Deadline: October 30, 2019
Eurasian, European, and Political Geography Specialty Groups are excited to co-sponsor a paper session on ethnonationalism entitled “Ethnic Unmixing Remixed: Varieties of Ethnonationalisms Across Central/Eastern Europe and Eurasia.”
Taking Rogers Brubaker’s 1998 paper, “Migrations of Ethnic Unmixing in the ‘New Europe'” as a point of departure, we aim to examine the current state of ethnonationalism – in a multitude of (re)formulations – across Eurasia. Provoked by Brubaker’s definition of ethnic affinity (to a “highly prized homeland”), we are interested in deconstructing ethnonationalism at a variety of scales through diverse scholarly and pedagogical frameworks. Moreover, in the 30 years since the unraveling of the Soviet order in Eastern Europe and Eurasia, the “role of ethnonationalism in the break-up of the Soviet Union” (Cheshko 2005) remains a contentious paradigm for understanding this geopolitically and ecologically critical space.
This proposed session seeks to bring scholars and educators together to investigate who, what, why, how, and where ethnonationalism mobilizes to reproduce exclusion (racial, religious, gender, sexual, linguistic, migratory, political, resource, et al.) across a broad range of territories oriented between Central and Eastern Europe, post-Soviet spaces, and Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. We encourage contributions from diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives, including contributions which engage with feminist geographies, queer geographies, and critical and empirical approaches to categories which may entangle with ethnonational phenomena (race, religion, identity, class, economic reproduction, and so on). This session might address the following questions and topics:
• Perspectives on ethnonationalism in Eastern Europe and Eurasia in 1990 vs. 2020;
• The role of everyday, embodied affective nationalism (Militz and Schurr 2016; Antonsich and Skey 2017) and affective-discursive practices (Breeze 2018; Wetherell 2015; 2013), such as media representations of an “emotional nation” (McConville, McCreanor, Wetherell, et al. 2017);
• Paraphrasing Tara Zahra (2010), is national indifference a useful category of analysis for researchers?
• Explorations of transnational imaginaries and relationalities of regimes of mobility (Salazar and Schiller 2016) and repertoires of migration (Siegelbaum and Moch 2015), as well as diasporas and ‘beached’ minorities (Kolstø 1995);
• Border theory as well as cognitive (b)ordering and linguistic geographies of ethnicities and nationalism(s), including place names, linguistic landscapes, language policy, et cetera;
• Literacy, knowledge, learning experiences and constitutive discourses of ethnonationalism in pedagogical encounters (classrooms, textbooks, et al.) and their meanings vis-à-vis identities and embodied experiences (Erdreich and Rapoport 2002);
• Ethnoscapes (Smith 1999) as catalysts in the destruction or “recovery of memory” through public commemorative ceremonies (Zhurzhenko 2014);
• LGBTQ+ activism, sexual citizenship, and resistances to / consocialities with ethnonational politics (Buyantueva and Shevtsova 2020);
• Social/protest movements, activism, and (post)imperial and (post)Soviet reimaginings of ethnic or multiethnic spaces – via GIS, critical and historical cartography, etc. (Seegel 2014);
• (De)escalations of ethnonationalism and violence, crackdowns, ethnic cleansing, and irredentism (Holland, Witmer, and O’Loughlin 2017);
• “Dreaming the global” (Franklin 2019) in Eurasia – explorations of development, identities and imaginaries along the Silk Road and China’s Belt and Road Initiative;
• Strategies against, resistances to, and critiques of ethnonationalism, including as a theoretical/research paradigm and political practice in academic studies (Tishkov 1992);
This is envisioned as a paper session, however, given the interdisciplinary framework of this CfP and the broad geographies under consideration, a discussant may be included; I aim to be as flexible as possible. Please send your title, abstract, and PIN to james.eugene.baker@huskers.unl.edu by October 30th if you would like to be included. October 30th is the date by which all abstracts must be submitted for inclusion in the 2020 AAG Annual Meeting. As sessions must be organized by November 20th, I will follow up with you no later than this deadline.
James E. Baker
james.eugene.baker@huskers.unl.edu
Graduate Student Representative / Student Board Member, European and Eurasian Specialty Groups
Department of Geography
University of Nebraska – Lincoln
References:
Antonsich, M., & Skey, M. (2017). Affective nationalism: Issues of power, agency and method. Progress in Human Geography, 41(6), 843-845.
Breeze, R. (2019). Emotion in politics: Affective-discursive practices in UKIP and Labour. Discourse & Society, 30(1), 24-43.
Brubaker, R. (1998). Migrations of ethnic unmixing in the “New Europe”. International Migration Review, 32(4), 1047-1065.
Buyantueva, R. & M. Shevtsova (2020). LGBTQ+ Activism in Central and Eastern Europe. Palgrave Macmillan.
Cheshko, S. V. (2005). Роль этнонационализма в распаде СССР [The Role of Ethnonationalism in the Break-up of the Soviet Union]. In Трагедия Великой Державы[Tragedy of a Mighty Power], edited by G. N. Sevostyanov, 443-468.
Erdreich, L., & Rapoport, T. (2002). Elaborating ethnonational awareness via academic literacy: Palestinian Israeli women at the university.
Anthropology & education quarterly, 33(4), 492-515.
Franklin, K. 2019. Caucasia on the Silk Roads: Situating Global Cultures in Local Histories. Paper presented at Teaching the South Caucasus: A Workshop for College and University Educators, Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Holland, E. C., Witmer, F. D., & O’Loughlin, J. (2017). The decline and shifting geography of violence in Russia’s North Caucasus, 2010-2016. Eurasian Geography and Economics, 58(6), 613-641.
Kolstø, P., & Edemsky, A. (1995). Russians in the former Soviet republics. Indiana University Press.
McConville, A., McCreanor, T., Wetherell, M., & Moewaka Barnes, H. (2017). Imagining an emotional nation: the print media and Anzac Day commemorations in Aotearoa New Zealand. Media, Culture & Society, 39(1), 94-110.
Militz, E., & Schurr, C. (2016). Affective nationalism: Banalities of belonging in Azerbaijan. Political Geography, 54, 54-63.
Salazar, N. B., & Schiller, N. G. (Eds.). (2016). Regimes of mobility: Imaginaries and relationalities of power. Routledge.
Seegel, S. (2016). Geography, identity, nationality: mental maps of contested Russian–Ukrainian borderlands. Nationalities Papers, 44(3), 473-487.
Siegelbaum, L. H., & Moch, L. P. (2015). Broad Is My Native Land: Repertoires and Regimes of Migration in Russia’s Twentieth Century. Cornell University Press.
Smith, A. D. (1999). Myths and Memories of the Nation (Vol. 288). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tishkov, V.A. (1992) Inventions and Manifestations of Ethno-Nationalism in and after the Soviet Union. In: Rupesinghe K., King P., Vorkunova O. (eds). Ethnicity and Conflict in a Post-Communist World. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Wetherell, M. (2013). Affect and discourse–What’s the problem? From affect as excess to affective/discursive practice. Subjectivity, 6(4), 349-368.
Wetherell, M. (2015). Tears, Bubbles and Disappointment-New Approaches for the Analysis of Affective-Discursive Practices: A Commentary on “Researching the Psychosocial”. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 12(1), 83-90.
Zahra, T. (2010). Imagined noncommunities: National indifference as a category of analysis. Slavic Review, 69(1), 93-119.
Zhurzhenko, T. (2014). The border as pain and remedy: commemorating the Polish–Ukrainian conflict of 1918-1919 in Lviv and Przemyśl. Nationalities Papers, 42(2), 242-268.