Minority Nationalisms

The aim of Åbo Akademi University’s subproject “Minority Nationalisms” is to explore norms, politics, and practices in relation to minority nationalisms, as well as emotions and experiences evoked by them.

Minority nationalism is a heuristic and analytical concept that helps to differentiate between the nationalist practices, experiences, and strategies of minority groups and those of majority groups, recognizing that the former operates under different conditions and with distinct aims, such as self-government or group-based national representation.

By focusing on minorities it is possible to study the interconnection between minority nationalism, majority nationalism, and national indifference, and how these play out in people’s everyday lives. The subproject connects to previous research on minority nationalism and advances it by addressing the historically contingent and contested meaning of minority nationhood.

Thematically the subproject focuses on interconnectedness, intraminority interaction and inddifference. As minority nationalism is relational to majority nationalism it is essential to study the multi-sited politics of minority-majority constellations in a context of communication and contestation from the state to the local level.  By studying processes of politicization and nationalization of previously depoliticized issues, the team studies moral economies of ethnic and nationalist claims from minority groups.

As minority nationalism nationalizes a minority from within, boundaries are not only constituted and reconfigured in relation to the majority, but also internally. We analyze boundary making and (re)categorizations both in public discourse and ego documents in relation to hierarchies of gender, class and other intersections. As Zahra (2010) among others has shown, minorities have also been indifferent to nationalist pursuits. The team studies the ways in which people imagine and/or dismiss their ties to the perceived minority nation and navigate between minority nationalism and other feelings of belonging.

Contact: PI Ann-Catrin Östman, ann-catrin.ostman@abo.fi