‘A sense of where you belong in the world’: national belonging,ontological security and the status of the ethnic majority in England

ABSTRACT. The significance of national forms of imagination and organisation has been increasingly questioned in an era of rapid globalisation. While theoretically stimulating, those who stress the importance of global mobility and sociability sometimes overlook what well‐established, “thick” attachments to the nation offer to disparate individuals, notably in terms of anchoring subjectivity. This first part of this paper explores how debates around belonging in England continue to define certain “ethnic” groups as more or less national, because they embody certain traits, practices or norms. It is then suggested that those who claim, and are treated as if, they belong “without question” may be offered a key sense of material and ontological security that is underpinned through routine practices, symbolic forms and institutional arrangements. The second section looks to evidence this argument by exploring how challenges to this ontological order, which focus on the agency of “perceived” others in relation to everyday spaces, practices and material objects, are debated and resisted.     

Belonging to the nation: Negotiating narratives of national identity in Aotearoa New Zealand

One of the most important yet complex contemporary political projects of belonging relate to rapidly diversifying societies. While prior research has tended to focus on how young people work to fit into the nation, this study sought to examine the processes by which ethnic minority young people (re)produced, reimagined and challenged narratives of national belonging. Underpinned by feminist theoretical understandings of citizenship and everyday nation, the study examined how young people (n = 180) attending four superdiverse high schools in Aotearoa New Zealand deliberated and negotiated the parameters of who belonged to the nation. The use of a qualitative participatory strategy – self-directed peer focus groups – opened up opportunities for young people to debate and contest complex ideas about belonging and national identity. Ethnic minority participants expressed widespread dissatisfaction with traditional narrow, monocultural narratives of national identity and drew on illustrations from their own everyday encounters with diverse others to offer more inclusive alternatives. Many employed affective notions of national belonging that centred on ‘feeling’ like, or choosing to be a ‘Kiwi’, rather than being chosen. Their deliberations and dialogue demonstrated agentic ways in which ethnic minority young people were ‘rewriting’ the narratives of national belonging to ensure that they and their peers were located as legitimate citizens of the nation, and in doing so, revealed the formation of their citizenship subjectivities.     

Epistemic justice and everyday nationalism: An auto‐ethnography of transnational student encounters in a post‐war memory and reconciliation project in Kosovo

This contribution introduces an exercise in epistemic justice to the study of everyday nationalism in post‐conflict, transnational (local and international) encounters. It explores how everyday nationalism, in often unexpected and hidden ways, underpinned a cocreational, educational project involving several local (Albanian) and international (British based) university students and staff collaborating on the theme of post‐war memory and reconciliation in Kosovo. The set‐up resembled a microcosm of transnational social encounters in project collaborations in which the problem of nationalism, typically, is associated with one side only: here, the Kosovars. Guided by Goffman's (1982) social interactionist framework, the study employs selected participants' paraethnographic and auto‐ethnographic reflections of their project experiences and practices after the event in order to trace the everyday workings of mutual assumptions and constructions of a national self and other for all sides involved. In this, it explores how the project participants' asymmetric positioning within a wider, global context of unequal power relations shaped their vernacular epistemologies of belonging and identity. It thereby excavated what otherwise taken‐for‐granted criteria can become relevant in such local/international social encounters as reflected upon and how the enduring power imbalances underpinning these might best be redressed.     

Kinned to be Norwegian: transnational adoptees' positioning in relation to whiteness and the negotiation of nationhood

Embedded in ongoing discussions on everyday nationhood in the context of migration‐related diversity, this article explores how Norwegian transnational adoptees, as border subjects, negotiate their national belonging and identities by positioning themselves in relation to whiteness. By doing so, it further explores the relationship between race and nation. The analysis demonstrates that transnational adoptees position themselves as white when encountering the norm of whiteness, which the author argues in favour of understanding as continued process of doing race. While phenotypic differences trigger a process of racialisation through which transnational adoptees can easily be placed in a minoritised position, adoption provides them with unique access to whiteness, mostly along the negotiable and intertwined dimensions of kinship and the notion of ‘origin’, referred to as the place where they grew up. The article argues that individuals' positioning along majoritisation/minoritisation processes is another important dimension to understand one's multiple and fluid national identity and belonging in migration‐related diversity. The analysis also furthers the discussions on hierarchy of belonging by highlighting the relevance of kinship in intersection with race.     

‘Living Liminality’: everyday experiences of asylum seekers in the ‘Direct Provision’ system in Ireland

Mechanisms to exclude people seen as ‘other’ which were once considered exceptional have now become normal. Global patterns of increased state security lead to people on the move or seeking protection being detained, dispersed and deported, their lives treated as ‘waste’ or ‘reject’. The Irish ‘Direct Provision’ system is part of an increasing network of liminal, or threshold, spaces, situated between and within borders, in which such people are detained or forced to wait in often inhumane conditions and often for years at a time. Based on ethnographic participatory photographic research, this article explores the ways in which imposed liminality plays out in people’s everyday lives in ‘Direct Provision’. The article looks at how liminality is lived in spatial and temporal terms and develops the idea of ‘ontological liminality’, a means of expressing the ways in which a chronic sense of fear, insecurity, invisibility and a highly controlled existence are lived and internalized; it also shows the ways in which people negotiate this imposed liminality through everyday practices, creating various forms of attachment, engagement and belonging. Exploring the concept of liminality in this context holds broader implications not only for understanding experiences of people waiting or held in the increasing number of refugee camps, border zones and detention centres in and beyond Europe, but also provides insight into the architectures of exclusion created by states to contain or exclude the ‘other’.     

Banal and everyday (inter)nationalism: French and Italian anarchist exiles in London, 1870s–1914

This article explores the anarchists' multilayered theoretical and practical engagement with the concepts and performance of nations, nationalism and national belonging, by applying the frameworks of banal nationalism (understood as an ideology) and everyday nationhood (the daily practices in which nation and nationhood are enacted) as analytical categories, to investigate the Italian and French anarchist exile groups in London between 1870 and 1914. Adopting these theoretical categories proves fruitful in probing the anarchists' perception and enactment of the idea of nation and national belonging, contributing to the literature on the relationship between pre-1914 socialist movements and (inter)nationalism and highlighting the specificity of anarchism therein. Using Fox and Miller-Idriss's four categories of everyday nationhood, we show that while the anarchists explicitly subverted the everyday performance of nationhood, redeploying it along internationalist lines, some forms of attachment to the national did endure and were in fact not always contradictory with anarchist internationalism. Looking at the exilic rituals of this intensely diasporic group thus complicates the simplistic but still pervasive view of a monolithic ideological internationalism and rejection of the national on the part of anarchists.     

Securing disunion: Young people's nationalism,identities and (in)securities in the campaign for an independent Scotland

This paper explores ethnic and religious minority youth perspectives of security and nationalism in Scotland during the independence campaign in 2014. We discuss how young people co-construct narratives of Scottish nationalism alongside minority ethnic and faith identities in order to feel secure. By critically combining literature from feminist geopolitics, international relations (IR) and children's emotional geographies, we employ the concept of ‘ontological security’. The paper departs from state-centric approaches to security to explore the relational entanglements between geopolitical discourses and the ontological security of young people living through a moment of political change. We examine how everyday encounters with difference can reflect broader geopolitical narratives of security and insecurity, which subsequently trouble notions of ‘multicultural nationalism’ in Scotland and demonstrate ways that youth ‘securitize the self’ (Kinnvall, 2004). The paper responds to calls for empirical analyses of youth perspectives on nationalism and security (Benwell, 2016) and on the nexus between security and emotional subjectivity in critical geopolitics (Pain, 2009, Shaw et al., 2014). Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), this paper draws on focus group and interview data from 382 ethnic and religious minority young people in Scotland collected over the 12-month period of the campaign.     

Connecting ontological (in)securities and generation through the everyday and emotional geopolitics of Falkland Islanders*

Abstract

Debates about the security of British Overseas Territories (OTs) like the Falkland Islands are typically framed through the discourses of formal and practical geopolitics in ways that overlook the perspectives of their citizens. This paper focuses on the voices of two generations of citizens from the Falkland Islands, born before and after the 1982 war, to show how they perceive geopolitics and (in)security in different ways. It uses these empirical insights to show how theorisations of ontological (in)security might become more sensitive to the lived experiences of diverse generational groups within states and OTs like the Falklands. The paper reflects on the complex experiences of citizens living in a postcolonial OT that still relies heavily on the UK Government and electorate for assurances of security, in the face of diplomatic pressure from Argentina. While Islander youth reflected on how their views about geopolitics and security might be considered marginal, relative to those who directly experienced geopolitical events in the Falklands during the second half of the twentieth century, the paper illustrates the multiple ways they can act as agents of (in)security.     

Repertoires of national boundaries in France and Germany—within‐country cleavages and their political consequences

This article analyses how members of the majority population in France and Germany define membership in the nation and how they relate to the various civic, cultural, or ethnic visions of national belonging available in the cultural repertoires of historical models, institutional arrangements, and elite discourses. To scrutinize within‐country differences in the configurations of the symbolic boundaries of national belonging, this article applies cluster analysis techniques for each country separately using data from the International Social Survey Program (ISSP). Overall, the results suggest that people choose and arrange different criteria from cultural repertoires, resulting in various configurations of national boundaries. Furthermore, the number and types of symbolic boundaries used are decisive for explaining restrictive and hostile attitudes towards immigrants. Contrary to the civic and ethnic historical models, the national boundary configurations display very similar patterns across the two countries, especially attesting to the considerable process of liberalization of citizenship regulations in Germany.     

Constructing subjective spiritual geographies in everyday mobilities: the practice of prayer and meditation in corporeal travel

This paper contributes to contemporary geographies of religion by exploring how everyday spaces of mobility and flows can be transformed through specific practices such as prayer and meditation that contribute to personal spirituality. The work challenges traditionally held assumptions that sacred space or codified religious spaces requires stillness and calmness by drawing on the New Mobilities Paradigm to explore how spiritual practices are conducted within the flows and movement that characterise contemporary everyday life. Using questionnaires and diary-interview methods, everyday journeys of participants captured how prayer, meditation and encounters with others and the environment facilitated by movement can transform and be transformed by mobility and the mode of travel. Participant’s accounts of their everyday mundane journeys reveal personalised associations of the everyday spaces that they travel through and the different routines they enact on a daily basis that incorporate religious objects, practices or ideas. These journeys and time-spaces form what I term a ‘subjective spiritual geography’, a network of the interrelated time-spaces threaded together by the individual’s schedule and routine that create, maintain and reinforce personal and informal religious meaning in everyday life.     

Young people’s everyday securities: pre-emptive and pro-active strategies towards ontological security in Scotland

Abstract

This paper uses a framework of ‘ontological security’ to discuss the psychosocial strategies of self-securitisation employed by ethnic and religious minority young people in Scotland. We argue that broad discourses of securitisation are present in the everyday risks and threats that young people encounter. In response and as resistance young people employ pre-emptive and pro-active strategies to preserve ontological security. Yet, these strategies are fraught with ambivalence and contradiction as young people withdraw from social worlds or revert to essentialist positions when negotiating complex fears and anxieties. Drawing on feminist geographies of security the paper presents a multi-scalar empirical analysis of young people’s everyday securities, connecting debates on youth and intimacy-geopolitics with the social and cultural geographies of young people, specifically work that focuses upon young people’s negotiations of racialised, gendered and religious landscapes.     

Children practising politics through spatial narratives

The aim is to study children’s politics by exploring how children relate to and rework positions and identities offered to them and others in a residential narrative of ‘Swedes’ and ‘immigrants’. Children’s politics is defined as children practising politics when negotiating and challenging positions and defending identities. The results are based on a reanalysis of two studies. The results show that participating children use the narrative, and to it connected stories about neighbourhoods, to position themselves and to negotiate exclusion, inclusion, identity and belonging. In relation to this they deal with political issues connected to national and global discourses that blame the category of ‘immigrants’ for being the cause of local and national problems. They also reflect on the positions and identities offered in the narrative and use tactics to manage the positions and their consequences. From this point of view, the children practise politics in their everyday lives.     

At home in the city: everyday practices and distinction in international student mobility

International students have been overlooked in geographies of ‘home’, yet this paper demonstrates how international student mobility offers unique insights that can advance our understanding of ‘home’ and belonging in the city. Drawing on photo-elicitation and mid-point and return interviews with Canadian students, this paper explores the everyday home-making practices of exchange students in urban centres in the Global South. It focuses on the ways in which international students create a sense of ‘home’ and belonging in their host city and how insider knowledge gained through local everyday practices is converted into cultural capital. It contributes to the literature by considering how home-making practices are implicated in spatial and scalar boundary-making processes for distinction. By illustrating through participants’ photographs how students articulate ‘home’ using spatial and scalar markers, I examine how students tighten the spatial boundaries of ‘home’ to focalise and localise symbolic capital within the city. The findings further add to debates on im/mobility by demonstrating that students’ distinguish their relative immobility during the sojourn from the mobility of travellers and tourists to legitimise claims of belonging as ‘insiders’ and of place-specific capital. The paper then concludes by considering how students are ‘collecting homes’ for distinction.     

‘We want to be there for everyone’: imagined spaces of encounter and the politics of place in a super-diverse neighbourhood

In the context of increasingly diverse urban populations in European cities, neighbourhood organizations are often seen as offering spaces of encounter that can foster a sense of belonging. As a result, they have formed an important element in urban policies on community identity and social cohesion. Yet everyday encounters in such micro-publics may not necessarily be experienced as positive, and these spaces themselves might become sites of contestation and exclusion. Through an ethnographic study in a super-diverse neighbourhood in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, this paper investigates how residents’ sense of belonging to the neighbourhood is informed by competing claims on a neighbourhood centre. Although envisioned as a collective space, contestations between different groups of residents over the centre as a functional and meaningful place illustrate how governing institutions shape informal politics of place through their own vision for the neighbourhood and their selective support of some initiatives over others.     

Welshness in ‘British Wales’: negotiating national identity at the margins

Popular interpretations of national identity often focus on the unifying qualities of nationhood. However, societies frequently draw hierarchical distinctions between the people and places who are ‘most national’, and those who are ‘least national’. Little attention is paid to these marginal places within the nation and the experiences of their inhabitants. This article helps to address this by analysing the ‘less Welsh’ British Wales region of Wales, a country that has traditionally possessed a hierarchical, regionally constituted nationhood. The article studies the British Wales region both ‘from above’ – considering how some areas develop as ‘less national’ – and ‘from below’, introducing empirical ethnographic work into ‘everyday Welshness’ in this area. Whilst previous work on hierarchical nationhood focuses on how hierarchies are institutionalized by the state, this article demonstrates how people at the margins of the nation actively negotiate their place in the nation. Whilst people in this area expressed a strong Welshness, they also struggled to place themselves in the nation because they had internalized their lowly place within the national hierarchy. The article demonstrates the importance of place and social class for national identity construction and draws attention to the role of power in the discursive construction of hierarchical nationhood.     

Co-becoming with angophora: performing more-than-human belongings in Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park

Belonging in Australian national parks has long been associated with universal ideas of nativeness or naturalness. However, these delineations have been critiqued as rooted in western, dualistic understandings of nature and culture that do not allow for other ways of conceptualising the world or for the agency of nonhumans. This paper argues for reconceptualising belonging as an ontological co-becoming where multiple contingent belongings co-emerge with bodies, worlds and place. To show how belonging co-becomes, I examine human–tree relations surrounding a special and sacred tree in Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park, Australia, the Angophora costata. I tell three stories that shed light on the multiple ways performances of belonging are entangled with histories, stories, spirits, and present and absent humans and nonhumans. In doing so, I show how belonging is a more-than-human practice where ideas of native and natural are questioned.     

Who you gonna call? Theorising everyday security practices in urban spaces with multiple security actors – The case of Beirut's Southern Suburbs

Who do urban residents turn to in everyday security incidents? Why do some go to the police in certain locations, others to armed nonstate actors or kinship networks? We explore the ways in which residents and security actors – state and nonstate – negotiate everyday (in)security in contested urban spaces with multiple security actors. We consider how hybrid security assemblages are shaped by physical and social space and how everyday security practices shape space. We use Beirut's Southern Suburbs (Dahiyeh) as a site of theorisation, bringing local vernacular experiences into dialogue with Bourdieu's concepts of capital, habitus, doxa and field to develop a spatially dynamic analytical framework. Using this framework, we map security actors' different types and sizes of capital and how this capital is affected by residents' habitus and doxa within the everyday security field. We introduce the notion of ‘translocal habitus’ to capture the impact of families' origins outside Dahiyeh on everyday security dynamics. The framework we develop contributes to the spatialisation, vernacularisation and pluralisation of everyday security studies, furthers the spatialisation of Bourdieu and adds to the literature on hybrid forms of governance. Our analysis is based on extensive fieldwork, including over 150 interviews and ‘street chats’ with residents and security actors in and around Dahiyeh.     

The art of nationalism: Artists' perspectives on the Latvian Centenary film programme

In the aftermath of several decades of neoliberalism in Eastern Europe, the social fabric of post-socialist societies is frayed. In this context, nationalist cultural policies and everyday displays of national belonging have emerged as key instruments of social solidarity. There has recently been a drive of state initiatives in Latvia in the field of cultural policy aimed at strengthening national identity. In this paper, we focus our attention on one particular cultural policy initiative, Latvian Films for Latvian Centenary. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 16 film directors who participated in the Centenary film programme, the paper explores how artists and cultural operators involved in this programme are mobilised as national(ist) subjects and how they see their work within such a framework. We argue that nationalist cultural policy can be successfully implemented because the artists, themselves formed as responsible political and moral subjects in the tradition of Latvian cultural nationalism, share a regard for culture and the arts as a resource for sustaining the political statehood and the national community. However, the artists also recognise the limitations of their work as a source of social cohesion and solidarity in a society that is ethnically divided.     

Norwegian national day oratory: constructing and reconstructing a national we

National day speeches play an explicit part in defining national identities. In this article, we examine how mayors in Norwegian municipalities reflect on Norway's increased diversity in their 17 May speeches. National day speeches in Norway are supposed to focus on unity, not conflict. Yet, what have they become in the context of diversity? In applying theoretical perspectives on nations, rituals and language to data consisting of a selection of speeches, our analysis identifies themes that structure a typical 17 May speech. We explore the use of plural pronouns in the speeches and how they make Norwegian national identity more or less accessible for people with minority backgrounds. By including ethnic minorities in national day rhetoric, the speakers negotiate who belongs in the Norwegian community in a less directly political way than in everyday life. Yet, whilst the genre is celebratory, the national day speeches also echo different political attitudes towards diversity and integration.     

‘God was with me everywhere’: women’s embodied practices and everyday experiences of sacred space in Czechia

In this paper, we approach religion and spirituality through the analytic lens of the everyday and examine how ordinary women make sacred space through their embodied, emotional, and spatially varying practices. Our research is grounded in Czechia where about 80% of inhabitants do not declare any religious affiliation and ‘new’ religions are on the rise. We deploy auto-photography as a method that invites participants’ own visual representations and interpretative narrations of their quotidian experiences. Thirty-eight Christian, Buddhist, and non-religious women participated in this study in 2016. Our analysis of photographs and interviews shows that our participants turn places that are not primarily associated with religion or spirituality (such as a kitchen sink or a bus stop) into sacred or spiritual places while at the same time integrate officially sacred spaces (such as churches and meditation centers) into their daily lives through social activities. Thus, we argue that a mutually transformative process is taking place in contemporary Czechia. In this process, religiously affiliated and non-affiliated women alike transform everyday spaces into sacred sites through their embodied and emotional practices that seek calmness, peace, and transcendence. At the same time, women who participate in organized religions remake the sacrality of officially sacred sites through their emphasis on social connections and feelings of communal belonging and shared identity. Our findings underscore that sacred space is not fixed in any one location and its production involves the continual emotional and material investment by ordinary women.