The Everyday in the History of Nationhood and Nationalisms
Nationalism Research in the Humanities (NARS) Research Council of Finland Centre of Excellence, Tampere University subproject, organises the first NARS Conference May 12-14, 2027 in Tampere, Finland. Please submit your proposal by 30.10.2026.
National frameworks and nationalism continue to shape our world in profound ways. NARS investigates how people’s experiences, emotions, and memories interact with various forms of nationhood and nationalism. How are nations constructed, transformed, and dismantled through human processes? What kinds of temporal continuities and ruptures can be observed here? To historicize nationalism effectively requires not only its examination in the context of belligerence, but also a focus on subtle and unacknowledged nationalisms, national feelings, and their impacts. Nationalism has not only been lived but also experienced, re-evaluated and, at times, resisted across the life course and between generations.
The First NARS Conference will examine how the everyday has shaped, negotiated, legitimized, and challenged nationalisms, and continues to do so. How have people produced and contested national meanings in different ways and in their encounters with mundane institutions, practices, spaces and objects? To what extent is the episodic, fluctuating, and asymmetrical nature of nationalism due to everyday encounters of individuals and groups with national(ist) affordances? More fundamentally, what does the “everyday” signify in everyday nationalism, and what influences its changing meanings?
This thematic focus aims to encourage scholars to reflect on the everyday beyond and in relation to overt nationalism, and to mine the more elusive and subtle spheres of the personal, the emotional, the educative and the material (including the welfare state and consumer culture). We are looking for panels and papers that consider how, when, or even if, the everyday shaped processes of experiencing, feeling and remembering the nation and contributed to changes or fluctuations in nationalisms; that is, how the everyday might influence, nurture, define, or disrupt individual and group experiences of nationalism.
This theme will provoke some important and challenging questions, for example:
- What makes up the “everyday” in the history of nationalism and how does it impact the historiography of nationalism more broadly?
- How does everyday nationalism change over time and what conditions impact the changes?
- What is the relationship between everyday nationalisms and ”hot” nationalisms, and how do these two fluctuate over time?
- How might affordances be a useful tool in understanding everyday nationalism?
- How do the arrangements of the ”everyday” enable or prevent possibilities for national belonging?
- How is everyday nationalism shaped or conditioned by ethnicity, gender, class, religion, age, or minority status?
- How is everyday nationalism linked to histories and memories of everyday racism?
- How might one experience everyday nationalism (materially, visually, physically, psychologically, emotionally, collectively, individually, institutionally – the list could go on) and what evidence can historians effectively use to capture this?
- How do situated contexts shape what is experienced and remembered (or deemed worth remembering) in the context of the nation?
- What role do the emotions have in creating, maintaining, rejecting, forgetting and remembering the everyday affordances of nationalism?
- Can evidence of everyday nationalism be found before the nineteenth century?
- What methodologies are best suited to exploring everyday nationalism in various contexts and periods?
Panel Proposals and Individual Paper Proposals
The organisers invite scholars working within the everyday history of nationalism, broadly conceived, to submit proposals. Contributions from disciplines other than history are warmly welcome, as long as they take a view on everyday nationalism in historical perspective. We anticipate that a diversity of perspectives will be most effective in broadening our current conceptions of everyday nationalism, gaining insight into the wider processes that impact it and expanding the pool of source materials deemed relevant in the pursuit of historical everyday nationalism. We encourage proposals for both coherent panels comprising three to four papers, or individual paper proposals.
Please submit your proposal by 30.10.2026 via this link according to the following instructions. All proposals MUST address the theme of the everyday and nationalism, in any historical context or period. The conference will take place in person only.
- For complete panels, send a joint 400-word abstract, together with brief bios and paper titles for each proposed speaker.
- For individual papers, send a 250-word abstract together with a brief bio.
For questions and more information, please write to narsconference@tuni.fi. Information about our keynote speakers will be updated soon. The conference webpage will be launched in August 2026.