Abstract:In this paper we demonstrate how writings on affect, materiality and relationality necessitate a rethinking of theories of the nation, focussing on the intermittent emergence and flickering presence of nation-ness and national identity. In moving beyond Billig?s (1995) notion of ?banal nationalism?, we argue that the presencing/absencing, foregrounding/backgrounding, and individualizing/collectivizing of feelings results from the differential capacities for bodies to affect or be affected and the assembling of… Show more
“…In considering such a focus, Merriman and Jones call for non‐deterministic and relational accounts of the processes of emergence and intermittence, foregrounding and backgrounding, individualizing and collectivizing, presence and absence, through which national feelings, emotions and affects take hold (or not) in and between bodies of different kinds. (: 1)…”
Section: Grounding Everyday National Identitymentioning
confidence: 96%
“…In this issue, Fox urges attention to be paid to the ‘edges of the nation: those moments, spaces and contexts where the nation vacillates between the explicit and the implicit, where it's taken‐for‐granted dimensions can be more readily coaxed out with a well‐placed breach.’ However, instead of seeking out these ‘edges’, moments of dissonance or rupture in which the nation suddenly springs into notice, we consider the national to be intimately entangled with mundane dwelling, slipping in and out of awareness in relation to the many other social, material, affective, sensory and temporal aspects of our everyday lives. For while national moods, feelings, emotions, atmospheres and affects may appear spontaneous, ‘exceed[ing] attempts at engineering and directing’ them (Closs Stephens, : 185), they are more frequently characterized by repetitious, rhythmic circulations, movements and affective ties (Merriman and Jones, ). Accordingly, we invited our research participants to attune to the register of the national in their lives to reveal how everyday nationhood was conceived and experienced not as an abstract quality but as inextricably connected to particular everyday surroundings and reproduced through daily habits, routines and competencies (Edensor, ).…”
Section: Grounding Everyday National Identitymentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Photography newly attuned participants to this aspect of their surroundings outside the home as they walked, cycled, drove or caught trains or trams to make routine journeys to shops or workplace. In considering the everyday affects and sensations of the national, Merriman and Jones (: 10) argue that the ‘material, elemental and functional qualities of mobility infrastructures are key to how and why they become caught up in particular affective relations and atmospheres’, reverberating with particular moods, emotions, feelings and memories during journeys. In this way, spaces of mobility may channel convivial encounters, affective connections and shared sensory engagements that are intricately entwined with a shared sense of nationhood (Figure 4).…”
Section: Everyday Nationhood and Multiculturalism In Melbourne 2017mentioning
ABSTRACT. In this article, we explore the geographies of nationhood manifest in everyday life, arguing that our quotidian surroundings continually reproduce the nation as we engage with them. We show that nationhood is obvious and ubiquitous in the lives of people when they are asked to attune to it, and that even when not in the forefront of attention, it partly informs how we make sense of our daily experiences. This is not to claim that nationhood is fully formed or coherent, a separate substratum waiting to be tapped into or closely defined by an identifiable symbolic repertoire, if only we pay attention. Instead, we demonstrate that nationhood is emergent in everyday life, is reproduced continuously and intimately entangled with the sensations, routines, material environments, public encounters, everyday competencies, memories, aspirations and a range of other affective and embodied qualities that comprise how we understand and inhabit our worlds. This mundane experience involves shifting between reflexive and unreflexive states, and the method we deploy -photo-elicitation -is devised to draw out these oscillations and heighten the attunement of participants to the usually unreflexively apprehended taken-for-granted national qualities of everyday space. Here, we aim to empirically foreground the neglected spatial dimensions that characterize the experience of banal nationalism.
“…In considering such a focus, Merriman and Jones call for non‐deterministic and relational accounts of the processes of emergence and intermittence, foregrounding and backgrounding, individualizing and collectivizing, presence and absence, through which national feelings, emotions and affects take hold (or not) in and between bodies of different kinds. (: 1)…”
Section: Grounding Everyday National Identitymentioning
confidence: 96%
“…In this issue, Fox urges attention to be paid to the ‘edges of the nation: those moments, spaces and contexts where the nation vacillates between the explicit and the implicit, where it's taken‐for‐granted dimensions can be more readily coaxed out with a well‐placed breach.’ However, instead of seeking out these ‘edges’, moments of dissonance or rupture in which the nation suddenly springs into notice, we consider the national to be intimately entangled with mundane dwelling, slipping in and out of awareness in relation to the many other social, material, affective, sensory and temporal aspects of our everyday lives. For while national moods, feelings, emotions, atmospheres and affects may appear spontaneous, ‘exceed[ing] attempts at engineering and directing’ them (Closs Stephens, : 185), they are more frequently characterized by repetitious, rhythmic circulations, movements and affective ties (Merriman and Jones, ). Accordingly, we invited our research participants to attune to the register of the national in their lives to reveal how everyday nationhood was conceived and experienced not as an abstract quality but as inextricably connected to particular everyday surroundings and reproduced through daily habits, routines and competencies (Edensor, ).…”
Section: Grounding Everyday National Identitymentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Photography newly attuned participants to this aspect of their surroundings outside the home as they walked, cycled, drove or caught trains or trams to make routine journeys to shops or workplace. In considering the everyday affects and sensations of the national, Merriman and Jones (: 10) argue that the ‘material, elemental and functional qualities of mobility infrastructures are key to how and why they become caught up in particular affective relations and atmospheres’, reverberating with particular moods, emotions, feelings and memories during journeys. In this way, spaces of mobility may channel convivial encounters, affective connections and shared sensory engagements that are intricately entwined with a shared sense of nationhood (Figure 4).…”
Section: Everyday Nationhood and Multiculturalism In Melbourne 2017mentioning
ABSTRACT. In this article, we explore the geographies of nationhood manifest in everyday life, arguing that our quotidian surroundings continually reproduce the nation as we engage with them. We show that nationhood is obvious and ubiquitous in the lives of people when they are asked to attune to it, and that even when not in the forefront of attention, it partly informs how we make sense of our daily experiences. This is not to claim that nationhood is fully formed or coherent, a separate substratum waiting to be tapped into or closely defined by an identifiable symbolic repertoire, if only we pay attention. Instead, we demonstrate that nationhood is emergent in everyday life, is reproduced continuously and intimately entangled with the sensations, routines, material environments, public encounters, everyday competencies, memories, aspirations and a range of other affective and embodied qualities that comprise how we understand and inhabit our worlds. This mundane experience involves shifting between reflexive and unreflexive states, and the method we deploy -photo-elicitation -is devised to draw out these oscillations and heighten the attunement of participants to the usually unreflexively apprehended taken-for-granted national qualities of everyday space. Here, we aim to empirically foreground the neglected spatial dimensions that characterize the experience of banal nationalism.
“…The geographies of outer space are inherently linked to terrestrial understandings of nations and nationalism. Recent research, by both social scientists and geographers, has explored the relationship between nationalism and a variety of social practices and materialities (Merriman and Jones, 2017;Militz and Schurr, 2016;Penrose, 2011).…”
Section: Moral Geographies Of Outer Spacementioning
confidence: 99%
“…If we then accept, within the turn to relational geographies, that 'a representation may function as a "small cog in an extra-textual practice" (Deleuze, 1972in Smith, 1998)…[then] we must pay attention to how representations function affectively and how affective life is imbued with representations' (Anderson, 2014: 14). This trajectory of thought has begun to take hold within geographic enquiry into nationalism (Closs Stephens, 2016;Merriman and Jones, 2017;Militz and Schurr, 2016 This can be seen as the culmination of the effect of the Space Race through its production of a Space Shuttle and the subsequent development of its capacity to be recognised as an intrinsically American symbol.…”
Section: Moral Geographies Of Outer Spacementioning
Research into outer space has burgeoned in recent years, through the work of scholars in the social sciences, arts and humanities. Geographers have made a series of useful contributions to this emergent work, but scholarship remains fairly limited in comparison to other disciplinary fields. This forum explains the scholarly roots of these new geographies of outer space, considering why and how geographies of outer space could make further important contributions. The forum invites reflections from political, environmental, historical and cultural geographers to show how human geography can present future avenues to continued scholarship into outer space.
This paper investigates the potential rupture that the United Kingdom's "Brexit" referendum of June 23, 2016, might bring about in intra-European Union youth mobilities, with a specific focus on the London region. In many respects, and counter-intuitively given the Brexit result, London has already become a "Eurocity": a magnet for young people, both highly educated and less educated, from all over Europe who, especially since the turn of the millennium, have flocked to the city and its wider region to work, study, and play. Now, these erstwhile open-ended migration trajectories have been potentially disrupted by a referendum result that few anticipated, and whose consequential results are still unclear. The main theoretical props for our analysis are the notions of "liquid migration," "tactics of belonging," "whiteness," "privilege," and "affect." Data are drawn from 60 in-depth interviews with Irish, Italian, and Romanian young-adult students and higher and lower skilled workers, carried out in late 2015 and early 2016, plus 27 reinterviews carried out in late 2016, post-Brexit. Results indicate participants' profound and generally negative reaction to Brexit and, as a consequence, a diversity of uncertainties and of plans over their future mobility: either to stay put using "tactics of belonging," or to return home earlier than planned, or to move on to another country. Finally, we find evidence that new hierarchies and boundaries are drawn between intra-European Union migrants as a result of Brexit. (Engbersen & Snel, 2013). We find these constitutive elements of liquid migration attractive for our study of contemporary youth migration within Europe, although some of our findings suggest that flexibility, openness to opportunities, and the search for security are more realistic characteristics of migrant motivations and behaviour than "intentional unpredictability."In the literature on youth life-course transitions, two concepts are important for our analysis in this paper. On the one hand, the "inclination to constant change" referred to in Bauman's quote above is advanced by Worth's (2009) notion of youth and young-adulthood as a continuous process of "becoming": we see this as more relevant and appropriate to our analysis than the traditional practice of agedefined life stages. On the other hand, the reality of sudden changes due to "fragility and vulnerability" (Bauman again) is nicely highlighted in the term "rupture" (Hörschelmann, 2011). Taken together, the notions of "rupture" and "becomings," combined with the framework of liquid migration, constitute a useful conceptual toolkit for understanding the social and spatial mobilities of young European Union (EU) citizens, both before and after the referendum of June 23, 2016, which saw 51.9% vote "leave" and 48.1% "remain."According to Bauman (2000, p. x), the key to the puzzle of liquid modernity is the premise that the "liquidity versus solidity conundrum"is not a dichotomy but that both conditions should be seen and treated as a couple "lock...
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