Construction Of Nation Research Articles

The welfare state

The first keyword, Welfare State, sets out to problematise the term itself. The welfare state is a national construct, a ‘national social state’ as Etienne Balibar calls it. Thus, transnational or global migration is often construed as a disruptive force, potentially destabilising the welfare state and the nation. This keyword entry critically examines common conceptions of what the welfare state should provide. It delineates some of the ways that migrants (and, more broadly foreign nationals who are not themselves necessarily migrants) are excluded or partially included, with a focus on contemporary EU social policies.

The Linguistic Construction of Political Identity: the Case of Catalonia

In the last decades much research has been carried out on discourse as a form of social practice from the Critical Discourse Analysis perspective. The Vienna school of CDA led by Wodak and her associates has developed a discourse-historical approach to discourse which investigates the linguistic construction of national identities through a method of description and analysis which posits three categories –topics, strategies and linguistic devices– employed in the construction, perpetuation, transformation and dismantling of nations and national identities. Following this approach, the present paper aims to analyse the linguistic construction of Catalonia’s present and political future in a corpus of public discourse fragments produced by Catalan pro-independence leaders and activists during the so-called Catalan crisis. The analysis reveals that the linguistic construction of the Catalan present and political future relies on constructive, justification and dismantling strategies that seek to support self-determination and construe Catalonia as an independent Republic.

Connecting gender role attitudes among China’s youth to perceptions of the state: a bottom-up approach

The present study examines the gender–state dynamics in the Chinese context through a bottom-up approach by adopting an online survey method. We find four indicators, which are male priority, child suffering, gender ideology, marriage and fertility, could reflect one common factor—gender egalitarianism, and we utilize this scale to measure gender role attitudes among China’s youth, as well as explore their psycho-political antecedents including system justification theory, national identification, and life satisfaction. The survey findings suggest a close interconnection between the construction of family and nation. The study’s outcomes offer valuable insights into the ongoing progress and challenges relating to gender equality as perceived by young people in China. Furthermore, these findings establish a refined measurement instrument for future empirical studies in this domain.

Media Capture and Perspectives for Media Development in a Fragile Media System

Guinea­‑Bissau’s media have negotiated their roles and freedoms within the postcolonial national construct since its official independence from Portugal in 1974. While the current media landscape is relatively pluralistic, journalists experience constraints from various sides: political pressures, unaccommodating regulations, lack of resources. The concept of media capture (Mungiu­‑Pippidi & Ghinea, 2012; Mabweazara et al., 2020; Schiffrin, 2021) allows the analysis of complex, subtle and structural constraints limiting media’s ability to fulfil their roles. This paper traces the phenomenon on the macro level (context), meso level (organizations) and micro level (journalists) in Guinea­‑Bissau to interrogate how the concept plays out in a context shaped by fragility. The article draws on a literature review, official documents and semi-structured interviews. Following Dugmore’s (2022) idea of precarity as an endogenous condition in many Sub­‑Saharan contexts, this paper argues that capture is engrained in a fragile system rather than being an exception or disruption.

Italy’s colonial archives and its history of racial violence. An interview with Gaia Giuliani, author of Bianco e nero. Storia dell’identità razziale degli italiani (2013) and Race, Nation and Gender in Modern Italy. Intersectional Representations in Visual Culture (2019)

ABSTRACT This interview is dedicated to the pioneering work of Gaia Giuliani in critical race, whiteness and postcolonial Italian studies in Italy and internationally, over ten and five years, respectively, from the publication of Bianco e nero: Storia dell'identità razziale degli italiani (with Cristina Lombardi-Diop, Mondadori Education, 2013) and Race, Nation and Gender in Modern Italy: Intersectional Representations in Visual Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Shelleen Greene is an associate professor of Cinema and Media Studies in the Department of Film, Television and Digital Media at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. Her Equivocal Subjects: Between Italy and Africa – Constructions of Race and Nation in the Italian Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2012) set a milestone in scholarship on Italian visual culture and race. Lorgia Garcia Peña, scholar and activist, is a professor of Latinx Studies at the Effron Center for the Study of America and the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. Her Translating Blackness (Duke, 2022) conceived Latinx Caribbean diaspora (also in Italy) as part of both Black migrants’ oscillating border-crossings and their forms of resistance to colonialism and racism. Both scholars have long been in dialogue with Giuliani’s scholarship.

Constructed Community: Rise and Engines of Chinese Nationalism Under Xi Jinping

ABSTRACT The Chinese state-sponsored campaign for nationalism has intensified since the last decade. This article is an empirical study focusing on Chinese mass nationalism in the same period. Drawing data from the World Values Surveys, it finds that mass nationalism significantly increased from 2012/13 to 2018, ranked second with a growth rate of 13.7% among 27 selected countries and regions. The origin of this remarkable rise of mass nationalism is rooted in elite construction. The findings suggest that constructivism is the most potent theory to explain nationalism during Xi’s presidency. The intensification of mass nationalism in China will continue as long as the construction of state nationalism is maintained. One backlash against this trend may come from social media.

习近平文化思想的唯物辩证法意蕴探析

Since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC), General Secretary Xi Jinping has, on the basis of the inheritance and development of Marxist cultural theories, summarized the Party’s practical experience in cultural work since the new era, and put forward a series of new ideas, new perspectives, and new assertions on the construction of a strong cultural nation in the new era, thus forming Xi Jinping Thought on Culture, which is characterized by a wide range of ideas and deep insights. Xi Jinping Thought on Culture has always manifested the theoretical character of “understanding the body and achieving the use of the body, and integrating the body and the use of the body”, and has always adhered to the practical rationale of “unity of knowledge and action”, and has been committed to the pursuit of the blueprint for cultural development of “harmony and coexistence”. Throughout this thought, with the Marxist worldview and methodology as the fundamental guidance, its logical thinking of “body and use”, “knowledge and action”, and “harmony and cooperation” contains a profound materialist dialectics.

The Aesthetics of Truth and Ecology: The World of Realistic Television Dramas

In the continuous dream-building process of China, the public has a broader interpretation of the concept ofhome and family wrapped around their daily lives. Family in their daily lives carries the love and care among individuals under the social attributes, while the unity of the country gives the public a firm foundation for life under the undertones of the growing scientific construction. Throughout the past two years, popular Chinese TV dramas, such as Age of Awakening, Ren Shi Jian, and Mountains and the Sea, have revealed the transformation in China’s development under the common terminology of multi-dimensional performance, which embodied the country and family under the great historical changes and reform of the country. This paper takes human behavior as the main perspective and expands the research on the common construction of family and nation based on aesthetics. Real aesthetics advocate through the real-life encounters of ordinary people to reflect contemporary social phenomena. This can stimulate social identity in audiences with the constructed ecology aesthetics by the community.

Everyday market nationalism: The nationhood imaginative value and nationalistic economic habitus on the Indonesian ride hailing commodity “Gojek”

AbstractThis article investigates everyday market nationalism as a construction of nationalism in everyday social interactions in the market field and reflected in the existence of an imaginative value of nationalism in a commodity. Focusing on the market field of ride hailing commodity Gojek and using a mixed method, this study shows that the imaginative value of Indonesian nationalism in Gojek is influenced by economic, cultural, symbolic, and digital capital as well as socio‐demographic characteristics of the actors and associated with nationalistic economic habitus formed through social practices in the market field of Gojek.

Digital diplomacy and domestic audience: how official discourse shapes nationalist sentiments in China

This article aims to reveal the domestic implications of China’s digital diplomacy by centring the interaction between official diplomatic discourses and Chinese nationalist sentiments. Examining diplomatic discourse presented by Chinese foreign affairs spokespersons and the related nationalist comments of the Chinese domestic audience, this study illustrates the dynamic interplay between official diplomatic discourses, the salience of other, and nationalist sentiments. The findings suggest that China’s digital diplomatic discourse can influence the dynamic of domestic nationalist sentiments. A positive diplomatic tone contributes to more positive nationalist sentiments through an enhanced sense of national identification. Conversely, a negative tone of diplomatic discourse tends to generate more negative nationalist sentiments through intensified social comparison and derogation, particularly in the presence of salient foreign others. The study puts forward the theoretical commensurability between digital diplomacy, social identity theories, and nationalism construction. It also offers practical insights into China’s multifaceted nationalist communication and digital diplomacy strategies.

“Lesbian nation is Amazon culture: Lesbian separatism and the uses of Amazons”

In this article, Amazon imagery serves as a case study for the complicated relationship of lesbian separatist movements of the 1970s and the classical Greek tradition. I consider how the use of mythological figures allowed lesbian feminists to rewrite and subvert dominant patriarchal narratives in ways that furthered their revolutionary projects. I argue that the nature of mythology is fundamentally fluid, collaborative, and open to queer reinterpretations and appropriations in ways that are rich with symbolic potential. Furthermore, the creation of separatist communities approximates an act of nation-building, and it is useful to consider other attempts to construct and theorize nations, ranging from Homi Bhabha on post-/anticolonial resistance to Berlant and Freeman on Queer Nationality. In particular, when considering a lesbian movement, we should remember that queer theory is messy because queerness itself is messy and resists boundaries and classification. Furthermore, what Ward frames as “dyke methods” (or dyke-centric queer methods) insist on categories that are fluid, messy, and shifting in their classifications and drawn toward as-yet-unknown queer possibilities. To study lesbian separatists with dyke methods is to embark on “an antiessentialist and interdisciplinary project” without necessarily “making a commitment to balanced ideas” (pp. 82–83). It is my hope that a messy, queer analysis of Amazonian symbolism in the construction of a lesbian nationalism will ultimately offer intriguing, if at times contradictory, possibilities.

Place of Women in Traditional African Societies: Case of Koongo Woman

At the root of the social construction of nations, there are almost always founding mythologies supposed to explain the advent of this or that fact and/or phenomenon. The Koongo nation is no exception. It has a mythology that relates how the muuntu, the primordial being, in its primitive uniqueness, split into two individual entities, each retaining its specificity, and, at the same time, the trace of this ontological split. From this ontological split in primordial being came man and woman. The aim of this paper is to show how, from this ontological split, the symbolism of the woman, who has become the most prominent social figure in Koongo civilization, has imposed itself to the point of structuring the entire Koongo imaginary, so that the man is reduced to the role of stooge, charged with magnifying and dignifying the image of the woman.

From Absence to Excess: Black Grief and Afrofuturism in Colombian Hip-Hop

This article examines the videoclip Quilo, made by the Colombian hip-hop duo DxD and circulated online. Using bodily technologies such as hairstyles, clothing, and posing, Quilo depicts how the futurity of Black life can be shaped. Drawing from recent conceptualizations of Black life and from Latin American hip-hop studies, this article analyses Quilo by contrasting it with media coverage of police violence and the killing of Black youths in Colombia, and with the discursive construction of the multicultural mestizo nation. In this context, I interpret the treatment of temporality and space in Quilo as aesthetically evoking the non-specific time of Black grief.

ПОЛИТИКА ПАМЯТИ В ЛЕГИТИМАЦИИ ВЛАСТИ ПОСТСОВЕТСКИХ ГОСУДАРСТВ В КОНТЕКСТЕ ОСНОВНЫХ НАУЧНЫХ ТЕОРИЙ

The formation of political regimes in the republics of the former USSR is helped by the implementation of an active symbolic policy, which contributes to the legitimation of power in the majority of states formed after 1991. The presented article reflects scientific theories and approaches to the phenomenology of symbolic politics considered in the interaction of the political power of new polities and social strata and population groups of these states. The relevance of the chosen topic of the article lies in the study of the algorithm for the implementation of symbolic politics in new conditions that influence the legitimation and strengthening of political power in new states. Field research: political institutions, processes and technologies. The purpose of the article is to present and justify the author’s definition and phenomenology of the symbolic politics of post-Soviet states in line with scientific theories and approaches to understanding the role of states and public policy. The subject of the study is the essential characteristics of symbolic politics in the processes of legitimation of political regimes in the republics of the former USSR. As a result of the research conducted by the author, on the basis of scientific theories and approaches to public policy, the essence of the symbolic policy pursued in the states of the post-Soviet space is substantiated. Problem statement: the constructed collective historical memory and political mythology in the post-Soviet space, implemented by state institutions and non-state actors, provides a solution to the following problems. In particular, the legitimation of political power, the success of the formation of civil identity and the construction of a political nation. The study of successful examples of symbolic policies of new states has a chance of practical application in the Russian Federation.

What Kind of Cosmopolitanism? Transplantation and Displacement in the (Re)construction of Theatrical Nationality in Early Twentieth-Century China and Japan

What Kind of Cosmopolitanism? Transplantation and Displacement in the (Re)construction of Theatrical Nationality in Early Twentieth-Century China and Japan

The construction of childhood and nationalism in the Early Republican period: Şen Çocuk Magazine

Türkiye’nin Erken Cumhuriyet dönemi, ulus devletleşme sürecine bağlı olarak milliyetçi ideolojinin baskın olduğu, dağılan Osmanlı İmparatorluğu ile bağların koparılmak istendiği ve yeni bir kök arayışına girilen bir dönem olarak karşımıza çıkmaktadır. Bu dönemde Türk milliyetçiliğini yaygınlaştırma amacıyla çeşitli adımlar atılmış, Türk Tarih Tezi, Güneş Dil Teorisi gibi teorilerle Türk halkının Orta Asya kökleriyle bağ kurmasına ve ulus bilinci geliştirmesine çalışılmıştır. Milliyetçilik gibi ideolojik unsurların bir topluma aşılanmasındaki en önemli sacayaklarından birisi çocukların “eğitimi”dir. Bu eğitim aşamasında çocukların bir yandan eğleneceği bir yandansa bilgileneceği bir alan sağlayan önemli mecralardan birisi ise çocuk dergileridir. Bu çalışma Erken Cumhuriyet dönemindeki milliyetçilik politikaları ve çocukluğun inşasına odaklanmaktadır. Bu bağlamda milliyetçi söylemlerin ve kimlik politikalarının hız kazandığı bir dönem olan 1930’lu yıllarda yayımlanan Şen Çocuk dergisi özelinde, Erken Cumhuriyet döneminin milliyetçilik politikalarının çocuk dergisinde kendisine nasıl yer bulduğu incelenmiştir. Çalışmada Şen Çocuk dergisinde yer alan içerikler Türklüğün niteliksel özellikleri, Türklüğün tarihi, Türk Dilinin önemi, dağılan Osmanlı İmparatorluğu, Anadolu övgüsü, düşman imgesi temaları üzerinden betimsel olarak analiz edilmiştir.

Organizational studies in brazilian context: new directions of knowledge or epistemic dependence?

Organizational studies incorporate the political, socioeconomic and historical-cultural transformations of a nation. In Brazilian context, such research brought greater autonomy through the work of Alberto Guerreiro Ramos and Maurício Tragtenberg, precursors of the onto-epistemological construction prior to the Anglo-Saxon criticism based on mainstream of administration. The objective of the study was to understand the evolution of organizational studies in Brazilian context. For this, a systematic review of the literature was used to map the studies that bring a legitimate idea for a national theorization. The relevance of national researchers and the influence of their studies in Latin America and in the world contributed to a disentangling of dominant theories. Finally, the national constructs allowed a dialogue with the theme, and bequeathed pluriverse lenses in the analysis of discourses and contexts that keep organizational studies in evidence.

From the Ancient Persian Court to the Early American Drama: A Discourse Historical Analysis of the Representation of Esther and Persia

Abstract In efforts to pay homage to the establishment of nationalities, there is precedence in creating a binary opposition of “us” and “them” in some narrative contexts. This discursive construction within the narrative starts with the labeling of social elements, then proceeds to generalize the negative attributions, and then culminates elaborately in justifying the exclusion of many and the inclusion of some. Discourse Historical Analysis is a critical attempt to study power relations as reflected in the language of a (literary) text. The Book of Esther in the Old Testament recounts the story of the exiled Jews in Persia and the ill-fated conspiracy of the Persian prince to exterminate them. The most common opinion about the time and date of its composition is that it was composed among the Jewish diaspora in Persia during the reign of Xerxes I. The consolidation of their own Jewish nationality was indispensable while living an exiled life in Persia. As such, they cling to the idea of positive Jew and negative Persian representation in their recounts of the story of Esther in the Persian court. The interest in this biblical story has been maintained in numerous literary works. The focus of the present study is on the six late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American plays that speak to this phenomenon. In light of Ruth Wodak’s DHA (2003), the present article studies the power relations between the Persian regal host and the expatriate Jews in these dramatic texts. Essentially concerned with the study of conflicting ideologies in the social and political spheres, the discursive function of language in the construction of a diasporic nationality is highlighted herein.

Domesticating the Global Discourse of Nationalism in Early Twentieth-Century Iran: A Sociological Institutionalist Account

This article explores how nationhood was discursively constructed in early twentieth-century Iran. While most studies concentrate on micro-national causes, this study complements this literature by drawing on domestication theory to show how globally diffused nationalist discourse was localized and tailored to the Iranian context at the turn of the twentieth century. It employs the methods of critical discourse analysis and critical metaphor analysis to investigate politics in the construction of nationhood in Iran. The data include all editorials and articles in three highly influential Iranian periodicals: Qanun, Tarbiyat, and Kaveh. By analyzing the shared premises in this data, the study highlights the transnational nature of the discourse to indicate how Iranian nationhood was embedded in world society yet adapted locally. The analysis then identifies three variations of Iranian nationhood, each woven into a particular national narrative at the time. These findings attest to the meso-level approach that addresses the discursive side of diffusion mechanisms and calls attention to the discursive politics in localization processes of nationhood. They point to new directions to understand contemporary Iran, not as an outlier or exception, but rather as discursively connected to world society. Given the discursive opportunities arising from these contentious notions of nationhood, the study calls for further critical investigations of identity-based appeals, often by authoritarian actors, in Iran’s modern politics.

Hindu Civilization and Indian Nationalism: Conceptual Conflicts and Convergences in the Works of Romesh Chunder Dutt, c. 1870–1910

This paper is about a particular construction of nationalism at the hands of Romesh Chunder Dutt (1848–1909), the well-known exponent of ‘economic nationalism’, in colonial Bengal from 1870 onwards till his death in 1909. In this construction of nationalism, which today scholars would best describe as ‘cultural nationalism’, the categories ‘Hindu’ and ‘national’ converged and became conflated. Through a discussion of Dutt’s ‘literary patriotism’, the paper seeks to answer why it was so in the case of someone like R C Dutt, and what implications we can draw from this regarding our understanding of colonial Indian nationalism and its origins. With reference to Dutt, Sudhir Chandra pointed out that the neat distinction that we draw between ‘economic nationalism’ and ‘cultural nationalism’ is fallacious. The paper reiterates and reinforces this argument by showing how cultural and political nationalisms were enmeshed together in the case of R C Dutt. Furthermore, the glorious past that Dutt reconstructed through his literary patriotism could not but be a Hindu past; he was not a vilifier of Muslims, but somehow he shelved the question of the place of Muslims in his construction of Indian nationhood.