Everyday Affordances of Nationalism

How the everyday shaped, negotiated, legitimized, and challenged nationalisms of the 20th century?

To historicize nationalism effectively requires not only its examination in the context of belligerence, but also a focus on unseen and unacknowledged nationalisms, national feelings, and their impacts. The researchers in the “Everyday Affordances of Nationalism” subproject develop a historically grounded and materially oriented approach that emphasizes how national meanings were afforded and contested in people’s encounters with institutions, practices and spaces of welfare, care, childhood and consumer culture.

By examining these sites, the project aims to show how nationalism was not only lived but also experienced, re-evaluated and, at times, resisted across the life course and between generations. This question is approached by combining historical analysis with the analytical concept of affordance and the theories of everyday nationalism. The theoretical lens of everyday affordances of nationalism, and the empirical sites of welfare, care, childhood and consumerism, also enable analyzing the episodic, fluctuating, and asymmetrical nature of nationalism.

The researchers in the “Everyday Affordances of Nationalism” project, working in Tampere University, are Dr. Antti Malinen, Dr. Stephanie Olsen and Dr. Sami Suodenjoki. The project’s PI is professor Tanja Vahtikari.