation of the religion-culture dichotomy. Further, against a backdrop of anti-immigration sentiment, religious revivalism, and rising nationalisms particularly Hindu nationalism might mutual identification between Indian Bengalis and Bangladeshis be possible in the liminal spaces that they are occupy as minoritised communities in Britain?

The presentation focuses on the role of the football programme at the 1951 Festival of Britain in the construction of post-war British national identity. It will begin by attempting to define British post-war identity, arguing that prestige and superiority in an era of decolonisation was key to this identity, re-enforced through success in popular sports such as football which propagated ‘traditional’ British values. It will then analyse the Festival of Britain in this construction, arguing it attempted to present Britain as united through insularity while its global influence declined, which was diametrically opposed to the prevailing national identity. Through analysis of the football programme, the presentation argues that through a series of football matches against continental opposition, the English Football Association, representing Britain, used the Festival as an opportunity to learn from ‘superior’ continental opposition, acknowledging British decline as both a sporting and imperial power and opposing the prevailing identity of prestige, despite celebrating football as a British export to the world. It concludes that mass-spectacle events such as the F.A. Cup final and England national team matches were more reflective of the prevailing identity, celebrating unity through displays from England’s star footballers, usually in front of royalty. Through analysis of newspaper reports, newsreel footage, and matchday programmes, this presentation addresses a topic which has received scant academic attention as a means of charting the construction of post-war British national identity, placing football in the wider context of decolonisation, globalisation, and the significance of the Festival of Britain.

This presentation is based on the analysis of the film collection #FreedomFilms published by the Lithuanian Public Broadcaster LRT and aimed at representing the past and remobilising the national past. The majority of those films received funding from the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture (LMC). Therefore, the presentation will also draw on five interviews with officials from the LMC, focusing on funding and curating films related to the past, visions of the past these films seek to convey and the remobilisation of national memories during the war in Ukraine.

This presentation will argue that, in Lithuania, the connection between institutions of remembrance and nationalism is intertwined into a complex fabric of socio-economic forces. Established methodologies, such as the invented traditions approach (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983), along with more recent research on Baltic neoliberalism and memory multiscalarity, can aid in unravelling these intricate dynamics, providing insights into historical film dynamics in Lithuania and the broader region.

For instance, interviews with the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture reveal a tendency towards adherence to market logics and liberal democracy in the realm of memory curation. However, this approach is not without its own fractures, giving rise to tensions regarding the promotion of diversity in representing the past. The majority of films predominantly focus on the late socialism period, portraying society within homogeneous narrative frames. These processes, to some extent, contribute to reinforcing a nuanced yet direct relationship between Lithuanian nationalism and memory. Given the relatively small size of the film industry, the prevalent practice involves appropriating old content during significant periods for the country’s self-identification, as exemplified in this study by the war in Ukraine. Consequently, not only historical content but also nationalism, memory dynamics, and homogenous representations undergo multiple rounds of appropriation.

My PhD project aims to scrutinise the relationship between national identity constructions and Euroscepticism in the UK and Turkey. In the last decade, the dominance of the nationalist political traditions that have sought to turn away from Europe has been witnessed in these two countries which have deep-rooted ties with the European Union. The project will be conducted through a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of texts and speeches produced in the last decade by the Eurosceptic and nationalist parties at the right of the political spectrum. In both countries, the instrumentalisation of national identities at the discursive level has laid the groundwork for the construction and production of Eurosceptic convictions and beliefs. Furthermore, Euroscepticism in the UK and Turkey has a socio-psychological aspects fed by collective complexes and anxieties. In this regard, the relationship between Eurosceptic convictions and beliefs and emotions and how these emotions have been constructed in the political discourse will also be investigated. This project will try to provide a new perspective to European studies by comparing the discursive construction of Euroscepticism in the UK and Turkey, which have many differences but also considerable similarities in the context of European Integration.

There has been much research about meaning of Iranian Identity and its evolution during the history. Many scholars are agreeing that due to last constitution of Iran, Iranian identity could be considered as a national identity of Iranian state. However, the lack of studies on what Iranian identity means for the indigenous Kurdish community, whose population is around 60 million in total and 12 million in Iran, and whose lands are shared between Iran, Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Armenia, still remains unclear.

In my PhD research, I explore the relationship between the Iranian state and Kurds from religious and nationalist perspectives by employing the theoretical perspective of ethnic nationalism and ethnic-religious nationalism. I conducted 28 semi-structured interviews with Iranian politicians to seek the meaning of being Iranian for Kurds and being Kurd for Iranians/politicians. The findings of my empirical research suggest that Kurds and Kurdish matters in the Islamic Republic of Iran are approached from two main aspects of Iranian identity: racial context and institutional context. According to the interviews, Iranian state considers Kurds as an Iranian on racial level. However, institutional level, Iranian state considers Kurds either as an ethnic minority or as an extension of Persian identity under the name of Iranian identity. On the other hand, even though Kurds are fully own the criteria of being a nation, still it denied by Iranian state. Moreover, Iranian identity is equal to be Persian which is an ethnic identity. However, being Iranian was supposed to be a national identity and inclusive for all ethnic identity in Iran. 

To sum up, this abstract aims to clarify meaning of Iranian identity and being Iranian in the context of Iranian state and its institutional consequences for Kurdish community via semi-structed interviews.

With the proliferation of ethnic accessories and clothing brands in Kazakhstan, individuals started to combine traditional elements with contemporary clothing in everyday settings. In this study, I aim to examine what I refer to as ‘accessory nationalism’, which is a diffusion of traditional symbols in the realm of daily consumer practices. Specifically, I will focus on how individuals in Almaty, the largest city in Kazakhstan, engage in the meaning-making process of ‘nation’. Through interviews and focus groups, I explore the role of consumer objects, particularly accessories, as ubiquitous tools for cultivating national identity. In addition, to examine whether those consumers are engaging uncritically or intentionally in the reproduction of national identity, I will conduct a visual analysis of advertised traditional accessories. Drawing on the theoretical framework of Banal Nationalism and Everyday Nationhood, this paper will aim to answer questions of why individuals are choosing those traditional accessories, and how the mundane materiality and consumer choice are affecting the engagement of ordinary citizens in forging their national identity. This study will contribute to the existing field by providing a case from a post-Soviet country and serve as another example of how material objects and visuals promote the commercialization of national distinctiveness.

The Orban government claims to fear both demographic decline and immigration. In order to avoid both, Fidesz introduced various strategies, programs to keep immigration out and boost the birth of Hungarian children. Part of these strategies is the Family Protection Action Plan. In this paper I will analyse the most updated versions of two pro-natalist policies of that Plan, namely the ‘Baba vár’ (Baby Expecting) and CSOK Plusz (Family Housing Supporting Program) with the help of the revised version of Beverly McPhail’s feminist policy analysis framework. This analytical framework views policies as inherently containing elements that lead to or reproduce already existing societal inequalities. Here the target population is mainly Hungarian, heterosexual, middle class families, while it is the poorer strata who is significantly more in need, is not eligible of these financial loans. I argue that it is middle class, married, heterosexual women who are going to become financially tied to the state and through that, to the market, due to them taking on the promise of giving birth to at least one, preferably more children, following the conditions of the loans. This puts unbalanced burden on parents to be, being the women taking on extra burdens. In the meantime, women in poverty who are exposed to unemployment, vulnerable to market relations are excluded from these policies, their dependence from the state is weakened by the lack of significant statal financial help. This seems to create a perverse contract between the Hungarian market and state, and a selected, essentialised category of women which is worth to be studied from closer.

This proposal builds on the preliminary findings of my MA research project, which deals with temporal and generational shifts in perceptions of belonging to a specific ethnic group in the context of North Macedonia: what being ethnically Macedonian exactly means and how ethnic membership is understood in relation to what individuals understand to be a different ethnic group. By taking a social constructivist approach, I sought to explore how knowledge, collective memory and politics of silencing intersect at the construction of identity and the ethnic boundary between ethnic Macedonians and ethnic minorities in North Macedonia. The theoretical framing of my current project is based on knowledge sociology, collective memory theory, as well as theories of silencing. The sample that I am working with is my own family, who I believe has witnessed intriguing events of boundary crossing and fluid and changing identities. While I am considering the influence that top-down narratives have on the occurrence of boundary shifts, I am mostly interested in the perception of ethnic membership in a bottom-up manner. Finally, although my initial assumption heavily relied on Wimmer's idea that symbolic ethnic boundaries do change, however, over the course of many generations, and that differences in the perceptions of ethnic membership by these individuals would be generational, my preliminary results seems to be pointing to very contextual and situational shifts in the ethnic boundary. 

I am currently interested in expanding this topic into a PhD project where I would extend the sample: I would be very keen on applying this theoretical framework on a larger sample, by conducting unstructured interviews with individuals whose self-identification has changed. I believe North Macedonia would allow for a very interesting study on this phenomenon, due to the ethnically diverse make-up, as well as the country’s disputed national identity by several neighbours. I would be looking at this phenomenon from a sociology of knowledge perspective: how do these individuals construct knowledge and their newly-found identity as their subjective /objective facticity; how does the social identity construction dialectic of self-identification and external categorization come at play here; how does their belonging to a specific generational location/mnemonic community affect these shifts, and what other socio-economic factors might act as contributing factors.

In the 2022 Serbian census, there were 8.0 per cent of the inhabitants of the country opting out from the established ethnicity categories in the ethnicity question. This contained not declaring any ethnic identification, declaring oneself using a non-ethnic (e.g. Vojvodinian, citizen) or supra-ethnic (e.g. Yugoslav) category. Donald L. Horowitz has famously stated, that in ethnically divided societies ‘an election is a census and a census is an election’. Therefore, following this principle, analyzing the campaign prior to censuses is important for a broader understanding of census results. 

In my paper, I compare the public responses covered in media towards non-ethnic and supraethnic categories in the most recent, 2022 Serbian census to the 1971, 1981 and 1991 Yugoslav censuses, where especially the Yugoslav category was prevalent. I will point out similarities and differences between the contemporary and historical discourses. While in Serbia, the nation-state legitimizes itself through the majority of people declaring themselves as Serbs, also in the multi-ethnic Socialist Yugoslavia censuses were a site of ethnic contestation. A cautious stance towards people opting out from ethnic categories can be seen in the public responses, which reflects the complex attitudes towards the Yugoslav category. 

The paper utilizes discourse-historical approach for analysis and approaches the topic through the analytical concept of national indifference, which has been used in historical research, but will in this paper be applied to contemporary settings. The paper demonstrates how opting out of ethnic categories has been met with similar ambivalence over several decades.

This study intends to examine the characteristics and features of an understudied radical political movement: the re-emerging Russian anarchist movement, in a revolutionary time (1985-1994). The collapse of the Soviet empire combined with the apparent failure of Marxist ideology and the introduction of Gorbachev’s ‘perestroika’ and ‘glasnost’ provided (Russian) anarchists with a unique opportunity to propose a radical restructuring of society; this raised the question of to what extent (the imagining of) a radical reconfiguration of society and geopolitical space was possible in an increasingly globalised and interlinked world. This research project will examine the conceptualisation of the re-emerging anarchist movement by placing it into its sociopolitical context and relating it to important processes such as political reform (democratisation, decentralisation), nationalism, and the emergence of other independent political movements in the late Soviet Union. Simultaneously, this research intends to explore how anarchist thought and activism made a unique and neglected contribution to one of the most pressing debates of the period: the National Question. In particular, this study is concerned with the tension between the anarchist critique of and resistance against established power structures and its endorsement of specific ‘political’ practices as represented in their support of several national liberation movements in the Soviet Union and later in the post-Soviet space. This research builds on the analysis of the vast amounts of newspapers and magazines published by Russian anarchists in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

According to the city’s slogan ‘People make Glasgow’. As an ever evolving, multicultural city Glasgow has long been the epicentre of Scottish migration as both Scotland’s largest city and predominate port of entry. Additionally, Glasgow is the often cited as the ‘birthplace’ of Britain’s favourite takeaway dish, the Chicken Tikka Masala, highlighting its ability to celebrate that diversity. This paper intends to contribute a new way of understanding both the history of migration and of social and cultural acculturation using Glasgow’s South Asian migrant community from the 1960s through the 1990s as a case study. Utilising oral history testimonies from the both migrant and Glasgow-born residents, this paper demonstrates how foodways can be used to both express and understand identity during a period of considerable change. Participants discuss the ways in which food and culinary cultural practises were used to maintain links to their heritage during the process of migration and settlement in Glasgow. They also recall memories of Glasgow’s changing social and cultural landscape associated with the acculturation of a migrant community from the Commonwealth at a time when political discourse around such communities was fraught with contradictions. Racialised concepts of Commonwealth migrants deemed ‘(un)deserving’ of maintaining citizenship rights are explored here in relation to archival material from the political and public discourse of the period alongside participants personal memories. This allows this paper to offer new insights into how memory, and both localised and national identity formation, can be explored in historic contexts.

This paper examines national identity polarization in the Torne Valley borderland area, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The aim of the paper is to shed light on when (and how) national identities become relevant and how they are communicated and represented through social media. The Torne Valley used to be described as one of the most peaceful and most integrated border areas in the world. This changed radically during the COVID-19 pandemic when the border between the Swedish and Finnish suddenly became materialized through the physical installation of a border fence in 2020. The suddenly visible border, combined with fear, and disappointment with the different virus mitigation strategies adopted by the two countries led to an upsurge in country specific nationalist sentiments on both sides. This paper analyses social media posts from local Facebook groups discussing the border closure, to examine polarization processes through which regional and national identities are constructed during this extraordinary period.

There is an alarming phenomenon taking place in Europe namely the (extreme) nationalist answer to any of the main challenges of modernization: mobility, access to information, cross-border cooperation, international organizations and above all, the increasing importance of pluralism. The classic handbooks in the field are no longer listened and nationalism, instead of collecting the progressive social forces, embodies the rejection of all that overcomes familiar and controllable frameworks. My main focus lies in Central European countries and Romania but Western European cases are no exceptions from this diagnosis. With the Russian aggression against Ukraine, most of the nationalist forces in these countries support Moscow’s politics and rhetoric as if they seek to preserve the ancien regime of hierarchies and dependences in the international world. And that utterly contradicts both the theory of nationalism and their profile as political forces. 

I am going to compare AUR (Romania) with FIDESZ (Hungary) and SNS (Slovakia) with respect to their latest years’ main decisions and reactions to question where (and why) they gave up a natural promotion of their nation (culture) in order to seek precisely goals and alliances that preclude the evolution and well-being of their electorate. The hypothesis is that a lot of ideology and Soviet-kind ideological surrender is now dressed into nationalist cloths circumventing the real profile of the political actors involved and creating, this way, new (ideological, that is artificial) profiles to deal with.  As such, nationalism plays in a fully dystopian world seeking to move everything there and annul the real world. This way, the political discourse turns to be one about possible realities and not about improving the present, real one.

In the dynamic landscape of Chinese internet culture, female netizens have crafted a subversive lexicon to critique gender norms and the sexism status quo. This research delves into the language used by users self-identified as 'Chinese extreme feminists'. Despite censorship and backlash, these women draw on Korean feminist movements to forge their distinct online identity. Academic focus on this group has been limited, often centered on negative perceptions rather than their place within the larger gender power structure.

By employing a combined feminist quantitative and qualitative discourse analysis to dissect posts from ten 'extreme feminists' on Twitter, the research includes a methodical analysis of the textual contributions of these users. Scrutinising the content through a feminist lens, the paper aims to understand the group's distinctive characteristics, vulnerabilities, and resistance strategies. Through this analysis, the study offers a window into an entirely female-driven online rebellious experiment. This experiment holds significant value in the context of establishing a female-centered counterpublic sphere within the Chinese sociocultural landscape.

After the devastation of World War II, the socialist Yugoslav state utilised omladinske radne akcije (youth labour actions, ORA) as a tool for post-war infrastructure reconstruction. Fostering a seemingly inclusive Yugoslav national identity, these initiatives, described as ‘infrastructural-anthropological’ (Andrea Matošević, 2019), emerged as a tool of social cohesion in the wake of intercommunal violence. Projects like the Brčko-Banovići railway line in northern Bosnia (1946) left an archival trail with cultural production emphasising international participation and the brotherhood and unity of the ‘multinational’ Yugoslavs. However, recent scholarship (Piro Rexhepi, 2022) has pointed to the exclusion of Albanians, Bosnian Muslims, other Muslims and Roma in Yugoslav ideology. This prompts a re-evaluation of early Yugoslav ORA as contested terrains where both anti-nationalist and nationalist politics coexisted. To what extent was the Yugoslav concept South Slav-centric, prioritizing national belonging among South Slavs over ‘others'? How far did projects of mass mobilisation and inclusion serve to produce and exclude ‘others’ (Lyubomir Pozharliev, 2023)? Specifically, this paper asks whether Bosnian Muslims were portrayed as ‘others’ within the supposed South Slav in-group through artistic agitprop works created during ORA. This paper will explore the scholarship on ‘Yugoslavism’ as a complex, inclusive/exclusive concept, and set out a microhistorical approach that utilizes cultural sources to dissect the dynamics of nationalism as lived by ordinary people

The Palestinian national discourse has long identified women with an apolitical and ahistorical domestic domain in a binary opposition to a political sphere occupied by men. Palestinian women’s role in upheavals, uprisings, and activism throughout the history of the Palestinian struggle against Israeli settler colonialism has compelled a change in the inferior perception of women’s anti-colonial agency. However, Palestinian women’s problematization of the narrow spaces in which certain agencies are imagined and enacted while others negated has been ephemeral and tied to the extraordinary situation of uprisings and revolts. Although the second Intifada (uprising) is marked by increasing recognition of women’s agency within the domestic domain, it is still articulated within the extraordinary conditions of Israeli violent onslaught on Palestinian homes. Drawing on my PhD research, the paper seeks to address a significant theoretical gap in national narration of Palestinian women’s agency through routine domestic activities in both ‘ordinary’ and extraordinary situations under Israeli oppression. I particularly focus on the dialectic of the domestic role Palestinian semi-nomadic women play in disrupting an interlocking settler colonial dispossession with patriarchy and capitalism. The initial findings of my ethnographic work show that semi-nomadic women in Palestine enable and maintain the emergence of two forms of anti-colonial resistance: Everyday resistance and mass-based mobilization. They do so by promoting their community’s group solidarity. The two forms of resistance, and their interface, allow semi-nomadic communities to carve out a land-based social, cultural, political, and economic space outside the enclaves in which Israel seeks to concentrate them.

Young women in the Hungarian far right represent an intriguing dualism. They embody traditional ideas of the feminine and fragile female but also support the violent and exclusionary ideas of nationalist movements. This paper examines the imagination and performance of womanhood in the ‘radical nationalist side’ of Hungary and investigates the reasons for women joining movements that express conservative, nationalist and anti-feminist views. Young female and male members of two Hungarian nationalist groups, Mi Hazánk Mozgalom and Hatvannégy Vármegye Ifjúsági Mozgalom were interviewed and observed through public and private events organised by the movements in the last two months of the 2022 elections’ campaign period. Half of them were young aspiring far right politicians, and the other half were official members of a movement which promotes ‘nationalist lifestyle’. The results demonstrate that according to nationalists in Hungary, the fulfilment of femininity is motherhood and being a self-sacrificing partner of a protective man who is able to take the lead both physically and spiritually. Women engaged in politics, however, demand more agency and their voices to be heard. Even those women who are aware of the downsides of benevolent sexism or tokenism present in Hungarian far right movements, consciously decide to continue participating in their activities to protect the nation from the perceived attacks of Western propaganda, migration and ethnic minorities, and to experience a level of belonging and pride in their nation that is not accessible for supporters of any other ideologies in Hungary.

What is the relationship between global and local identification, and how is it linked to political conflict? These questions are central to scholarship on contemporary electoral politics, which has linked the radical right’s rise to a new dimension of political conflict that sets liberal, globally minded voters against socially conservative, locally oriented ones. This hypothesized cleavage, variously described as cosmopolitan-parochial, globalist-nationalist, and universalist-particularist, implies that collective identification is polarized along a universalist-particularist axis and that these differences drive political mobilization. Yet little is known about how territorial identities at different scales compete with or reinforce each other, let alone how their configurations connect to political preferences. This study investigates patterns of multiple collective identification and their relation to electoral politics using latent class analysis and data from cross-national attitude surveys. Evidence from the United Kingdom suggests that the identity-based division of electorates into cosmopolitans and nationalists does not accurately reflect actual patterns of collective identification. Rather than being mutually exclusive and antagonistic, particularistic and expansive sources of identity typically co-occur, albeit with different levels of support. Notably, the latent class that most strongly emphasizes expansive identities does so while simultaneously showing strong national identification. This challenges assumptions about the polarization of territorial identities and its role in contemporary electoral cleavages.

My PhD research examines the strategic uses of enmity discourses under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It aims to show that enemy has continually been threaded by the top-down into political lives in socialist China. An enemy, as referred to in this paper marks a discursively produced entity (be it an individual, group, or idea) which is said to deliberately harbour a threat to the CCP’s ideology, and/or sovereignty, and/or leadership. 

This paper will assess the CCP’s management of domestic enemy narratives under three regime flashpoints: Jiang Zemin’s crackdown on Falun Gong in 1999, Hu Jintao’s suppression of Tibetan ‘Dalai Lama forces’ in 2008 and the first year of Xi Jinping’s Anti-Corruption Campaign in 2012/13. I will seek to understand who the targets of the enemy narrative were, what was the political context of enemization, through what means did the discourse manifest and to what level the narrative was employed. As such, my research aims to answer the following question: how is the discourse of enmity used and reproduced by the Chinese Communist Party?

To engage with the essence of enmity narratives in China and their broader implications on Chinese nationalism, I have created a model of Strategic Enemization. The model postulates that the party conjures notions of enmity targeted towards a specific in order to fulfil the CCP’s own strategic interests and strengthen nationalism. In this way, imagined enemies can serve as a recyclable narrative to anger, deflect, unite, and bolster a visceral domestic landscape.

This study embarks on an examination of the devolution of power from central governments to regional institutions, emphasising the consequent reverberations within nationalist movements in the respective regions. The analysis focuses on two emblematic cases: the 1997 Scottish devolution, culminating in a referendum post-parliamentary debate, and the 2015 legal amendment conferring a new single collectivity status to Corsica. At the core of this comparative study lies an exploration of the divergent mechanisms of power transfer: the direct democratic process in Scotland versus the legislatively-driven approach in Corsica. Through this, the research engages with the symbolic capital and power relations between the central authority and the regional entities, drawing extensively on the theoretical paradigms established by Bourdieu and Foucault.

For Scottish context, it is posited the using of a referendum augments the symbolic capital of the regional institutions. This is attributed to the legitimizing force of the popular will, a crucial element in the statehood narratives of these regions. This is a procedural and transformative act imbuing regional institutions with a sense of legitimacy and authority. Conversely, the Corsican case is marked by a power transfer effected solely through a legal amendment. This approach devoid of the direct democratic endorsement found in the Scottish case, elicits an analysis grounded in Foucault's discourse on power and the individual. Therefore, the study examines how such a mode of power transfer, controlled by the centre, shapes the dynamics between the state and the region, and its implications on the individual's perception of regional autonomy.

During the "long nineteenth century" historiography went through an intensive process of professionalization and methodological revaluation. At the same time, historians became active participants in the creation of historical narratives of nation-states in accordance with their own metanarrative strategies and the ideology they advocated. Leopold von Ranke played particularly important role, not only for German, but also for European historiography. As a distinct monarchist, Protestant and conservative, Ranke placed the state as a key factor in history at the center of his research. Although Ranke was guided by the idea that the past can be viewed objectively, he tried to legitimize the conservative order of his own country. Inheriting the traditions of political realism that placed the state, its raison d'être, statist egoism and power relations at the center of historical action, Ranke carefully studied the political structures of many states and broader international relations. In Ranke's opus, many of the works were associated with the history of the German states (especially Brandenburg-Prussia), but his Serbian Revolution was published several times between 1829 and 1879. And while conservative Prussia was the ideal model of the European national state in internal and foreign policy, Serbia (despite the fact that it was created in revolutionary and rebellious circumstances) gained Ranke's sympathies. Because of this paradox, the aim of the paper will be to examine the basic similarities and differences in Ranke's interpretation of the origin of the Serbian and Prussian states, and in accordance with Ranke's conception of political realism.

Populism studies is a booming field, spurred by the rise of new forms of radical politics. However, despite most populist politics actually being nationalist politics, scholarship has consistently sidelined the study of nationalism when it comes to explaining mass support for populism, reifying populism as an all-explanatory cause. In turn, the place of nationalism has been occupied by the concept of nativism, which assumes rather than explores the nationalist ideologies, identities, and practices behind populism.

To understand why this has happened, and how nationalism could be foregrounded in populism studies, I flesh out the theoretical and ontological foundations of the dominant ideational school in populism studies. I show nativism is a conceptual mechanism that serves the ambitious programme of comparative generalisation that drives the ideational school, yet at the expense of imposing a deductive, psychological model of citizen attitudes. This model flies in the face of research in nationalism studies, that points to the fluid, heterogeneous, contested reality of national identity, whose social implications cannot be grasped without contextual insight. Moreover, contrasting populism to nationalism scholarship reveals a broader, more fundamental problem which is an incapacity to account for meaning and its causal relevance, even if ideational scholarship defines populism as a discursive phenomenon.

I conclude by sketching out a research programme designed to improve our understanding of populist nationalism as a mass phenomenon. The aim is to go beyond limitations in populism scholarship, but also limitations in how everyday nationalism scholarship addresses the political dimension of nationhood.

This paper examines the diverse voices which critique, analyse, and celebrate the vexed nationalist histories of the Bangladesh Liberation War. Though the event occupies a prominent altar in Bangladesh’s history, its circumstances remain largely obfuscated from the Pakistani imaginary, as it symbolised an egregious disruption to Pakistan’s manufactured ideal of a homogenous nationalism. I argue that the protean forms of literary construction redress this pervasive censorship by bringing stories of liberation to the fore, thus triumphing a profoundly liberating Bangladeshi nationalism against its jingoistic, Pakistani precedent. 

I begin by investigating Sara Suleri’s memoir "Meatless Days" (1989) and Kamila Shamsie’s novel "Kartography" (2001) as texts that interrogate the coercive fictions of a parochial, Pakistani nationalism, exposing how nationalist rhetoric insidiously sought to attenuate Bangladesh’s complex social heteroglossia. I then turn to Bangladeshi writers Tahmima Anam and Zia Haider Rahman. For Anam, fiction provides its own form of documentation, thus competing ‘with the state for authorship of the past’ (Hue Tam Ho Tai). Anam imaginatively re-imbues undocumented oral histories into her fiction, thus constructing an alternative historiography celebrating the poignant freedom embodied by Bangladeshi independence. 

My paper will culminate with Rahman’s "In the Light of What We Know" (2014). By weaving legal reports and policies of resistance into his text, Rahman crafts an interdiscursive textual arena which spatially foregrounds these forgotten narratives through a newfound visual prominence. Rahman hence crafts a new repository of archival information that is prolix and variegated, asserting a distinctly Bangladeshi nationalist consciousness that resists Pakistan’s inculcated amnesia.

Gandhi believed that the pre-colonial system of Nyay Panchayats in India rather than applying pre-determined law constructed justice for itself. The Panchayats did not function on an adversarial approach but through a conciliatory approach to achieve relational justice rather than punishment. The source of this approach lies in what Gandhi describes in his conception of a solidarity-based society rooted in mutual trust and respect for everyone (Sarvodaya).  This system suffered a catastrophic event with the colonization of India which almost led to its extinction until it was partially revived after independence. However, during this time the colonial legal system had already entrenched itself within the Indian society. The people in India were simply unable to adapt their practice and habitus when dealing with this new idea of law and the agents within the field simply could not comprehend the rules of the game itself. The character of the symbolic capitals within the field changed and in the absence of any clear rules of the game structural corruption got introduced into the field. Solidarity in the Indian society is now based on a struggle for recognition within the social fields. From a Gandhian perspective these struggles create a cycle of violence and therefore can only lead to injustice and punishment. This paper uses Luhmann at a macro level and Bourdieu at an intermediate level to theoretically attempt a Gandhian solidarity-based approach to decolonization of Justice in India.

Objectives: To understand the cultural traditions of forced migrant women during the perinatal period that improve their maternity experience.
To identify barriers to practising them in NHS.

Methodology: Phenomenological design is employed to understand women’s knowledge and lived experiences of their cultural traditions. Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) provides valuable insights into the subjective experience of forced migrant women during childbirth, enabling a deeper understanding of how they perceive and make sense of their experiences.

Methods: Three focus groups consisting of 8 forced migrant women each, and three in-depth individual interviews conducted in English, Urdu, and Arabic to include a diverse sample with a better representation of the population.

Findings: The findings indicate a notable deficiency in awareness regarding cultural traditions and their significance for the sense of safety among forced migrant women. This underscores a substantial gap between cultural understanding and its application in enhancing culturally sensitive care practices.

Occidentalism scholarship highlights the West as the significant ‘Other’ in constructing the national identity of non-Western nation-states (Chatterjee, 1996). China exemplifies this, with the government using the essentialized West to bolster nationalism (Chen, 1995). In fact, the ‘official Occidentalism’ in China is a nuanced concept, not merely anti-Western. Chinese nationalism in the early 21st century was pragmatic, ensuring foreign policy was not swayed by emotional rhetoric that could damage cooperative relations with the West (Zhao, 2004). Official narratives portray China as a developing country seeking a ‘peaceful rise’ rather than confronting Western domination. However, Zhao Yuezhi notes a shift towards assertive state nationalism under Xi Jinping’s leadership and growing big power ambition (Zhao, 2022). It raises the question of whether this assertive turn signals the end of the pragmatic and cautious narrative of the Western Other and Chinese Self, potentially constructing an evolved national identity that no longer aligns with the narratives of ‘peaceful rise’. With critical discourse analysis, this paper investigates the representation of the Western Other by state media from 2016 to 2017, marking the end of Xi’s first term. The 2016 South China Sea conflict between China and the US (supporting the Philippines) offers a significant context to observe China’s rhetoric on the China-West dichotomy. Analyzing coverage of the West in People’s Daily, Global Times, and Southern Metropolis Daily, three prominent state newspapers in terms of editorial stances and market influence, this study will enrich discussions on the implications of the Western Other in Xi Jinping’s China.

There have been several instances of linguistic nationalism during the past century. Language education is often used to either create or reinforce a sense of unified national identity. The literature on the topic ranges from references to the Ottoman Empire, the Soviet Union, and several cases of post-colonial nationalism. However, there is very little research about dialect nationalism, and the extent to which a sense of nationalism can be reinforced or performed through the use of certain dialects. This is particularly relevant to people of different nations and cultures who speak the same language with different dialects. I argue that this is predominantly used among diverse diaspora and migrant communities, specifically focusing on the case of Arab diaspora and migrants who use dialect nationalism in order to promote a sense of personalised identity that highlights their migration experience, contrary to the use of standard Arabic. My analysis is based on my ethnographic fieldwork in Berlin among the Arabic-speaking community and some of their schools and institutions that teach different national dialects of the Arab language to people of all age groups. Being at the intersection between migration studies and nationalism, I use the linguistic derivative of nationalism in order to look into the intricacies of post-migration identity politics.

Although sport and nationalism have been closely related in numerous studies, the relationship between sport and nationalism in the Chinese context and its development still lacks attention, especially considering the huge social changes in China in the past thirty years.

Chinese women’s volleyball has been responsible for eye-catching nationwide achievements, especially in the 1980s and the 2010s, which are recognised as a ‘legend’ in Chinese sports and frequently associated with a significant impetus to nationalism, especially in official propaganda and the policy agenda. Hence, it is important to study the relationship between sport and nationalism in China and to understand how it has developed against a backdrop of social change through a study of Chinese women’s volleyball.

This presentation focuses on the Chinese women’s volleyball legend and how it reflected nationalism at different times with reference to the discourses of the media and the voices of Chinese people. By using media analysis and focus groups, the aim of the study has been to assess how attitudes have changed from the 1980s to the 2010s in a period when the Chinese socio-economic situation also changed considerably. The ‘legend’ in 1980s centred on the undisputed national pride that encouraged Chinese people and proved their ability on the world stage, while the emotions towards these recent victories by the same team are more blurred as regards nationalism. Although people are still proud of the victories, their pride is no longer specifically connected with national pride and is primarily associated only with the team.

In the last decade, virtual celebrities have become increasingly popular among young people in China with news reports estimating a fan-base of around 300 million and total industry revenues of over $35 billion in 2020 (Bloomberg, 2021). Despite the rising cultural and economic significance of these ‘novel’ celebrities and the industry that supports them, there has been relatively little research on the topic. In order to address this lacuna, this paper explores the representative virtual idol fandom of Luo Tianyi to discuss how Chinese youths’ identify with the nation through everyday fan practices and negotiate their fan identity with mainstream culture, combining recent work on Chinese fandom nationalism alongside insights from popular geopolitics.

As Dittmer and Dodds (2008) has argued, the combination of fandom and nationalism provides critical insights into the interpretation of national narratives construction in a digital era. The Chinese context can usefully highlight this in popular culture, perhaps best represented by ‘fandom nationalism’ (Liu, 2019) designed to promote specifically Chinese cultural products in opposition to those from perceived competitor countries e.g. Japan. Based on in-depth interviews and digital participant observation, this study finds that the Chinese elements displayed through virtual idol Luo’s images and songs are one main reason for fans’ adoration and their collective emotions accumulated everyday in return leads to the nationalist sentiments. Although conflicts arose during the identity negotiation, national narratives in this case are also exploited by fans as a strategy to recognize their pleasures and legitimize their community.