This paper examines the discourse surrounding Italian gastronationalism throughout the previous four European Parliament elections to gain a deeper comprehension of the escalating significance of gastronationalism over the past two decades. In this examination, the notion of gastronationalism, situated within the wider context of banal nationalism, is elucidated, and delineated to achieve the intended objective. Utilizing a case study approach, this research investigates the right-wing political party "Alleanza Nazionale / Fratelli d'Italia" through an analysis of prominent party members' discourse in newspapers and social media platforms. The findings reveal a notable escalation in the employment of gastronationalism in AN/FdI's political rhetoric from 2014 to 2019, which bears a discernible correlation with the linguistic style and communicative techniques employed by the Italian Fascist Party, originally established by Benito Mussolini.

This PhD examines the role of the transnational media in articulating and mobilizing different political and identity positions for migrants. It explores the complex linkages between Kurdish and Turkish transnational ethnic media and migrant communities. It is based on 74 in-depth interviews and 6 focus groups with Kurdish and Turkish migrants of diverse age, gender, political affiliation, occupation and length of migration in London, Berlin and Stockholm. Drawing upon the concepts of “imagined community” (Anderson 1991) and “banal nationalism” (Billig 1995), it seeks to understand how migrants make sense of the media representations of the ethno-national conflict between the Turkish state and the Kurds and how they position themselves in relation to these media texts. The thesis explores how the media impact differentially on migrants’ views and ethnic identities in the three countries. This study argues that transnational media speak on behalf of the nation to the nation, even if the members of these imagined national communities live in different places, connecting people across different geographical spaces and thus building transnational imagined communities. They create a sense of belonging to a meaningful imagined community defined as “our” nation. The mediated Turkish-Kurdish ethno-national conflict has contributed to this transnational imagined community. The analysis of interviews found that the mediated conflict has hardened ethnic-based divisions and differentiation between Kurdish and Turkish migrants in Europe. Transnational media have contributed to deterritorialization, differentiation and division among migrants. Kurds and Turks have developed distinct identities in Europe and cannot be viewed any longer as a homogeneous group. The thesis concludes by suggesting a three-way framework for the analysis of ethno-national identities of migrants, taking into account firstly the country of settlement, secondly Turkish and thirdly Kurdish media as significant in constructing imagined national communities.

Today, global media such as the Internet provides media audiences scattered across the globe with the possibility of cross-cultural moral interaction upon a plethora of global digital public spheres. Such trends have been the catalyst for increased academic attention to the field of media and morality and the notion of media audiences as global citizens – ‘cosmopolitans at home’, consuming a wide array of mediated, global images and thus enforcing a proximity with the ‘distant Other’. Parallel to such trends is the dichotomous relationship between rural- and urban areas that have emerged as increasingly ambivalent in ‘network society’. Due to the ‘urbanization of media culture’ and the ‘digital divide’, it is argued that rural areas, in an era characterized by global interconnectedness, are rendered dysfunctional. On the other hand however, media can be argued to promote inclusion and new possibilities for rural people.   This study set out to empirically examine the tension field between residential patterns (rural/urban), the media (Internet) and cosmopolitanism. Setting out from the research questions: (1) What variables determine a ‘cosmopolitan outlook’ in Sweden?, (2) Does media use/access promote a ‘cosmopolitan outlook’, and under what circumstances?, and (3) Is there a ‘cosmopolitan divide’ between different residential patterns – and if so: how does it relate to different patterns of media use and access?. To attend the research questions, data from the annual national survey, Riks-SOM 2008, was analysed and the findings indicated the general trends for the Swedish cosmopolitan was, in accordance with other empirical accounts, young and well educated. Furthermore, respondents ‘high’ on Internet use where more likely to be cosmopolitans – confirming theoretical accounts of e.g. Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck and Dick Hebdige. Also, ‘locality’ proved to be more important for rural people than for people living in metropolitan areas. Finally, men and women displayed different ‘cosmopolitan patterns’: rural women being more cosmopolitan than metropolitan women in terms of a ‘willingness to move to a country outside of Europe’ while men displayed the opposite, following the hypothesis.

Like Alike explores notions of pleasure and beauty through an examination of mundane activity. Pleasure is simple, uncomplicated niceness. Pleasure is forgettable and related to the norm. Beauty is complicated and hardly predicted. Finding beauty in the banal provides an escape from mundane life. The banal, then becomes unforgettable. The nondescript, everyday experience becomes important and gains meaning. Like Alike's electronic format is adapted from the original format of an artist book.

<p> </p><p>Today, global media such as the Internet provides media audiences scattered across the globe with the possibility of cross-cultural moral interaction upon a plethora of global digital public spheres. Such trends have been the catalyst for increased academic attention to the field of media and morality and the notion of media audiences as global citizens – ‘cosmopolitans at home’, consuming a wide array of mediated, global images and thus enforcing a proximity with the ‘distant Other’. Parallel to such trends is the dichotomous relationship between rural- and urban areas that have emerged as increasingly ambivalent in ‘network society’. Due to the ‘urbanization of media culture’ and the ‘digital divide’, it is argued that rural areas, in an era characterized by global interconnectedness, are rendered dysfunctional. On the other hand however, media can be argued to promote inclusion and new possibilities for rural people.</p><p> </p><p>This study set out to empirically examine the tension field between residential patterns (rural/urban), the media (Internet) and cosmopolitanism. Setting out from the research questions: (1) <em>What variables determine a ‘cosmopolitan outlook’ in Sweden?</em>, (2) <em>Does media use/access promote a ‘cosmopolitan outlook’, and under what circumstances?</em>, and (3) <em>Is there a ‘cosmopolitan divide’ between different residential patterns – and if so: how does it relate to different patterns of media use and access?</em>.<em> </em>To attend the research questions, data from the annual national survey, Riks-SOM 2008, was analysed and the findings indicated the general trends for the Swedish cosmopolitan was, in accordance with other empirical accounts, young and well educated. Furthermore, respondents ‘high’ on Internet use where more likely to be cosmopolitans – confirming theoretical accounts of e.g. Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck and Dick Hebdige. Also, ‘locality’ proved to be more important for rural people than for people living in metropolitan areas. Finally, men and women displayed different ‘cosmopolitan patterns’: rural women being more cosmopolitan than metropolitan women in terms of a ‘willingness to move to a country outside of Europe’ while men displayed the opposite, following the hypothesis.</p><p> </p>

Using a mixed methods approach informed by feminist and gender studies methodologies, this thesis explores foraging in Sweden as a socio-cultural practice, examining its relevance in narratives of identity, belonging, space, and environmental engagement amid contemporary ecocrises. The material used is nearly two hundred responses from a questionnaire, distributed to members of Swedish Facebook foraging groups, and five qualitative semi-structured interviews. The analysis shows that foraging appears to be part of national representations of nature, connecting to discourses of Swedish/Nordic exceptionalism. Foraging narratives shape understandings of nature, particularly in relation to Swedish landscapes, and inform current conflicts in the forests. Clear-cut forestry practices erase cherished foraging spots, lead wider reflections on capitalist-driven ecological crises and trigger feeling of loss and grief in foragers. These experiences foster a deeper awareness of environmental challenges and lead to subtle, routine practices of ‘soft activism’ as a form of gentle response. Analysing foraging from a feminist environmental perspective opens up opportunities to look at how discourses on nature influence identity formation, but also create cracks in dominant narratives. Although foraging has been coopted in processes of national identity reproduction, it also functions as a catalyst to trigger ecological awareness and sustains individual practices, framed as soft resistance to neoliberal forces, nurturing forms of hope in the face of current multiple environmental crises.

The title of this thesis Extra Ordinary is intentionally ambiguous. Depending on how you read it, it can refer to either the very ordinary or to that which is outside of the ordinary.The works described within these pages functions similarly. From person to person and with time they move from the ordinary to beyond and back again. How can something be both mysterious and understood at the same time? How can I as a painter create a space where diametrically opposed forces can coexist and what is the effect of viewing such an object? This thesis addresses these issues with personal anecdote and through description of artwork and the art making process

The study of the relationship between Hindu nationalism and Hindu activist traditions of seva (selfless service) has been principally organised into three approaches: firstly, the instrumentalist deployment of the practice, secondly, the political appropriation of traditions of seva, and thirdly, that these related associational spaces are internally homogenous and distinct from alternative ‘legitimate’ religious arenas. These frameworks largely reflect approaches to Hindu nationalism which place emphasis on its forms of political statecraft and relationship to spectacular violence. These approaches raise manifold concerns. This thesis retheorizes the relationship between Hindu nationalism and seva with reference to primary and secondary sources, together with field research in the seva projects of the Vanavasi Kalyan Kendra (VKK), a Hindu nationalist association. Through deploying a reworked understanding of Fraser’s (1990) approach to associational space and Butler’s (1993, 2007) theorisation of performative acts and subject formation, this thesis contributes to rethinking Hindu nationalism and seva. I demonstrate firstly that the colonial encounter worked to produce a series of social imaginaries which were drawn upon to transform traditions of seva. Through their articulation in shared religious languages, practices of seva were productive of porously structured Hindu activist spaces in which the tradition was contested with regard to ‘radical’ and ‘orthodox’ orientations to Hinduism’s boundaries. Increasingly, articulations of seva which invoked a sangathanist ‘orthodoxy’ came to gain hegemony in Hindu activist arenas. This influenced the early and irregular Hindu nationalist practices of seva. Fractures in Hindu nationalist articulations developed as a result of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s (RSS) sangathanist organisational idioms, allowing the association to inscribe its practices with pro-active meanings. In the post-independence period the alternative arenas of Hindu nationalist seva projects expanded greatly, a point evident in the degrees of dialogue between the Sangh and the sarvodaya movement. The importance of porous associational boundaries is further demonstrated through noting how engagement in visibilized arenas of popular Hindu religiosity worked to both broaden the fields of reference and vernacularize Hindu nationalist practices of seva. With reference to field research, I demonstrate that central to the expansion of the VKK’s arenas of service into spaces associated with Ayurvedic care is the incorporation of both refocused and transgressive practices. In the educational projects of the VKK, I note how seva works to inscribe daily practices of hygiene, the singing of bhajans and daily assemblies with Hindu nationalist meanings, and so works to regulate conduct through the formation of an ‘ethical Hindu self’. However, arenas of seva are also a location where we can witness subjects negotiating power. I demonstrate this through examining how participants in the VKK’s rural development projects rearticulate Othering practices of seva, with actors using the discourse to position themselves as active subjects, break gendered restrictions on public space, and advance an ‘ethically Hindu’ grounded claim on development and critique of power. This work illustrates that far from being of inconsequence to the circulation of Hindu nationalist identities, alternative arenas of seva operate as spaces where discourses are performatively enacted, refocused, transgressed and rearticulated. These acts contribute to the consolidation and disturbance of Hindu nationalist subject formations.

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This thesis addresses critical conceptions of Scottish literary development in the twentieth-century which inscribe realism as both the authenticating tradition and necessary telos of modern Scottish writing. To this end I identify and explore a Scottish ‘counter-tradition’ of modern uncanny fiction. Drawing critical attention to techniques of modal disruption in the works of a number of post-1970s Scottish writers gives cause to reconsider that realist teleology while positing a range of other continuities and tensions across modern Scottish literary history. The thesis initially defines the critical context for the project, considering how realism has come to be regarded as a medium of national literary representation. I go on to explore techniques of modal disruption and uncanny in texts by five Scottish writers, contesting ways in which habitual recourse to the realist tradition has obscured important aspects of their work. Chapter One investigates Ali Smith’s reimagining of ‘the uncanny guest’. While this trope has been employed by earlier Scottish writers, Smith redesigns it as part of a wider interrogation of the hyperreal twenty-first-century. Chapter Two considers two texts by James Robertson, each of which, I argue, invokes uncanny techniques familiar to readers of James Hogg and Robert Louis Stevenson in a way intended specifically to suggest concepts of national continuity and literary inheritance. Chapter Three argues that James Kelman’s political stance necessitates modal disruption as a means of relating intimate individual experience. Re-envisaging Kelman as a writer of the uncanny makes his central assimilation into the teleology of Scottish realism untenable, complicating the way his work has been positioned in the Scottish canon. Chapter Four analyses A.L. Kennedy’s So I Am Glad, delineating a similarity in the processes of repetition which result in both uncanny effects and the phenomenon of tradition, leading to Kennedy’s identification of an uncanny dimension in the concept of national tradition itself. Chapter Five considers the work of Alan Warner, in which the uncanny appears as an unsettling sense of significance embedded within the banal everyday, reflecting an existentialism which reaches beyond the national. In this way, I argue that habitual recourse to an inscribed realist tradition tends to obscure the range, complexity and instability of the realist techniques employed by the writers at issue, demonstrating how national continuities can be productively accommodated within wider, pluralistic analytical approaches.