This lecture deals with issues of globalization, nationalism, education policy and curriculum and addresses in this context farces that deserve to be analyzed in their front- and backstage of performance. Thereby, it is argued, on the front-stage nation-states participate in the international generation of allegedly comparative data while they use these data, on the backstage, as arguments for national reform in order to achieve better results than the collaborating but competing nation-states. This back-stage nationalism in the international masquerade is in itself a result of nationalist strategies embodied in the curricula that create a distinct kind of national literacy contributing to what is called Banal Nationalism, a storage of national identity and sentiment that governs national policy and that can easily be retrieved by right wing.
Contact persons: Ali Qadir, Nelli Piattoeva or Jouni Häkli
Organiser
Tampere network for global & transnational research (T-GLOBAL) and New social research (NSR) program