Hosted by Asen

In this seminar, Dr Claire Sutherland will speak about Brexit, nationalism and the nation.

Taking the incipient Brexit nation that is the UK today as a starting point, this seminar asks; Who are we? What is this national imagined community in whose name some cry that we are full up, that we do not want foreigners and immigrants taking our jobs and diluting our traditions? Why do we take nation-states for granted as dividing individuals and thereby defining their life chances? How do we grasp, challenge or even escape the embedded, all-pervasive principle of national belonging that governs so much of peoples lives the world over? The seminar considers the central role of nations and nationalism in maintaining discursive divisions between insider and outsider, Self and Other, native and foreigner and, importantly, nationalist and patriot.It examines the feelings of home and nostalgia that permeate nationalist atmospheres, using scholarship that transcends static associations of home with homeland to focus not on settlement, but on movement as embodied by the sea, in order to take a different perspective on nations and nationalism. Finally, it imagines stepping outside ethnonational categories, using the sea to explore potential alternatives to nations as bounded communities.

Speaker: Claire Sutherland is Senior Lecturer and Deputy Head of School in the School of Government and International Affairs at Durham University. She has published on nationalism in the twenty-first century.

Chair: Iro Konstantinou (@IroKonstantinou) is completing a PhD at the University of Warwick.

The Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism (@asenevents) is a student-led, interdisciplinary association dedicated to the advancement of the study of ethnicity and nationalism.

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