Everyday Affordances of Nationalism – History of Everyday Nationalism
To historicize nationalism effectively requires not only its examination in the context of belligerence, but also a focus on unseen and self-evident nationalisms, national feelings, and their impacts. The research project examines how the everyday shaped, negotiated, legitimized, and challenged nationalisms of the 20th century. Our contribution lies in developing a historically grounded and sociomaterially oriented approach on everyday nationalism. We explore how national meanings were afforded and contested in people’s encounters with institutions, practices and spaces of welfare, care, childhood and consumer culture.
By examining these sites, the project aims to show how nationalism was lived, experienced, re-evaluated and, at times, resisted across the life course and between generations. This question is approached by combining historical analysis with the analytical concept of affordance and theories of everyday nationalism. The theoretical lens of everyday affordances of nationalism, and the empirical sites of welfare, care, childhood and consumerism, also enable analyzing the episodic, fluctuating, and asymmetrical nature of nationalism. The forms of everyday nationalism are variable and bound to the social, cultural, political and material contexts of each era. They shape and intensify in relation to exclusionary nationalisms.
“Everyday Affordances of Nationalism” project is part of the Research Council of Finland Center of Excellence in Nationalism Research in the Humanities (NARS), https://www.finlit.fi/en/research-at-the-finnish-literature-society/nars/
The first NARS conference “The Everyday in the History of Nationhood and Nationalisms” will be organized at Tampere University 12.-14.5.2027. For more information, see: https://www.tuni.fi/fi/tau/ajankohtaista/nars-conference-everyday-history-nationhood-and-nationalisms
