National identity in a foreign context: Irish women accounting for their children’s national identity in England

Abstract

Social psychologists have attempted to capture the ideological quality of the nation through a consideration of its taken-for-granted quality whereby it forms an unnoticed 'banal' background to everyday life and is passively absorbed by its members in contrast to its 'hot', politically created and contested nature. Accordingly national identity is assumed to be both passively absorbed from the national backdrop and actively acquired through national inculcation. This raises the question of how national identity is expressed, transmitted and acquired in a foreign context, where the banal national backdrop is unavailable to scaffold identity and the national resources for identity transmission may be unavailable. The present paper addresses this gap by examining the situation of Irish women raising children in England. Critical discursive analyses of the 16 interviews revealed that all women treated their children's national identity and the issue of transmitting identity as dilemmatic: passive transmission risks children passively absorbing English, but active transmission contravenes the assumed naturalness of national identity and can furthermore conflict with children's own personal choice. These results point to the complex interaction between the management of national identity and the broader personal and national context within which this occurs.

Acculturation as intergenerational trajectory and accountability concerns in immigrant youth discourse

“…Berry and Sabatier, 2010; Fuligni, 2001). Following a discursive approach in this study, we maintain that these cross-generational acculturation concerns do not just represent different acculturation strategies, but rather different rhetorical concerns that arise in everyday verbal interactions (see also Ní Maolalaidh and Stevenson, 2014).…”

Territoriality and migration in a divided society: Lay theories of citizenship and place in Northern Ireland.

“…CDSP analyses how participants ‘position’ themselves in relation to these discourses (e.g., by endorsing, challenging or subverting them), in order to manage their interactive concerns, thereby either reproducing or transforming these discourses through their actions. A particular strength of the method is therefore its ability to capture participants’ orientations to their broader national and political contexts through the examination of their active adaptation and reworking of shared political contexts for their own purposes in interaction (e.g., Burns & Stevenson, 2013; Ni Maolalaigh & Stevenson, 2014). For present purposes, where we aim to investigate how accounts of personal experiences are both shaped by the broader political context of Northern Ireland and serve to perpetuate or transform this context, this approach is apposite.…”

“…14 examination of their active adaptation and reworking of shared political contexts for their own purposes in interaction (e.g., Burns & Stevenson, 2013;NiMaolalaigh & Stevenson, 2014). For present purposes, where we aim to investigate how accounts of personal experiences are both shaped by the broader political context of Northern Ireland and serve to perpetuate or transform this context, this approach is apposite.…”