Epistemic justice and everyday nationalism: An auto‐ethnography of transnational student encounters in a post‐war memory and reconciliation project in Kosovo

Abstract

This contribution introduces an exercise in epistemic justice to the study of everyday nationalism in post‐conflict, transnational (local and international) encounters. It explores how everyday nationalism, in often unexpected and hidden ways, underpinned a cocreational, educational project involving several local (Albanian) and international (British based) university students and staff collaborating on the theme of post‐war memory and reconciliation in Kosovo. The set‐up resembled a microcosm of transnational social encounters in project collaborations in which the problem of nationalism, typically, is associated with one side only: here, the Kosovars. Guided by Goffman's (1982) social interactionist framework, the study employs selected participants' paraethnographic and auto‐ethnographic reflections of their project experiences and practices after the event in order to trace the everyday workings of mutual assumptions and constructions of a national self and other for all sides involved. In this, it explores how the project participants' asymmetric positioning within a wider, global context of unequal power relations shaped their vernacular epistemologies of belonging and identity. It thereby excavated what otherwise taken‐for‐granted criteria can become relevant in such local/international social encounters as reflected upon and how the enduring power imbalances underpinning these might best be redressed.

Introduction: Below Peace Agreements: Everyday Nationalism or Everyday Peace?

“…The project resonated with dominant and patriarchal discourses, thereby implicating itself in the reproduction of traditional gender roles in the everyday performance and articulation of Albanian nationhood. Finally, Luci and Schwandner‐Sievers () show how local and international actors operating in post‐conflict environments can, in their attempts to address issues of reconciliation, reproduce nationalist narratives through everyday nationalism. Their anthropological approach, based on observing interactions between Western students on an exchange project in Kosovo, provides insights into outsider–insider dynamics in the context of hot nationalism and outside intervention.…”