Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Although the presence of language in the construction of nationalist ideology and national identity is explicitly acknowledged in the literature on nationalism, the mechanisms by which language and language politics influence nationalism are often margina

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Although the role of language in the construction of nationalist ideology and national identity is explicitly acknowledged in the literature on nationalism, the mechanisms by which language and language politics influence nationalism are often marginalized in the broader literature on comparative politics. In the Middle East/ North Africa region, a unique state of linguistic diglossia exists. Although Classical Arabic has been touted as the unifying language of the MENA region, it is no one’s native language, and the very nation that it purports to represent is fraught with political and cultural tensions. What then, is the role of the actual native languages (demotic Arabics) in the construction of national identity within MENA states? This paper examines this question through a detailed examination of the existing literature on language politics and national identity, arguing that three main factors can help us to determine the role of language in the construction of national identity: educational policy, print media, and the rhetoric of political leaders. An empirical case study (Egypt) evaluates these factors through an examination of demotic (Egyptian) Arabic in the construction of Egyptian nationalism and national identity.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: In this paper, I examine how nationhood is reproduced in and through the students’ everyday social relations. First, I demonstrate how a nationally demarcated university system patterns the students’ social relations along national lines. The students choose their friends not because they share the same nationality, but because they are there. These institutions make nationhood a parameter – not a criterion – of their friendship choices. Second, I examine how the students’ social relations are simultaneously reproduced through the interactional practices in which they routinely engage. Through language choices, discursive practices, and embodied stances, the students communicate, constitute, and reproduce nationhood as a relevant feature of their day-to-day interactions. Institutions provide national paths along which the students’ social relations take shape, and interactional practices make nationhood a salient feature of those relations. The students come to the university to pursue diverse objectives, but they leave as Romanians and Hungarians.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In contrast to predictions about likelihood of a new era of post-nationalism and cosmopolitan citizenship, the patterns of post-communist globalization and de-colonization have produced more rather than less ethnic, political, and religious conflict. Thus globalization processes are not just homogenizing and supranational, they also increase differences and the importance of local frameworks. Considering this ambivalence of the globalization process, a theoretical framework that links various aspects of globalization to forms of fragmentation within nation-states will be developed. Then this framework will be applied in case studies of the United Kingdom and the Turkish Republic.