ABSTRACTSt Helena is a British Overseas Territory. This paper investigates how an imagined and ideological link between Britain and the island was created, maintained and eventually weakened. British citizenship was removed in 1981. Since its return in 2002, many St Helenians have migrated to the UK. Whilst an ideological sense of Britishness has weakened, a sense of lived Britishness has simultaneously occurred. Investigating the feelings, emotions and cultural values within this small migrant community, the islanders are far from deluded about their downgraded national identity and, as a community, are willing to articulate their mixed emotions.

ABSTRACTThis study examines the distinctive roles that social media play for the diasporic Kurds in regard to the political and nationhood process. It attempts to understand how the notion of Kurdayeti [Kurdish nationalism] has been affected by the growth of Kurdish social media. It argues: although the Kurdish political activism has been accelerated by the rise of social media and the ethnic identity discussions have become much more visible, the idea of a unified imagined Kurdish nation has been affected by the existing socio-political fragmentations among the Kurds and transformed into a participatory and pluralistic imagined community.

ABSTRACTIn Zimbabwe, ethnicity has long informed the ways people make sense of their membership to the nation. Sport has since the turn of the century emerged as one of the major sites for the performance of ‘patriotic’ and subversive notions of ‘unity in diversity’. This article explores the significance of nicknaming and name-calling by Highlanders Football Club fans on virtual spaces, in illuminating the ethnic threat to dominant conceptions of nation in post-2000 Zimbabwe. The study argues that as psycho-social and cultural constructs, football team nicknames reveal deeper states of ethnic attitudes which indicate the politics of complex ethnic sentiments that destabilise popular notions of belonging to a nation.

ABSTRACTThis article analyzes how the dominant narrative of Armenian national identity shapes perceptions of Armenian culture and offers examples of Ottoman Armenian craft art to bring to light an under acknowledged, yet intrinsically valuable, dynamic within Armenian cultural identity. Within studies of art history, cultural exchange between Ottoman Armenians and Turks has been ignored due to its inconvenience to the conflictual understanding of Armenian-Ottoman relations central to Armenian national identity. These artifacts speak out against reductive norms and offer an important addendum to the understanding of what it meant and continues to mean to be Armenian.

This book addresses ‘the use of national signifiers to sell products or services, and the selling of the national story for purposes such as tourism’ (p. 3). It aims to ‘demystify’ the various ways...

ABSTRACTThis study analyses the experiences of exiles within international rugby union in Britain. The emphasis is on challenging existing sociological assumptions surrounding national identity and sports labour migration. Eight international rugby exiles were invited to take part in semi-structured interviews and several themes emerged. The major findings from the study demonstrate that exiles are subject to an array of cultural attachments and personal experiences which shape their national identities. As migrants, their repositioning in relation to the nation is increasingly deemed to be the norm in rugby union. However, additional influences were also shown to persist to varying degrees.

ABSTRACTThis paper examines migration and identity in contemporary Scotland and engages with ongoing debates about the relationship between nationalism and cosmopolitanism. The paper employs Arendt’s maxim of the ‘right to have rights’ to suggest that while identity would not be the sole or specific focus of policy, more well-developed social policy attuned to the complexities of identity formation would facilitate multicultural and multi-ethnic social identification.

ABSTRACTIn the 1950s, Aotearoa New Zealand very much identified itself as a British country and an integral part of a wider British World, which had the UK at its heart. However, by the 1970s, this British World had come to an end, as had Aotearoa New Zealand’s self-identification as a British nation. During this period, citizenship in Aotearoa New Zealand was redefined in a significant way from being an ethnic (British) based one to a more civic founded one – which was more inclusive of other ethnic groups and apparently Māori. This article will argue that this redefinition of citizenship took place primarily in the context of this major shift in national identity. After having established the context of the end of the British World in Aotearoa New Zealand (with a focus on the UK’s application for entry into the European Economic Community (EEC) and the British military withdrawal from ‘East of Suez’), it will explore the British Nationality and New Zealand Citizenship Act of 1959 and the Citizenship and Aliens Act of 1977 to illustrate the ways in which citizenship became more inclusive of other ethnic groups in the country. It will then study the Māori Affairs Amendment Act of 1967 and the subsequent Māori Affairs Amendment Act of 1974 to highlight the ways in which citizenship in Aotearoa New Zealand also attempted to incorporate Māori, but this proved highly problematic and at this stage, unresolved.

"Myths in education, learning and teaching. Policies, practices and principles." National Identities, 21(1), pp. 115–116

This timely work, published by Cork University Press, offers a powerful illustration of how the 1916 Easter Rising served as the focal point for a reconstruction of Irish identit (ies) that then became crystallized on all sides and defined the decades and possibly century which followed.