National Belonging Research Articles

University Spaces as Agents of National Belonging: Analysing the Visual Culture of Public Universities’ Campuses in India and Pakistan

This article discusses the role of ‘space’ in Indian and Pakistani public sector universities in fostering national pride. University spaces have been highlighted, in both countries, for being used by the governments as agents fostering the national narrative yet there is limited research on how these spaces contribute to the visual culture of educational institutions and in the inculcation of nationalistic values. This article adds to the conversations regarding the fostering of national belonging and pride in universities by exploring space as a constitutive element of the visual culture of the higher education environment in India and Pakistan. In both countries, the physical spaces of public universities have become platforms for channelling student voices. This research uses two state-funded universities, from Delhi (in India) and Lahore (in Pakistan), and Lefebvre’s conception of space to conduct a discourse analysis of bulletin boards, graffiti, statues, sculptures, and any other imagery found online pertaining to the campuses and analyse how it is a ‘conceived’ and ‘perceived’ aspect of the visual culture of the universities. It adds to current scholarly conversations on national pride and consciousness in India and Pakistan by showing how university spaces can potentially play an active role in promoting the state’s narrative in students’ or educators’ everyday educational experiences.

The Last Englishman: National Belonging and the Outbreak Narrative in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man

The Last Englishman: National Belonging and the Outbreak Narrative in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man

How Does the Sense of Closeness to God Affect Attitudes toward Refugees in Turkey? Multiculturalism and Social Contact as Mediators and National Belonging as Moderator

Turkey has been the country hosting the highest number of refugees globally with the immigration of Syrians after the civil war in Syria. There have been no major problems between Turks and Syrians in the past ten years. Although Syrians have a financial burden of 71 billion USD to the Turkish state, Turkish society has not reacted significantly due to common religious, cultural, and humanitarian values. This study was conducted with 1743 individuals of different age groups, and it tried to understand the effect of Turkish society’s spirituality in attitudes and behaviors towards Syrian refugees. This relationship was investigated with regard to whether the multiculturalism and contact frequency acted as mediators and national belonging acted as moderator. Gender, age, education, family income, marital status, and whether participants have Syrian neighbors were used as control variables. As a result of the analysis, it was found that the spirituality of the Turkish people was associated with their attitudes towards Syrian refugees, with the mediator effect being multiculturalism and social contact and the moderator effect being national belonging in this relationship.

Belongingness and National Belonging among Youth in Hong Kong

This study examined the multiplicative associations of the social categories of ethnicity (Hong Kong Chinese, mainland Chinese, or ethnic minorities), gender, and socioeconomic status (SES) with overall belongingness (to one’s self, personal networks, and society) and national belonging to China among youth (aged 18–24 years) in Hong Kong. Our analysis revealed similar levels of overall belongingness and national belonging among ethnic minority youth relative to Hong Kong Chinese youth. The intersectionality of mainland Chinese female youth determined a higher degree of belongingness compared with their male counterparts and Hong Kong Chinese female youth. Although SES was positively associated with belongingness, it was not significantly associated with national belonging to China. We provided explanations of these patterns and recommends policy strategies to strengthen individual and national belongingness.

Classroom Predictors of National Belonging: The Role of Interethnic Contact and Teachers\u2019 and Classmates\u2019 Diversity Norms

Schools can be important for the development of national belonging in students with immigrant backgrounds. Following Contact Theory and prior research on diversity norms, this cross-sectional survey study examined if intergroup contact and perceived diversity norms of teachers and classmates predicted national belonging in ethnic minority (i.e., Turkish [n = 95], Moroccan [n = 73], and Surinamese [n = 15]) versus majority students (n = 213) living in the Netherlands (Mage = 10.53 years; 50.3% female). Minority students reported less national belonging than their ethnic Dutch classmates. Multilevel analyses indicated that their national belonging was affected by the presence of ethnic Dutch classmates and the relationship with their teacher. These results indicate that minority students’ national belonging could be promoted by reducing school segregation and stimulating positive teacher-student relationships.

Social Work, Refugees and National Belonging: Evaluating the ‘Lady Social Workers’ of West Bengal

In the aftermath of Partition, the Government of India suddenly found itself to be responsible for a large number of refugee women who were not ‘attached’ to male guardians. The national government readily acknowledged the fate of these widowed, abandoned or abducted women as a sphere of feminine expertise and sought the active participation of prominent social workers such as Rameshwari Nehru, Mridula Sarabhai, Ashoka Gupta and Romola Sinha. Referred to as ‘lady social workers’, these women worked as volunteers and advisors to rehabilitate unattached women. Focusing on the voluntary service of social workers in West Bengal, and drawing upon the memoirs and personal papers of Ashoka Gupta, this article seeks to understand the limits and possibilities of this role. Was their role entirely circumscribed by the larger patriarchal vision of rehabilitation that treated ‘unattached’ refugee women as permanent liabilities of the state, or could they author policy that benefitted refugee women? Through a close reading of the solutions, schemes and reforms proposed by lady social workers, this paper suggests a complex relationship that resists such binaries.

Who Can Represent the Nation? Elite Athletes, Global Mega Events and the Contested Boundaries of National Belonging

For those studying national belonging, elite athletes competing in international mega events offer particularly compelling case studies as they represent the nation during periods of sustained media attention and heightened emotional registers. But when compared with other types of representatives – such as heads of state, ambassadors, political leaders – they have received much less scholarly attention. This article analyses reporting of the ‘Plastic Brits’ debate, where elite athletes brought in to represent Britain at the Olympics were subject to ongoing scrutiny and critique. Developing an analytical framework that uses insights from Elias, Goffman and Hage, we focus on three key issues. First, how a taken-for-granted ‘logic of nationalism’ underlies discussions about which athletes should (not) represent Britain. Second, how the nation’s boundaries are discursively marked with reference to a range of everyday features. Third, the use of different ‘destigmatisation strategies’ by athletes caught up in the ‘Plastic Brits’ debate.

دور مناهج التربیة الإسلامیة فی تعزیز الانتماء الوطنی لدى طلاب المرحلة الثانویة من وجهة نظرهم . The Role of Islamic Education Curricula in Enhancing the National Belonging of High School Students from their Viewpoints

هدفت الدراسة الکشف عن دور مناهج التربية الإسلامية في تعزيز الانتماء الوطني لدى طلاب المرحلة الثانوية من وجهة نظرهم، وتم استخدام المنهج الوصفي مع الاعتماد على الاستبانة في جمع البيانات، وتکونت عينة الدراسة من (427) طالبا وطالبة بالمرحلة الثانوية تم توزيعهم وفق متغيري النوع والمنطقة التعليمية، وأسفرت النتائج عن أن دور مناهج التربية الإسلامية في تعزيز الانتماء الوطني لدى طلاب المرحلة الثانوية معرفيا وثقافيا جاء مرتفعا من وجهة نظرهم، وأن دور مناهج التربية الإسلامية في تعزيز الانتماء الوطني لدى طلاب المرحلة الثانوية وجدانيا جاء مرتفعا من وجهة نظرهم، وأن دور مناهج التربية الإسلامية في تعزيز الانتماء الوطني لدى طلاب المرحلة الثانوية مهاريا وسلوکيا جاء متوسطا من وجهة نظرهم، وأنه لا توجد فروق ذات دلالة إحصائية في استجابات أفراد عينة الدراسة تعزى لمتغيري النوع أو المنطقة التعليمية. The current study aimed to uncover the role of Islamic education curriculum in promoting national belonging among secondary school students from their viewpoints. The study made use of the descriptive method and utilized a questionnaire for collecting the study data. The study sample consisted of (427) students in the secondary stage, who were distributed according to the variables of gender and educational region. The results attained showed that the role of Islamic education curriculum in enhancing national belonging among secondary school students in terms of the cognitive and cultural domains form their viewpoints was high. Moreover, the role of Islamic education curriculum in enhancing national belonging among secondary school students in terms of the affective domain from their viewpoint was high; however, in terms of psychomotor domain, national belonging was medium. The results of the study revealed that there were no statistically significant differences in the responses of the study sample individuals due to the variables of gender or educational region.

The Role of Augmented Reality Technologies in Supporting the Culture of National Belonging to the Arab Knowledge Society - Al-Azhar Mosque Library as a Model

The Role of Augmented Reality Technologies in Supporting the Culture of National Belonging to the Arab Knowledge Society - Al-Azhar Mosque Library as a Model contemporary world of progressive knowledge development and successive and accelerating developments in the fields of information and communication technology, which have no limits and no substitute for them, Which directs the attention of leaders and managers of cultural and knowledge institutions to the need to take precaution towards working to achieve the goals and objectives of these institutions according to the vision and mission of each institution separately, especially the Arab national archives, which comes at the top of its goals and priorities to spread cultural awareness and support the values of national belonging to a society Arabic knowledge.In order to summon the data of the Arab civilization, whose light has dimmed for decades, and to keep pace with global developments in the fields of providing various sources of information in unconventional methods and methods to achieve the desired goals, such as augmented reality technologies that work to produce a complex display that mixes between the real visible scene and the virtual scene that is created by the computer The machine, which enhances the real scene with additional information in a modern and attractive way, the current study dealt with the following:- To value the role of technologies in supporting the culture of national belonging to the Arab knowledge society.- Activating the effect of archives and the role of archives in shaping the features of the Arab knowledge society.- Implementing a program using Augmented Reality techniques that deals with the events of the tripartite aggression in 1956, through productive materials that work to enhance the real visible scene, and by applying it to a number of selected sources for the project "Al-Azhar Memory" and some sources related to the subject of the study.- Directing the attention of archives leaders and managers to the need to work to support the values of national belonging among members of society.- Presenting an integrated proposal for activating the role of augmented reality technologies in archives and the role of Arab archives in order to support the culture of national belonging to the Arab knowledge society.

“Being Chinese Means Becoming Cheap Labour”: Education, National Belonging and Social Positionality among Youth in Contemporary China

AbstractSince the 1990s, the Chinese party-state has attempted to teach its youth how to think and speak about the nation through a “patriotic education” campaign waged in schools, the media and on public sites. The reception of these messages by youth of different social backgrounds remains a disputed issue, however. Drawing on a multi-sited field study conducted among rural and urban Han Chinese youth attending different types of schools, this article explores the effects of the patriotic education campaign on youth conceptions of the nation by examining the rhetoric high-school students employ when asked to reflect upon their nation. The study reveals that a majority of youth statements conform to the language and contents of the patriotic education campaign; however, there are significant differences in the discursive stances of urban youth and rural youth and of those attending academic and non-academic, vocational schools. These findings call into question the party-state's current vision of China as a “unified” national collectivity. They highlight the existence of variances in the sense of collective belonging and national identity of Chinese youth, while underscoring the importance of social positioning and perceived life chances in producing these variances.

Overseas Lands, Cultural Citizenship, and National Belonging in Contemporary French Cinema

Overseas Lands, Cultural Citizenship, and National Belonging in Contemporary French Cinema

Reading the “Veil of Black” in Frederick Douglass and Thomas Jefferson: Affective Legibility and National Belonging

The article places Frederick Douglass in the tradition of African American writers responding to Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia. In doing so, it reveals Douglass’s keen understanding of how visual racialized affect was bound up in questions of slavery, freedom, and citizenship. By displaying his own affective legibility, revealing that black affective illegibility is an accomplishment of consciousness rather than a natural racial distinction, and highlighting that white feeling relies on Jeffersonian racial vision, Douglass reimagines a nation in which shared affect, regardless of the body’s racialized visual aesthetics, becomes the basis for interracial American kinship.

National Belonging and Public Support for Multiculturalism

AbstractHow do views about national identity shape support for multiculturalism? In this paper, we argue that individuals who view national ingroup belonging as “achievable” are more likely to support multiculturalism than individuals who view belonging as “ascriptive.” Using data from the 1995, 2003, and 2013 International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) Nationality Identity survey waves across 35 advanced democracies, we find achievable national identities correspond with support for multicultural principles but not for programmatic aspects involving government intervention. Robust analyses reveal these patterns are specific to the content, rather than the strength, of one's national identity. Our findings underline the role of both national belonging and outgroup attitudes on building support for policies of inclusion—and therefore social solidarity—in diverse democracies.

Hungarian Religion, Romanian Blood: A Minority's Struggle for National Belonging, 1920–1945. By R. Chris Davis. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2019. xxv + 249 pp. $79.95 cloth.

Hungarian Religion, Romanian Blood: A Minority's Struggle for National Belonging, 1920–1945. By R. Chris Davis. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2019. xxv + 249 pp. $79.95 cloth.

Kinyarwanda and Kirundi: On Colonial Divisions, Discourses of National Belonging, and Language Boundaries

The development of the Bantu languages Kinyarwanda and Kirundi is entangled within the colonial histories of Rwanda and Burundi, first under German and then Belgian rule. From the turn of the twentieth century on, missionaries compiled grammars and dictionaries of the two mutually intelligible languages, contributing to the development and instrumentalisation of two prestigious varieties out of a larger dialect continuum. In this contribution, I trace the missionary and colonial activities of corpus planning and textualisation and summarise how Kinyarwanda and Kirundi turned into official languages with distinct linguistic boundaries. The central research question is how speakers of Kinyarwanda and Kirundi thereafter came to be identified as “Rwandans” or as “Burundians,” with each language indexing a specific national categorisation. Tentatively, I contrast these developments with contemporary fluid practices in multilingual neighbourhoods.

Spanish Composers within and without Borders: On National Belonging in the Work of Ramon Lazkano and Carlos de Castellarnau

This article looks at two Spanish composers active in France—Carlos de Castellarnau and Ramon Lazkano—to develop a reflection about how national belonging is used in contemporary art music, specifically for its evaluation and the discourses that are created around it. We see that despite both composers rejecting any essentialist definition of themselves as ‘Spanish’, ‘Basque’, or ‘Catalan’ composers, these labels are continually used to describe them and their music, even though these labels have no specific aesthetic meaning. We reflect on why national origin is used to categorise composers, even in light of their typically transnational career paths. The conclusion addresses the tension between universalism and authenticity that is present when evaluating the work of composers who have followed migratory paths.

Irony of Citizenship: Descent, National Belonging, and Constitutions in the Postcolonial African State

In 2010, like many African countries since the 1990s, Kenya passed a new constitution. This constitution aimed to get rid of many past issues including the definition of citizenship. Globally, two general principles govern the acquisition of citizenship, descent from a citizen (jus sanguinis), and the fact of birth within a state territory (jus soli). In contrast to the prior Constitution that required both descent from Kenyan parents and birth in Kenya, the 2010 Constitution adopted a rule of citizenship by descent alone (jus sanguinis) from either parent. However, today Kenya is faced with a conundrum first articulated by Aristotle: how do you understand and operationalize citizenship by descent in a new state, or in the case of Kenya, one that has only just turned fifty? The crux of this conundrum is determining the basis of the citizenship of parents who precede the polity and therefore what they can transfer to their children. Understanding that articulations of citizenship are also systems of exclusion, this paper asks who can and cannot be a Kenyan citizen and why? What are the unintended consequences of efforts to escape Aristotle's conundrum?

Hungarian Religion, Romanian Blood. A Minority's Struggle for National Belonging, 1920–1945. By R. Chris Davis. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2019. xxvi, 249 pp. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Glossary. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. Maps. $79.95, hard bound.

Hungarian Religion, Romanian Blood. A Minority's Struggle for National Belonging, 1920–1945. By R. Chris Davis. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2019. xxvi, 249 pp. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Glossary. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. Maps. $79.95, hard bound.

Trust and National Belonging: Welfare for Disabled Veterans in Bohemia (1914–1918)

Abstract This contribution examines the role of trust in disabled veteran welfare in Bohemia during the First World War. It places this concern for disabled veterans’ trust in a wider political context as trust emerged as a specific concern in Cisleithanian political discourses on administrative reform around 1900. In the context of welfare for disabled veterans in Cisleithania, trust gained novel importance. Medical and occupational experts deemed it imperative to gain disabled veterans’ trust to maintain their role as experts and developed specific strategies of emotionally engaging with disabled soldiers to gain their trust. Karl Eger, a military official, emerged as an influential actor in Bohemian welfare for disabled veterans. He propagated a welfare administration based on local welfare boards, which would supposedly possess disabled veterans’ trust. His idea of trust was, however, based on concepts of national communities and he implemented it to re-organize disabled veteran welfare based on nationality.

Reimagining the Strange and Familiar in National Belonging: Memory, Heritage, and Exclusion in the Dominican Republic

Recent constitutional reforms and high court decisions in the Dominican Republic made an estimated 200,000 Dominicans of Haitian descent stateless when rulings retroactive to 1929 invalidated their birthright citizenship. Some social actors—including diasporic Dominicans and Haitians—connect the crisis of exclusion to the nation’s difficult heritage—namely, the 1937 massacre of thousands of Haitians and other black bodies in the Dominican Republic borderlands dividing the two nations, and the subsequent decades of authoritarianism that constructed Haitians and blackness as the nation’s strange “other.” A new museum in Santo Domingo, and an annual binational commemoration at the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic about the 1937 massacre bring attention to the historicity of present-day understandings of Dominicanidad (being Dominican), reminding the public that such definitions are rooted in state violence. This research examines how memory activism strives to transform familiar, though exclusionary, understandings of national belonging in the Dominican Republic.