Introduction: Everyday nationalism's evidence problem

From folklore to patriotic and protest songs: Music, youth, and Basque identity during the 1960s

“…10 Fox and Miller-Idriss (2008) have pointed out the value of a bottom-up approach, focusing on the way people experience nationalism in their everyday lives. More recently, Fox and Ginderachter (2018) have suggested the interest of understanding individuals not just as receptacles of nationalist messages but rather active agents in the appropriation and production of their own notion of the nation. Along these lines, Skey and Antonsich (2017: pp.…”

From Crisis to Nationalism?

“…Everyday nationalism is a new approach to observe and study nationalism by focusing particularly on everyday routines and lived experiences with ethnic or nationalist content (Goode et al 2020 : 2–3). Following the constructivist turn, it is posited that everyday nationalism does not regard people as mere passive receptacles of top–down nationalist messages, but also active agents in producing, manipulating, and practicing their own version of nationalism (Goode and Stroup 2015 ; Fox and Van Ginderachter 2018 ). Although the practices of everyday nationalism are more often observed in settled times (Bonikowski 2016 ), the pandemic crisis provides an unsettled environment in which people perform daily nationalist responses as their everyday lives have been profoundly changed by various uncertainties.…”

‘There are times when I feel like a bit of an alien’: middling migrants and the national order of things

“…Having argued for the importance of drawing an analytical distinction between individual national practices and wider national frameworks, in the next section, I want to shift focus by briefly acknowledging a methodological challenge. For while, finding evidence for more overt expressions of national practice is relatively straightforward, ‘uncovering the covert workings of nationhood in everyday life’ (Fox and Ginderachter, this issue) represents much more of a tricky issue. In order to address this challenge, I suggest that a particular group of migrants may provide a fruitful avenue for not only teasing out the shifts from taken‐for‐granted to more explicit expressions of nationalism but also understanding their relative value in grounding people's connections to place and each other.…”

“…Recent research on nationalism has seen a move away from more top‐down investigations into the role of powerful institutions in inculcating banal nationalism (the media, political institutions, and the education system) to address the everyday performance of the nation by ordinary people. Much of this work has been interesting, and some attempts have been made to pinpoint the ways in which national frameworks operate as ‘an unreflexive habit [or] … and unselfconscious disposition’ (Fox and Ginderachter, this issue) by drawing on the tenets of conversation analysis and studying features such as ‘reciprocity of perspective’ when discussants, for example, do not feel the need to explain particular points or laugh in unison at a joke based on insider ‘national’ knowledge (Hester and Housley ).…”