Search

How has the Europeanisation of football at the level of governance (due to for example the effects of the Bosman ruling and the formation of the UEFA Champions League) – influenced the identities of football fans? This paper explores how such structural Europeanisation in football is influencing identifications among fans. Based on an analysis of articulations in selected online message boards, we distil the positioning of fans towards 'Europe' in football, and the factors which shape it. We control for three main avenues of impact: the club level, the league level, and the societal context. Our inquiry is based on a set of paired comparisons of fan scenes for football clubs in four different European countries. Results show that the factor carrying the most explanatory power is the club's participation in European-level competition. Although this broadly confirms a 'contact hypothesis' – according to which the more fans are exposed to cross-border contacts, the less relevance they attribute to aspects of national belonging – significant variations of how frequent exposure to European-level competition translates into more Europeanised perceptions do exist. For European identity studies, the work corroborates that a lifeworld arena such as football can foster Europeanised identifications, albeit not in a uniform manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I discuss Lithuanian LGBQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer) people's views on belonging to the West/EUrope. I will argue that the research participants' age group, location of residence, their (not)involvement with LGBTQ+ leisure culture and/or their migrant status made a significant impact towards forming their subjective sense of (not) belonging to the West, when they discussed their personal experiences of spending time abroad. When belonging to the West/EUrope was discussed against the backdrop of national belonging, the research participants syncretised the elements of the dominant nationalistic narrative, and the Rainbow Europe narrative in order to homosexualise the national canon and to construct an accommodating version of Lithuania as the Rainbow Nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, scholarship on postfunctionalism in European integration has drawn attention to how processes of Europeanisation are not restricted to policymakers, but exist equally (if not more significantly) in the quotidian. The 2016–2020 Brexit process and debates on the relationship between national identity and 'Europeanness' urge a new consideration of how Europeanisation is narrated in everyday discourses. This paper analyses British fictional portrayals of the EEC and EU and posits a new theoretical framework of 'Imperial Gothic 2.0'. Pre-2016 representations of the EU were entirely dystopian. But post-2016, Brex-Lit fiction has reversed this trend and the EU now appears as a flawless utopia. Early twentieth-century 'Imperial Gothic' saw popular fiction defined by themes of British decline and oppression by foreign powers; a century later, Brex-Lit has resurrected these themes by narrating Britain in terminal decline, reflecting cultural anxieties, a reversal of Self and Other, and a loss of identities. This 'Imperial Gothic 2.0' reveals anxieties which reflect and influence political action, and reveals the extent to which imaginations and narratives of the EU have transformed from depictions of a distant, technocratic entity used for comedy or conspiracy, into a site of intense emotional affiliation, nostalgia, anticipation, and regret. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of growing nationalisms and Euroscepticism, this paper develops the original concept of 'Everyday Europeanhood' on a theoretical level, building on related concepts, such as Skey and Antonsich's 'Everyday Nationhood', Billig's 'Banal Nationalism', Anderson's 'Imagined Communities' and Beck's 'Cosmopolitan Vision'. It applies the concept to the European Universities Initiative (EUI), seen as a tool to promote European identity, based on a common sense of belonging conveyed through everyday practice, among students and staff in European University Alliances. It is argued that, in the light of previous top-down European initiatives designed to symbolically reinforce a sense of shared European identity, the EUI seems more in phase with bottom-up 'everyday' processes of identity development. Taking the European University Alliance 'FORTHEM' as an example, core features, aspects, actions and outputs achieved so far within this alliance are categorised in the light of four dimensions of 'Everyday Europeanhood': 'Talking Europe', 'Choosing Europe', 'Performing Europe' and 'Consuming Europe'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cross-border regions are often deemed laboratories for initiatives to increase Europeanization. Our paper examines the German-speaking Community of Belgium in the Euregio Maas-Rhine to assess the relevance of everyday cross-border activities to the perception that living in a border region presents a unique opportunity to feel and think as a European. Departing from the assumptions of both Deutsch's transaction theory and Allport's contact hypothesis, we analyze Eurobarometer data (population-level surveys) and use data from focus groups with regional MPs. Results from quantitative data analysis suggest that perceptions of life in cross-border regions are positively influenced by frequent cross-border movement (functional dimension) as well as general trust in other people (emotional dimension). Our qualitative data from focus groups support the findings from the quantitative analysis and demonstrate further that it is not merely the quantity but the quality of contacts that contribute to a gradual 'growing together'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Julian Go's 'Thinking Against Empire' identifies the corpus of 'anticolonial thought' as being instructive for a wider rethinking of how sociology might rally its key conceptualisations of social relations. He insightfully identifies the marginalisation of such thinking from Sociology as an institutionalised discipline. In our response we take up some of the warnings Go provides in the closing sections of his essay—which concern the expanse of intellectual engagement being currently bracketed under or connected to the 'anti‐colonial', not least vis‐à‐vis the 'decolonising/decolonial' turn—to further unpack how the 'anti‐colonial' might be adapted for thinking through contemporary socio‐political dynamics. Offering, first, a precis of some particularities of British Sociology vis‐a‐vis the contributions of anticolonial social theory, this article then expands upon the dilemmas arising when anticolonial theory contemporaneous to the pre‐decolonisation era is transposed to contingencies of the present 21st century. Namely, whilst the anticolonial archive has proved invaluable to upending the omissions but also complicities of European social theory canons, allowing for a much more expansive sense of how the modern world and its violences were conjured and how we might accordingly escape its miseries, it is also clear that much of the postcolonial world has undergone sufficient shifts to warrant an adapted sense of how we consider the anti‐colonial for our current politics. We suggest that the important deviations which anti‐colonial theorisations might heed include the dangers of conflating the anticolonial with an affirmation of Global South, non‐white nativist identity; the need to recognise some key conjunctural premises by which the anticolonial is no longer geographically indexed to a straightforward Global North‐Global South distinction; and the need to acknowledge that, at its most radical, anticolonial thought is itself still invested in traversing both the dreams but also corruptions of those dreams as intrinsic to modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to characterize the culturalist theory of the nation by Florian Znaniecki. Opposing the sociological theory dominated by Western, particularly Anglo-Saxon, thinkers, Znaniecki rejected the view of the nation as a state society. He believed that the nation is a type of community constituted by a specific culture that is created by its intellectual leaders. To derive his findings, he used the knowledge gained from the experiences of the nations of Central and Eastern Europe. He believed that their specific history required the development of a sociological theory that was adequate for such research, not dominated by the findings of Western sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The critique of "methodological nationalism" constitutes an important advance in the attempt to elaborate a theory of world society adequate to our socio-historical reality. However, I argue that this is not enough if "theoretical nationalism", which consists in assuming that globality is formed in the interaction or interplay between regions and / or states, is not disputed at all. This assumption is in opposition to the idea of "one" world society as postulates the existence of a plurality of regional and national societies. Beyond the fact that this conception may be acceptable within the framework of the epistemological and methodological openness enabled by the "World Paradigm", we point out a set of analytical dilemmas that arise from it. My thesis is that it is necessary to overcome this regionalist worldview to advance not only in a more adequate theory of world society, but also to a better understanding of the way in which inter-regional inequalities are produced and reproduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conflicts are a natural companion of both man and society. Throughout human history, the contents have changed, but also the forms of conflict. What is more significant characteristic of the conflicts is that they were mostly violent and with great consequences, not only for the actors but also for their contemporaries. That is why conflicts are important for sociology and psychology as well as for anthropology and history. Conflicts have their positive characteristics, because they are essentially forms of social change and individual development of man and his ethics, and other characteristics. Conflict most often gets a new state, which from the experience of the previous states represents progress in scientific views, and better understanding of current state. Therefore, we could say that conflicts are a natural state of both society and man in a mutual, but also social relationship. There are different forms of conflict from ethnic, national, religious, political to intergroup and within group with different contents and motives. All of them constitute a wealth of social relations and social movement that takes place with unequal intensity and in different social conditions. Ethnic, national, religious and political conflicts have developed and stood out throughout history. Different theories observe and understand conflicts in different ways depending on their intensity and scope. We will consider from the sociological aspect some theories and approaches to understanding conflicts, such as ethnic and national, given their historical foundation and significance in modern societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A prominent figure in the social sciences in Brazil and Latin America, Renato Ortiz is invited in this interview to reflect on his intellectual and academic trajectory, whose (re) beginning goes back to France in the 1970s. Professor at the Campinas State University since 1988, he addresses here the main concepts and references that make up his vast work, situated at the intersections between sociology and anthropology. The conversation begins by addressing the issue of his university education and insertion in the Brazilian academic field and develops through the following topics: religion and popular culture, national identity and modernity, mundialization and globalization, the market of symbolic goods and the luxury universe. Finally, he focuses on the dilemma of intellectual work in the social sciences amidst the adversities of the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review essay explores a number of key books published in transnational feminist sociology over the last 20 years, including Kamala Kempadoo's (2004) Sexing the Caribbean, Pei-Chia Lan's (2006) Global Cinderellas, Smitha Radhakrishnan's (2011) Appropriately Indian, Héctor Carrillo's (2018) Pathways of Desire, Oluwakemi Balogun's (2020) Beauty Diplomacy, and Rhacel Parreñas' (2021) Unfree. The review analyzes three key themes found in transnational feminist sociology: migrant domestic work, sexuality and migration, and gender and nationalism. It also points to the important contributions transnational feminist research makes to sociology through its focus on global-local processes, intersectional inequalities, and the relationship between structure and agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, I will reflect upon what has been sociology's contribution to understanding the emergence and development of nationalism and how sociology can contribute to understanding nationalism's present and future through a property rights perspective. The essay will discuss, in particular, how historical sociological analysis of property rights and property rights regimes may be central to understanding nationalism past and future. After a general and brief discussion on the current, so‐called return of nationalism, the essay starts with discussion of some late enlightenment proto‐sociologists, suggesting that these writers actually analysed some crucial early dynamics of property and sovereignty which is central to understanding nationalism. The essay then moves on to suggests why a property rights focus might be a useful perspective to understanding nationalism in the 21st century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses how to explain the rise of a new nationalism in Europe. It begins by problematizing the inconsistencies in the current culturalist, socio-economic, and socio-political approaches. It then makes Pierre Bourdieu's theory of social space fruitful for a sociological explanation of neonationalism by removing it from the conceptional framework of national container societies. It finally shows that the transnational opening of national societies is accompanied by profound processes of symbolic appreciation and depreciation of economic, cultural, and social 'capital' that the inhabitants of the national container possess. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At a time when nationalist sentiment is on the rise, this special issue takes stock of how sociology can contribute to understanding the past, present and future of nationalism. In contrast to declarations of 'the end of history', which was also meant to herald increasing integration due to a lowering of cultural and national barriers, nationalism never went away. The articles in this collection engage with the question of nationalism at a theoretical and empirical level and in different regional contexts, assessing how national boundaries are drawn and policed, how national identities are formed and the myriad political and everyday consequences of nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an innovative sociological framework to discuss recent social, ideological, and religious trends within the Religious-Zionist sector in Israel. The article challenges the prevalent conceptualization of Religious-Zionism as a sui generis ideology. Contrary to researchers who emphasize the synthesis of religion and Zionism in the Religious-Zionist ideology, the author argues that the Religious-Zionist identity is based primarily on social connections (kinship, geographical, institutional) between the members of the group. The author uses this approach to make sense of recent Religious-Zionist trends: post-Zionism, the 'religious-lite', Orthodox feminism, and neo-liberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the theoretical and empirical contributions of the interdisciplinary field of memory studies for a comparative sociology of collective memory and politics. We identify three major empirical foci that have structured the scholarship: the role of collective memory in the creation, legitimation, and maintenance of national identities and nation-states; political reckoning with the memory of difficult and violent pasts; and the ongoing transnationalization of collective memory. We conclude with suggestions for future research on the politics of memory given the rise of populism and so-called fake news. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cosmopolitan sociology of Ulrich Beck has been widely recognized as making vital contributions to crosscutting conversations on globalization and transnational studies, including these debates that are being played out on the pages of Global Networks. Beck's impassioned critique of 'methodological nationalism' in his own discipline of sociology, in particular, has often served as a springboard for programmatic calls to attend more closely to transnational actors, issues, and processes. However, beyond the occasional acknowledgement, comparatively less attention has been paid so far to the potentialities, specificities, and practicalities of Beck's affirmative alternative vision for the socio‐cultural sciences, that of 'methodological cosmopolitanism'. Building on and extending out from research experiences obtained in Beck's East Asia and Europe‐focused Cosmopolitan Climate Change (Cosmo‐Climate) project, this special theme brings together experts from across a range of socio‐cultural research fields to discuss and critically interrogate the challenges and capacities of doing methodological cosmopolitanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the poetry of Qu Xuanying, a literatus who remained in the city of Beiping (now Beijing) following its occupation by the Japanese in 1937. Through historical allusions in his poetry, Qu communicated with friends about the ethical dilemmas that he faced under occupation, and reflected upon the choices that literati in earlier eras had made when facing dynastic transitions and foreign conquest. Qu's 'esoteric writing' during the occupation contained a complex set of historical allusions which referenced various points in the Chinese past. Since Qu served in the collaborationist north China regime, he has often been perceived as a 'traitor' or a 'collaborator'. Through this in-depth analysis of his literary works, however, this paper seeks to reveal the special exegetical strategies adopted by literati such as Qu under occupation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the construction of lyric identities by Li Xuanti, a classical-style poet, cultural celebrity and prominent civil servant in collaborationist regimes based in Nanjing during the Second Sino-Japanese War. It argues that Li used his poetry to explore the confusion, ambivalence and sense of cultural pride while living with the occupiers. Despite his collaboration, a frequent identity that appears in Li's poetry is that of a yimin (loyalist), who has retreated to the inner world of reclusion. With the progress of the war, however, another identity eventually emerged in Li's poetry, namely that of a patriot. Historical allusions in Li's poems thus acquire double-entendre, expressing his ambivalent loyalty. Li was also at the social centre of a group of like-minded collaborators and accommodators in Nanjing, bound by their common practice of classical-style poetry and arts. Their community thus becomes a special case of study for the sociology of survival under the Japanese occupation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

David Martin's sociology of religion embodied an expansive vision of religion, one that encompassed the entirety of human and social experience: its political, national, economic, aesthetic, poetical and spiritual-religious orientations, and the complexities of their institutional arrangements, entanglements and compromises with one another. David's sociology was not formulaic; it was a constant struggle – a struggle for understanding the motives, forms and patterns of human behaviour as these changed and shifted under changing circumstances. David was extraordinarily sensitive to the importance of the historical context, and especially the effects of modernity, in all its different guises, on the great cultural traditions of Western civilisation: Christianity and Western 'high culture' - the 'Western canon' of European art, music, literature and poetry. For David, the former presented the best account of human life; the latter, the pinnacles of human creative and imaginative achievement. As my doctoral supervisor, he also helped me to see and understand the persistence, revival and evolution of that other great European cultural tradition, the Classical tradition, the civilisation of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, in the modern world. Like its Biblical, Judaeo-Christian, counterpart, the Classical tradition has offered, well into the twentieth century, a powerful repertoire of cultural themes, images and symbols of human existence. This repertoire was often seen to parallel and complement the Biblical repertoire, while in its artistic, musical, and literary manifestations, would form the basis of the 'Western canon'. Modern cultural movements, and especially the expressive and utilitarian revolutions of the 1960s, would set out to break these great images of the axial age. David's mission would be to restore them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the ways nationalism has been theorised in classical and contemporary sociology. More specifically, the author analyses the relevance of Randall Collins's contribution to theories of nationalism. Since Collins's work is firmly rooted in the classical tradition, including the reinterpretation and synthesis of Weber, Durkheim and Goffman, the first part of this paper zooms in on the classics of sociology and their treatment of nations and nationalism. The second part of the paper outlines the key features of Collins's approach and identifies the strengths and weaknesses of this position. The final part builds on the footsteps of Collins and others to articulate an alternative approach focused on the coercive organisational, ideological and micro-interactional grounding of nationalisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the power of social media in defining and policing sexual identities and bodily expressions, and what are their connections to understanding nation, power and self in authoritarian contexts? Through the study of popular Instagram accounts in Kazakhstan and Russia, I argue that these sites serve as spaces of visualization and re-creation of new forms of 'acceptable' behaviour and lifestyles, that on the one hand may lead to new globalized visions of sexual identity and the body while on the other promoting localized conflict and resentment online, triggered by online users' fear of losing their 'national culture' in these global trends. While many resort to policing gender norms and heteronormative body images online, influencers and Instagrammers from Russia and Kazakhstan take an active part in resisting these frameworks and categories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recent article has found nationalism to be negatively associated with government respect for several human rights. In this article, I replicate the original study’s findings, I demonstrate that these findings are robust to an alternate model specification, and I then extend the analysis to additional human rights not examined by the original author. Ultimately, I find that in comparison to when the chief executive is not nationalist, when the chief executive is highly nationalist, that state is less likely to be associated with high government respect for six ‘empowerment’ rights (i.e. the freedoms of assembly and association, electoral self-determination, speech, foreign movement, religion, and worker’s rights), and more likely to be associated with low government respect for these six empowerment rights. This study suggests that nationalism’s influence on human rights is greater than previous thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How are masculinity and nationalism intertwined? This question has received scant theoretical attention, and existing theories tend to focus on their shared ideals and are embedded in a heteronormative, homophobic, and patriarchal framework. Such views imply a static relationship between the two phenomena and are incompatible with the recent phenomenon of homonationalism and the incorporation of some homosexual bodies within the nation. Addressing this theoretical gap, this article develops a more holistic framework of the relationship between nationalism and masculinity. Drawing on relational sociology, it conceptualises nationalism as competing masculinities. It argues that the link between masculinities and nationalism is not found in their overlapping substantive ideals, but rather that the two phenomena are co-constructed through their overlapping Othering processes. The proposed theoretical framework does not only provide a more dynamic understanding of the link between masculinity and nationalism, but it also helps to overcome the apparent duality between homonationalism and heteronationalism. It is shown that both phenomena are in fact two sides of the same coin, with the main difference between them being the location of homophobia as a technology of Othering within different types of Self/Other relations. Overall, the article provides an analytical tool that allows for the contextualisation and understanding of seemingly contradictory features of nationalism and its relationship to masculinity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores what globalization means for the relationship between Medicare and Canadian identity. Typical accounts of this relationship explain it as either the result of deep-seated Canadian values, or as the result of government action in the postwar era. Starting from where the second group leaves off, this article explores how the Medicare identity was the result of very specific capitalist property relations that are now fading. The article begins with an analysis of the origins of modern national identities, linking them to the transformation of property relations that characterized the transition to capitalism. It then focuses on the rise of social rights and how these were used to craft social solidarity among disparate individuals and groups in Canada. The next section focuses on globalization and the shift to neoliberalism. The article concludes with a reflection on what the demise of Medicare might mean for Canadian identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Methodological nationalism in sociological theory is unfit for the current globalized era, and should be discarded. In light of this contention, the present article discusses Max Weber’s view of language as a way to relativize the frame of the national society. While a “linguistic turn” in sociology since the 1960s has assumed that the sharing of language—linguistic community—stands as an intersubjective foundation for understanding of meaning, Weber saw linguistic community as constructed. From Weber’s rationalist, subjectivist, individualist viewpoint, linguistic community was a result of social actions, not a prior entity as assumed by German metaphysical organicism (and historicist holism). Indeed, Central Europe in Weber’s era was a battlefield of linguistic nationalism(s); in contrast to the national societies of the Cold War period, national borders were unstable and ultimately the multiethnic empires of the region were dismantled after World War I into ethnolinguistic nation-states. Experience of this contemporary reality brought Weber to the core of the relationship between language and politics: A language community is an imaginary one demarcated not by language itself but by conscious opposition against outsiders, with monolingual contexts within borders created artificially by homogenizing policies like linguistic standardization and national education—the first modernity of language. In this way, Weber felt, language can be a means to domination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the question of antisemitism in relation to the construction of national identity in late capitalist and post-Nazi societies. Its argument centres on the concept of 'secondary antisemitism', as developed within the Critical Theory tradition. Thus, I will elaborate on the complex relationships between post-Nazi antisemitism, the culture industry and the radical destruction of memory in late capitalist societies. The aim is to show the contemporary relevance of secondary antisemitism beyond the immediate context of the task of remembering the Nazi past. In the second section of this paper I will illustrate this by an analysis of examples from print media debates in Austria on the recent financial crisis and show that instances of secondary antisemitism are utilized for the discursive construction of an exclusive national(ist) unity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While scholars have shown how ‘color-blind racism’ functions as the dominant form of racist discourse in the post-Civil Rights era, few have interrogated how this logic operated before the advent of US Civil Rights, or how ethno-racial groups such as Puerto Ricans exist in an unique and liminal position and have been subject to color-blind racist discourse. The authors explore the construction of Puerto Rican identity during the pre-Civil Rights: a time rife with color-blind American paternalism over the supposed cultural dysfunctions of the Puerto Rican diaspora, an era of mass Puerto Rican emigration to the US, and a moment when Puerto Rico underwent a political change. The authors employ a content analysis of The New York Times (1948 to 1958) in order to investigate the relationship between the discursive construction of Puerto Rican identity and the flagship newspaper’s use of nationalist and racialized cultural schemata. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Gdeim Izik protest emerged in response to Moroccan public policy (the distribution of land for construction) and adopted a nationalist line during the course of the action, provoking a heavy-handed response from Moroccan state security forces. This paper analyses the process and places it in the broader context of protest movements that emerge in situations of occupation and authoritarian rule. To that end, the study addresses the reconfiguration of the protest camp in Western Sahara during the 2000s, including protests that were not explicitly pro-independence struggles, to examine how Sahrawi protest actors perceived and assessed this context and how this assessment influenced their individual and collective action strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to understand contemporary forms of nationalism in a socio-political context in which neo-nationalism has obtained a dominant role not just in politics but in public discourse and in the cultural field as well. It investigates the emergence of a particular music scene in the beginning of the 21st century, shaped by rock bands and performers and supported by far-right political actors, which has made the 'national' imagination emotionally and ideologically appealing to a considerable part of Hungarian society and first of all to young people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on a unique digital archive of thousands of images of far right symbols and commercial products in Germany, combined with 62 interviews conducted with German youth and their teachers in 2013–2014, this article examines young Germans’ sense of style and their interpretation of far right-wing symbols and codes in commercial products, clothing, and tattoos. The article focuses on the role that perceptions of masculinity and body image play in the appeal of clothing brands and styles popular with the far right. The analytical focus is on two iconographical tropes – the soldier/sailor and the rebel/rule-breaker – as devices that help articulate how a hegemonic far right version of masculinity is inscribed through male bodies. The article thus identifies subcultural style as a key mechanism through which masculinity and nationalism are linked and mutually reinforced. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the museums of the U.S. and provide information for Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Museum in Abilene. It also states the historic relation between the U.S. with world. Topics discussed includes American President Museums, masculine saga, stoicism and National Gallery of Art.

This article examines Russian patriotism in the global context of patriotic education, civic education, and nation-building. It cites data from all-Russian surveys and World Values Survey Wave 6 2010–2014, as well as data from the content analysis of eight patriotic education documents from the United States, Singapore, China, and Russia. The uneven nature of Russians’ patriotic self-identity shows that external events play a large role in the formation of patriotism, while Russian society consolidates not through the cultivation of positive values, but on the basis of negative factors whose impact leads only to blind—and not to constructive—patriotism. This approach integrates citizens’ emotional relationship with their country and their state, civic, and national identities and emphasizes the importance of traditions and values by creating a construct of active and free social behavior without impinging on alternative values, traditions, and beliefs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Nowadays, the widespread view is that classical sociology is tainted with ‘methodological nationalism and it would appear that there has been a significant overlap between social and political space. We disagree with this point of view for three reasons: (1) by dealing with the global world, classical sociology has already glimpsed the possibility of going beyond the nation-state as a unit of analysis; (2) having operated above all with the notion of ‘social’ rather than ‘national’, its categories are transnational; and (3) when classical sociology has dealt with national society, studies have not reified it within its political boundaries. Consequently, in our opinion, classical sociology highlights both analytical categories that go beyond the ontology of the nation-state as well as new socio-political forms defined within the trajectory of modernity under the pressure of globalization processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the various facets of sociality of guru-led movements in the contemporary social milieu. It argues that sociality is the key to deciphering the numerous manifestations of the guru-led movements within the social domain. Sociality is the essence of tradition, continuity and perpetuation of these movements. This sociality as imagined here is a result of a meta-analysis of the guru-led movements, reflecting on their socio-political frame of reference; visions on society, stratification and ethics; positions on social issues and social service; views on social transformation and tangible social service along with the antagonisms and contradictions which penetrate all the social imaginaries. The analysis builds upon two aspects: the episteme of sociality and the episteme of guru-led movements. In terms of the episteme of sociality there is substantiation of a strong conception of sociality which emphasizes social relations to others. Faith and guru memory are central categories and embedded in this sociality is a potential for change. The sociality of guru-led movements throws light on how their agency and actions emerge. It constitutes the movements’ social imaginings and intersubjectivity, which very often are also coloured by their own dominant forces of hegemony and Hindu nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the decline of ethnic notions of national identity, the extent to which immigrants are believed to have acceptably liberal values has become a site of boundary making in Western Europe. Much scholarly work has focused on ‘boundary liberalism’ in European media/policy discourse, and the ways that Muslim migrants in particular are framed as carriers of unacceptable ideologies. There has, however, been little exploration of how these ideas shape practice in the mandatory citizenship training that is an increasingly common feature of European integration regimes. This article examines boundary liberalism in citizenship education as it took place in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Attention is paid to how instructors interpret the mandate to enforce tolerance in others in light of Germany’s own problematic history, how curricula and classroom interactions define normative liberalism, and how lessons on these values still draw the symbolic boundaries of national and supranational identities to exclude Muslims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the affective dimension of nations. Topics dicussed include analysis of issues such as power, agency and method in the nations; intermittent, emergent and relational character of nation; and an account of shared emotional experience of social groups beyond the differences which inhabit any nation.

On the 50th anniversary of the ISSA and IRSS, a leading Canadian scholar on sport, identities, and community, Christine Dallaire, considers the dynamic role of sport in reproducing national and ethnocultural communities in Canada. A diverse research agenda grew, merging considerations of not only the trajectory of Canada as a nation, but the meshing of immigrant and new national identities and the role of First Nations communities on the sport landscape. Noting the constant interaction and opposition among communities with different self-determination, ethnocultural and national aims, an ongoing challenge in sociological work about the roles of sport resides in reaching nuanced understandings of differing identity narratives that circulate and that are reinvented through sport. Future research will need to focus on the complexities of “Canadianness” in sporting identities and how the reproduction of contested ethnocultural and national identities are cast and understood in stories about differentiated, racialized, and gendered sport heroes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study constructs a sociology of knowledge approach to explaining the relationship between intellectuals and nationalism, one that challenges the conventional intellectual historical approach of understanding the relationship through macro and remote factors. The sociological approach conceptualizes knowledge production dynamics as intervening variables that refract macro and remote causal impacts on knowledge contents. This study focuses on one such dynamic: a ‘nationalist intellectual distinction’ tactic that compels academics to produce indigenous knowledge that in turn inspires popular discourses on national culture. The utility of the approach is demonstrated through a comparative historical analysis of how early 20th-century Chinese and Japanese philosophers contributed to constructing national cultural identities. Based on primary and secondary historical data, it is found that all prominent philosophers in the two countries used nationalist intellectual distinction to build indigenous philosophies. Modern Japanese philosophers defined indigenous rationality, epistemology, and logic as aesthetical, mystical, and emotional and described indigenous ontology in terms of nothingness. Modern Chinese philosophers conceptualized indigenous rationality, epistemology, and logic in moral-practical terms and characterized indigenous ontology as this-worldly and humanistic. It is also found that popular discourses on national culture, which strongly shaped the national cultural identities of the two countries in the past 70 years, borrowed heavily from these philosophers’ ideas on indigenous rationality, logic, and ontology. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Reflecting on a long itinerary of research in the Aurès begun in the 1970s, and the significance today of the ‘high’-cultural model of nationalism advanced by Ernest Gellner (which drew on Weberian sociology in principle and the example of Algeria empirically), this article considers the historical roots and the long-term consequences of the incorporation, via the Islamic reformist (islah) movement of Abdelhamid Ben Badis and his followers, of local cultural producers and local social spaces into an Algerian nation-state politically defined by the hegemony of the National Liberation Front (Front de Libération Nationale (FLN)). Close examination of local and familial strategies for the accumulation and reinvestment of spiritual capital reveals both the local importance, beginning in the 1930s, of linkages to the emerging national sphere and the absence, at a national level, of competition for religious and cultural legitimacy that would contest the imposition of a uniform, hegemonic vision of national community. The reformist movement itself would suffer from the monopolisation of control after independence by the FLN party-state. While the limitations of this model, and the artificial consensus it created, were subsequently revealed in the obstacles to a critical intellectual life and the more radical disaffection of younger generations, it seems that there were few or no other ways, in the 1930s–50s, to articulate local society and national aspirations effectively. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Following the successful cloning of genes for mostly rare genetic diseases in the early 1990s, there was a nearly universal enthusiasm that similar approaches could be employed to hunt down genes predisposing people to complex diseases. Around 1996, several well-funded international gene-hunting teams, enticed by the low cost of collecting biological samples and China’s enormous population, and ushered in by some well-connected Chinese intermediaries, came to China to hunt down disease susceptibility genes. This alarmed and, in some cases, enraged many poorly funded Chinese scientists, who perceived them as formidable competitors. Some depicted foreign gene-hunters as greedy pilferers of the vast Chinese genetic gold mine, comparing it to the plundering of national treasures from China by invaders in the past, and called upon the government and their fellow countrymen to rise up and protect China’s genetic gold mine. Media uproar ensued, proclaiming the imminent “gene war of the century.” This article chronicles the key events surrounding this “war” and its aftermath, exposes some inherent complexities in identifying susceptibility genes for complex diseases, highlights some issues obscured or completely overlooked in the passionate and patriotic rhetoric, and debunks some misconceptions embedded in this conflict. In addition, it argues that during the entire course of this “war,” the public’s interest went conspicuously unmentioned. Finally, it articulates several lessons that can be learned from this conflict, and outlines challenges facing human genetics researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the reasons why national forms of identification and organization (might) matter in the contemporary era. In contrast to the majority of macro-sociological work dealing with this topic, I develop an analytical framework that draws together recent research on everyday nationalism with micro-sociological and psychological studies pointing to the importance of routine practices, institutional arrangements and symbolic systems in contributing to a relatively settled sense of identity, place and community. The second part of the paper focuses on the hierarchies of belonging that operate within a given national setting. Of particular interest is the largely taken-for-granted status of the ethnic majority and the degree to which it underpins claims to belonging and entitlement that are used to secure key allocative and authoritative resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent anthropology of the state is influenced by sociology's cultural turn—taking up “the state idea” as situated meaning. The works reviewed here pursue the state's idea of itself—in two cases through state projects of extreme social and cultural engineering, in two as a comparative problem. Notwithstanding differences of purpose and approach, the authors evince tacit points of convergence around the state as a form of modernism, as a function of elite interests, and as a localized process of depoliticization, associating dissent with cultural authenticity. The essay relates these points to western state nationalism and current ethnographies of political subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article seeks to further our understanding of what methodological nationalism is and to offer some insights towards its overcoming. The critical side of its argument explicates the paradoxical constitution of the current debate on methodological nationalism – namely, the fact that methodological nationalism is simultaneously regarded as wholly negative and all-pervasive in contemporary social science. I substantiate the idea of this paradox by revisiting some of the most successful attempts at the conceptualization of the nation-state that have sought to transcend methodological nationalism in four disciplines: sociology, nationalism studies, anthropology and social psychology. The positive side of my argument offers a distinction between different versions of methodological nationalism with the help of which it tries to address some of the problems found in the literature. Theoretically, methodological nationalism is associated with, and criticized for, its explanatory reductionism in which the rise and main features of the nation-state are used to explicate the rise and main features of modernity itself. Historically, the article reassesses the problem of its prevalence, that is, whether methodological nationalism is a key feature of the history of the social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents abstracts on planning literature which include approaches to empirical work in regional economics, understanding the barriers to social adaptation, and management of large city regions.

This paper considers Charles Tilly as an important but underappreciated theorist of nationalism. Tilly's theory of nationalism emerged from the 'bellicist' strand of his earlier work on state-formation and later incorporated a concern with performance, stories, and cultural modeling. Yet despite the turn to culture in Tilly's later work, his theory of nationalism remained state-centered, materialist, and instrumentalist-a source of both its power and its limitations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article responds to concerns about the ''diaspora' diaspora' effect on sociology of national identity and migration, and the related thought by about a national community as something more tangible and close-knit than just 'imagined' by . I refer to the ideas of the occupational 'platoon'- derived from and - and platoon friendship as representing the occupation-friendship-nationalism conflation. Having conducted narrative-biographic interviews with twenty-five Russian academics now residing in the United Kingdom and the United States, I look at how they understand their new, diasporic spaces as impacted by their Soviet platoon friendship - a feature that could be used as a criterion for recognising a putative diaspora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]