From mood to movement: English nationalism,the European Union and taking back control†

This article considers whether the 2016 EU referendum can be perceived as an English nationalist movement. Specifically, attention is given to examining how memories of the former British Empire were nostalgically enveloped in anxieties regarding England’s location within the devolved UK state. The comments and work of Enoch Powell and George Orwell are used to help explore the link between nostalgia and anxiety in accounts of English nationalism. Despite their opposing political orientations, when considered together, it is argued that both men provide a unique cross-political perspective on Englishness, empire and nostalgia. By way of exploring these themes in relation to the EU referendum, Aughey’s assertion that English nationalism can be perceived as both a “mood” and “movement” is used to highlight how a sense of English anxiety regarding its lack of national sovereignty (mood), as well as a desire to reclaim this sovereignty by renegotiating trade relations with the “Anglo-sphere” (movement), were conjoined in the popular referendum slogan, “take back control”. In conclusion, it is argued that the contextualization of the referendum can be predicated upon an orientation to empire that steers away from glorifying pro-imperial images of England/Britain, towards a more positive and progressive appropriation of the EU referendum as a statement of national change and belonging.     

Competing Sovereignties,Contested Processes: Insights from the Venezuelan Food Sovereignty Experiment

Abstract

This article explores how ‘competing sovereignties’ are shaping the political construction of food sovereignty—broadly defined as ‘the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems'. This study was motivated by a lack of clarity on the ‘sovereignty’ of food sovereignty, as noted by numerous scholars—sovereignty for whom, and how? As there is a growing consensus that there are in fact ‘multiple sovereignties’ of food sovereignty that cut across jurisdictions and scales, there is the question of how these sovereignties are competing with each other in the attempted construction of food sovereignty. This question is becoming ever more relevant as food sovereignty is increasingly adopted into state policy at various levels, calling for state and societal actors to redefine their terms of engagement. This article explores questions of ‘competing sovereignties’ by developing an analytical framework, using the lenses of scale, geography, and institutions, and applying it to Venezuela, where for the past 15 years a food sovereignty experiment has been underway in the context of a dynamic shift in state–society relations.     

Fashioning Futures: Life Coaching and the Self‐Made Identity Paradox

Contemporary processes of individualization push people to construct single‐handedly their own identities. This urge runs counter to a fundament of sociology, which proposes that identities are social products that must be validated through social relations. Based on participant observation and in‐depth interviews with life coaches and their clients, I investigate life coaching as a social institution that aims to resolve the paradoxical nature of the desire for self‐creation. Locating life coaching in the larger identity‐fashioning market, this article illustrates how the artificial nature of outsourced social relations reconciles two apparently contradictory desires: the “need for help” and “wanting to find it on my own.” Three mechanisms are involved: creating an independent social space where identities can be crafted away from significant others; deliberately deemphasizing the coach and intentionally underwriting personal authorship; and encouraging clients to root identities in the social world while promoting an instrumental view of sociality. The article discusses the blurring of boundaries between intimate social relations and utilitarian market logic, and the implications of the ongoing outsourcing of identity support that reinforces the privileged ideal of self‐made identities.     

Transnationalizing the ‘Asian’ family: imaginaries,intimacies and strategic intents

Abstract In this introductory article, we emphasize the significance of considering the politics and practices of transnationalism as they impinge on the social morphology of transnational ‘Asian’ families. Three strands of work in this arena are discussed. First, transnational families draw on ideologically laden imaginaries to give coherence to notions of belonging despite the physical dispersal of their members; these imaginaries may in turn act as a conservative force exerting control over particular female members, an increasing salient issue given the feminization of various streams of labour migration. Second, transnational families are also realized through lived experiences, where variants and degrees of intimacy are negotiated across transnational spaces with both ‘regular’ members and ‘irregular’ others. In the process, social identities may be reinforced or reconfigured. Third, families may assume transnational morphologies with the strategic intent of ensuring economic survival or maximizing social mobility. In this context, children's education has emerged as a particularly important project which provides strong impetus for families to go transnational.     

Dual citizenship or dual identity? Does ‘transnationalism’ supplant ‘nationalism’ among returning Trinidadians?

In this article we focus on the dual identities of relatively young Trinidadians who have decided to return to the island of their birth, or of their parents, while still in their thirties and forties. Highly‐educated professional transnational migrants mostly make up our sample of 36; 26 possess dual citizenship. We focus on our informants’ narratives about their transnational experiences, self‐appraisals of their dual identities and how they value dual citizenship. More generally, we ask, does transnationalism supplant nationalism among our returning informants? Unsurprisingly, the diverse responses we document do not support the commonly held explanatory relationship between return adaptations, ‘national belonging’ and the expected dominance of ‘transnational belonging’. Family relations intervene significantly, both to encourage transnationalism and to strengthen nationalism. Feelings of national belonging often accompany transnationalism. Notably, we view dual citizenship strategically and pragmatically as advantageous to the continuation of transnational practices.     

Extra-activism: counter-mapping and data justice

ABSTRACT

Neither big data, nor data justice are particularly new. Data collection, in the form of land surveys and mapping, was key to successive projects of European imperialist and then capitalist extraction of natural resources. Geo-spatial instruments have been used since the fifteenth century to highlight potential sites of mineral, oil, and gas extraction, and inscribe European economic, cultural and political control across indigenous territories. Although indigenous groups consistently challenged maintained their territorial sovereignty, and resisted corporate and state surveillance practices, they were largely unable to withstand the combined onslaught of surveyors, armed personnel, missionaries and government bureaucrats. This article examines the use of counter-mapping by indigenous nations in Canada, one of the globe’s hubs of extractivism, as part of the exercise of indigenous territorial sovereignty. After a brief review of the colonial period, I then compare the use of counter-mapping during two cycles of indigenous mobilization. During the 1970s, counter-mapping projects were part of a larger repertoire of negotiations with the state over land claims, and served to re-inscribe first nation’s long-standing history of economic, social and cultural relations in their territories, and contribute to new collective imaginaries and identities. In the current cycle of contests over extractivism and indigenous sovereignty, the use, scope and geographic scale of counter-mapping has shifted; maps are used as part of larger trans-media campaigns of Indigenous sovereignty. During both cycles, counter-mapping as data justice required fusion within larger projects of redistributive, transformative and restorative justice.     

NGOs’ transnational advocacy networks: from ‘legitimacy’ to ‘political responsibility’?

NGOs that operate as part of transnational advocacy networks face a number of ‘legitimacy challenges’ concerning their rights to participate in the shaping of global governance. Outlining the legitimacy claims that development NGOs make, the article argues that ‘legitimacy’ is a socially constructed quality that may be ascribed to an NGO by actors and stakeholders with different viewpoints. NGOs operating transnationally link disparate communities and conceptions of legitimacy, and undermine the discourse and practice of sovereignty. Therefore such NGOs will find it difficult to be universally regarded as legitimate, especially by states that hold a sovereignty‐based conception of legitimacy. However, relationships are the building blocks of networks, and efforts to improve them should not be abandoned simply because ‘legitimacy’ is too closely connected with sovereignty. In particular, NGOs ought to improve their relationships with the poor and marginalized communities whose interests they claim to promote. To this end, the concept of ‘political responsibility’ is suggested as a pragmatic approach to understanding power relations as they arise in transnational advocacy networks and campaigns.     

Gender relations,transnational ties and rituals among Bosnian refugees

In this article I show how Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) refugees reproduce, contest and construct their ethnic and religious identities. Using ‘ritual’ in a broad sense to refer to everyday routinized activities and practices that characterize family hierarchies and gender relations, as well as more easily identifiable religious rituals, I show that rituals assert belonging to a community and an identity, but are also, in the process of construction and contestation, selectively evoked and ignored. ‘The Other’ constructed through certain rituals is not merely the non–Muslim Bosnian (Serbs and Croats), but also, for refugees, other Bosnian Muslims who stayed behind. Moreover, engagement in secular and religious rituals, and the wider issue of identity constructions cannot be understood fully without exploring the dynamics between refugees and people who have remained in Bosnia. Competing constituencies claiming ‘Bosnianness’ and ‘Muslimness’ can be found across national boundaries and complicate the attempt to construct a community of believers or nationals, or both.     

Building 'Europe': Culture, History and Politics

This article explores historically grounded connections between cultural and political identities, and how they persist in contemporary Europe within its multilateral or 'supranational' frameworks. It argues that nations remain the starting point (and for many the end point) for conceptions of belonging and of political legitimacy. While economic prosperity is an essential ingredient, the European project cannot be built or sustained by perceived common economic interests alone. In recent years this has been realised by élites in favour of integration and has resulted in an increased concentration on the cultural dimension. Creating and psychologically implanting a formula which activates a resolute belief in a 'common cultural heritage' has proven difficult however. By comparison historiographic influences and contemporary social referents are still overwhelmingly national in character.     

What was Bitcoin,what will it be? The techno-economic imaginaries of a new money technology

In its first decade, Bitcoin has not proven to be a practical money form for most circumstances, but it has become a staging ground for debate around the cultural role of money in society. This debate is poised between two related but ultimately incompatible techno-economic imaginaries: infrastructural mutualism and digital metallism. Each offers a theory not just of money, but also of relations, identities, and the larger imaginaries we call ‘society’ and ‘the economy’. In particular, they offer distinct visions of what it means to be a ‘peer’ in a peer-to-peer money system, and perhaps, a peer-to-peer society. This article traces the pre-history of Bitcoin, as well as more recent developments, to inquire about its future, as well as the future of money more broadly.     

Lives in limbo: Temporary Protected Status and immigrant identities

The United States formulates much of its immigration and refugee policy to match economic and political circumstances. We interpret these policy shifts as a set of graduated positions on immigration and refugee flows that attempts to discipline the lives of newcomers and, in so doing, shapes immigrant identities. In this article, we analyse the interplay between the US government and Salvadoran asylum applicants negotiating procedures that grant only temporary relief from deportation via the policy of Temporary Protected Status (TPS). We find that each policy shift results in the strategic renegotiation of asylum applicants’ identities so as to achieve the best opportunity for a successful outcome. Based on Foucault’s ideas of governmentality and Ong’s concept of flexible citizenship, we argue that what appears more superficially as a patchwork strategy of immigration laws and asylum practices may be theorized more deeply as a set of flexible responses by the state that turn on identity construction at different scales, and that aim to mediate transnational relations.     

Making a place in Footscray: everyday multiculturalism,ethnic hubs and segmented geography

In this article, we explore through analyses of interviews the meanings and experiences of everyday multiculturalism in a suburb in Melbourne, Australia. The people we interviewed valued and experienced diversity in different, yet interrelated ways: as an experience of multiculturalism, as providing comfort in diversity and as embodied in ethnic hubs in a segmented geography. Everyday racism can make forging belonging and connections across diverse ethnic groups difficult. Yet, Footscray is constructed as a place in which diversity is regarded as normative and protective. Our focus on a local suburb has allowed us to develop insight into the diverse ways identities are constituted through multiple understandings and experiences of diversity.     

Popular Culture,Social Identities,and Internal/External Cultural Politics: The Case of Rangers Supporters in Scottish Football

The article examines the construction of critical, resistant identities among supporters of the powerful Scottish football club, Rangers. The analysis is underpinned by two general arguments relating to identity construction: (1) the need to examine carefully the cultural politics of relatively advantaged groups within the field of popular culture and (2) the need to explore how forms of cultural resistance and contestation are focused particularly on relations within the popular culture, rather than on forms of determination by the wider societal order. The article draws heavily on substantial fieldwork with Rangers supporters in the UK and overseas. The findings highlight the complex and contingent relationships between popular culture and broader societal forces, as illustrated by the diverging arguments of Rangers fans on the legitimacy of ethno-religious and market-focused identities within football.     

Making Sense of a Transnational Merger: Media Texts and the (Re)construction of Power Relations

In this study of symbolic power relations in a transnational merger, we suggest that the popular media can provide a significant arena for (re)constructing national identities and power in this kind of dramatic industrial restructuring, and are an under-utilized source of empirical data in research studies. Focusing on the press coverage of a recent Swedish-Finnish merger, we specify and illustrate a particular feature of discursive (re)construction of asymmetric power relations; superior (Swedish) and inferior (Finnish) national identities, which, we argue, are embedded in the history of colonization and domination between the two nations. The findings of the present study lead us to suggest that a lens taken from post-colonial theory is particularly useful in understanding the wider symbolic power implications of international industrial restructuring.     

Translating the Politics of Food Sovereignty: Digging into Contradictions,Uncovering New Dimensions

Abstract

Food sovereignty, as a movement and a set of ideas, is coming of age. Rooted in resistance to free trade and the globalizing force of neoliberalism, the concept has inspired collective action across the world. We examine what has changed since food sovereignty first emerged on the international scene and reflect on insight from new terrain where the movement has expanded. We argue that to advance the theory and practice of food sovereignty, new frameworks and analytical methods are needed to move beyond binaries—between urban and rural, gender equality and the family farm, trade and localism, and autonomy and engagement with the state. A research agenda in food sovereignty must not shy away from the rising contradictions in and challenges to the movement. The places of seeming contradiction may in fact be where the greatest insights are to be found. We suggest that by taking a relational perspective, scholars can begin to draw insight into the challenges and sticking points of food sovereignty by training their lens on shifts in the global food regime, on the efforts to construct sovereignty at multiple scales, and on the points of translation where food sovereignty is articulated through historical memory, identity, and everyday life.     

Body Exchanges: Material Culture,Gender and Stereotypes in the Making

In the line of recent works on the relationship between body and gender, this article examines the bodily investment of gender construction. Grounded in an ethnographic fieldwork, it focuses on the ways in which gender relations in North America are constructed through the manipulation of objects, via body exchanges. It shows that physicality cannot simply be taken as a given on which genders are imposed. It is used to maintain sexual differences in a normative fashion. In attempting to understand this economy of body exchanges, this article calls for a broadening of our understanding of gender stereotypes. In doing this, it challenges the idea that changes of consciousness may not have reached the level of practices. It reveals instead that people are not fooled. They may even engage into these relations with a certain degree of irony.     

Reconciling commodities and personal relations in industrial society

Conclusions I began this article with Colin Campbell's lament about the productionist bias in sociology and the related point that most sociologists concerned with consumption have ignored private meanings and small-scale structures in favor of public meanings and large-scale structures. This article calls attention to and builds on an emerging alternative approach to what happens after production, using an understanding of the social nature of objects that springs from Marcel Mauss's distinction between gifts and commodities.Mauss's model directs attention to the conflict in industrial societies between the two realms of commodity exchange and gift exchange, which I have cast as the conflict between the world of work and the world of family, and as the contrast between commodities and possessions. Thus, the model directs attention to the fact that objects are not simply transformed in production and displayed in consumption. However important these facts may be for understanding objects and society, they do not exhaust the important ways that people experience, use, and think about the objects that surround them. In particular, Mauss's model throws into relief the problematic nature of the objects that surround us and that we use in our social relations. And in doing so it directs attention to the ways that people try to reconstruct and redefine those objects by transforming them into personal possessions. This transformation makes objects acquired as commodities suitable for gift transactions, and hence suitable for the key task of recreating social relationships and social identities, the task of creating, not merely defining, who we are and how we are related to each other.Although the Maussian model addresses many of the links between people in the worlds of work and the home, and many of the ways that objects are part of these links, I am concerned here primarily with the ways that people can appropriate commodities in the process of purchase: shopping. This concern with shopping points out the social significance of retail trade, which I take to include advertising and shopping. This is not simply a passive conduit between production and consumption. Instead, it is an important point at which objects begin to leave the realm of work, commodities, and commodity relations and enter the realm of home, possessions, and gift relations. Shopping is an ubiquitous activity in industrial society and one that is highly significant culturally: we spend vast amounts of time, energy, money, and attention on it. Doubtless part of the reason for this is utilitarian, for we need to buy to live, but it would be foolish to reduce the significance of shopping to some combination of the need of individuals to acquire in order to survive and the need of companies to generate demand in order to profit. Thus, retail trade needs to be seen as well as a set of relations and transactions between seller and buyer that define and are defined by the objects and services involved, their history, and their future. My focus on purchasing food in supermarkets has the advantage of throwing into relief the problem of appropriation, because of the impersonality of object and social relations in large, self-service supermarkets. However, the very extremity of this example can create a false impression. As I noted, in other forms of shopping the social relations between buyer and seller, like the social identity of objects, can be more personal. This personality can be real, as when buyer and seller know each other or where the object is hand-made or even unique. Alternatively, it can be more purely symbolic, as when the selling company touts itself or its employees as friendly and caring or where the manufacturer advertises the personal nature of its commodities. In some cases, indeed, the manufacturing or trading company can present itself in such a way that the company itself becomes the person with whom the purchaser transacts. In addition, because of the focus on the appropriation of commodities in purchasing, I have touched only briefly on production and the world of work more generally. As does life at home, so life at work involves the transaction of objects and labor. Relations at work, then, will shape and be shaped by the nature of what is transacted. Co-workers who transact things that are more clearly stamped with their own identity, as among service workers and craft producers, will likely have more personal relations with fellow workers than will those who transact things that are themselves relatively impersonal, as in assembly-line production. This variability in the objects and relations at work suggests that people will have diverse understandings of work, and hence of manufactured objects more generally, which will affect the need they feel to appropriate commodities. In all, though, the point of this article is simple. People use objects to create and recreate personal social identities and relationships, and in industrial capitalist societies these objects are likely to be produced and purchased as commodities and understood as manufactures in Miller's sense. Our experience with and understanding of the production and sale of objects will affect the way we use them in transactions that create and recreate social identity and relationship, and will affect our understanding of the social identities and relationships that are created and recreated. Thus, the objects that people use in social relationships mediate between realms of economy and society, between the public realms where those objects are produced and distributed, and the private realms where those objects are transacted as part of social reproduction. The fact of this mediation and its effects on people's understanding of objects and social relations deserve careful attention.

---

     

Class belonging: a quantitative exploration of identity and consciousness

The recent revival in interest in class subjectivity has been largely premised on class belonging as a form of identity, eschewing talk of class-consciousness. Evidence in this debate has been mostly qualitative and focused on specific social groups. This paper uses data from the 2003 British Social Attitudes Survey to map the sense of class belonging in England and to assess the strength of class belonging when placed alongside other social identities, such as gender and nationality. The paper also explores the extent to which class identity could be conceived of as class-consciousness through its links with attitudes to redistribution and workplace relations.     

Towards a Political Theory of Migrant Transnationalism

Political transnationalism covers a wide range of phenomena and can be studied using a variety of approaches. In migration research the focus is mostly on migrants' networks and activities that involve them in politics oriented towards their country of origin. The article argues for a wider conception of political transnationalism from a political theory perspective. It proposes a terminological distinction between international, multinational, supranational and transnational relations and phenomena. What is specific about migrant transnationalism is that it creates overlapping memberships between territorially separated and independent polities. In this understanding, political transnationalism is not only about a narrowly conceived set of activities through which migrants become involved in the domestic politics of their home countries; it also affects collective identities and conceptions of citizenship among the native populations in both receiving and sending societies. Within this general framework the article suggests a set of hypotheses for an explanatory and normative analysis of sending country relations to their emigrants, a task that has hitherto been neglected in political theory.     

Risk, sexuality and economy

From the mid 1980s onwards HIV/AIDS became a new subject of work reform, with a range of experts producing new knowledges on work and the worker in regard to HIV/AIDS and workplace organizations putting in place workplace HIV/AIDS policies and programmes. To date, much of the discussion in sociology in regard to such policies and programmes has focused on the issue of effectiveness and has been concerned with making such policy 'better'. In this article however, and with particular reference to sexuality, I suggest that such approaches fail to register that workplace HIV/AIDS policies concern new conceptualizations of worker identities. Specifically, I suggest that such policies may be viewed as part of an assemblage of work reforms which are reworking worker identities as risk identities. Thus I argue that workplace HIV/AIDS policies and programmes are best understood as risk rationalities. Further, I consider the alignment between such rationalities and neo-liberal modes of rule, and in particular consider the ways in which workplace HIV/AIDS policies render both HIV/AIDS and sexuality calculable and governable in terms of notions of risk, self-responsibility and self-management.