France is often described as a strongly secular or culturally Catholic country despite the internal plurality that always belied a presumed national uniformity. In recent decades, the increasingly public presence of Islam has raised concerns over the stability of French national identity and a putative common French culture. The added threat of terrorism and the rise of the far right have aggravated the challenges of plurality and the mieux vivre ensemble (living better together). Amidst these tense national debates, this dissertation provides an ethnographic comparison of pious Catholic and Muslim citizens’ experiences with plurality, public ethics, citizenship, and Frenchness. Employing ethnographic methods and a small-scale survey, I carried out research in sites of religious education, including churches, mosques, private Muslim schools, and interfaith initiatives in Paris, Lyon, and Lille, France from 2013-2014. My research showed similarly broad spectrums of piety and ethical commitments among Catholics and Muslims as well as many shared public ethical concerns. However, there was much less convergence in the framing of ethical concerns, agency in civic engagement, and experiences of French citizenship and belonging among Catholics and Muslims respectively. Moreover, in contrast to prominent social science scholarship on Islam in France, I found that Muslim exclusion from French belonging was not attributable to a single cause, such as secular Republicanism, strong religious commitments, class, race or ethnicity. Instead, this research suggests that many of these factors worked together to produce the normative aesthetic, ethical, and performative boundaries of francité. While francité literally denotes Frenchness, it indexes a complex history of national identity and belonging from late French colonialism to today. Catholics and Muslims described francité in similar terms. However, Catholics claimed to confidently embody francité, while Muslims often excluded themselves from its experience and meaning. Contributing to the scholarship on Islam in France and Europe, my research indicates that it is circumscribed notions of francité that work to exclude “Others” from French belonging, and which impinge upon otherwise inclusive possibilities of belonging under secular Republicanism. Contributing to the literature on citizenship, ethics, and the challenge of plurality, I suggest that scholars need to disentangle juridico-legal citizenship, secular Republicanism, and francité in order to better analyze the challenges of French citizenship and the effort to mieux vivre ensemble. / 2021-02-27T00:00:00Z

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0400169A Tonyterah@yahoo.com Faculty of Humanities Master of Arts 2005 Dr Ebrahim. H haseenahe@artworks.wits.ac.za / This study analyses the role of the media generally, and the documentary mode specifically, in the construction of national identity. It focuses on the Project 10 documentary series in South Africa. Chapter one, lays the foundation for the study by discussing the concepts, theories and debates on the notion of ‘the nation’, ‘national identity’, ‘nation building’ and the documentary mode. Chapter two argues that nations are in a constant state of (re)birth, (re)definition and (re)invention and interrogates how the documentary mode attempts to sustain what Benedict Anderson (1991) calls a sense of ‘imagined community’. Chapter three focuses on the role and position of an individual citizen vis-à-vis ‘nation’ and ‘nation building’, and how the documentaries in the Project 10 series explore this concern. Chapter four examines the effects and manifestations of previous leadership regimes in the present-day South Africa and how this affects the process of building contemporary South Africa.

The Swedish national narrative regarding religion often highlights the 2000 separation of the Church of Sweden from the state and a steady decline in religiosity within the population. However, increased immigration since the end of the Second World War has resulted in rising religious diversity, particularly in the growth of Islam as a minority religion. As members of a minority group, Muslim women often face issues concerning their representation in the media, frequently connecting the women’s identities to debates about immigration, religion, and feminism in Sweden. Through understanding the role religion plays within the conceptualization of Swedish national identity, it becomes possible to then analyze how discourse about Muslim women in the media is associated with ideas of representation, religion, and national identity. In studying the discourse around the 2008 television program Halal-TV, newspaper articles about the program and the articles’ corresponding comment fields reveal recurring themes about media representation, perceptions of national belonging and diversity, and attitudes towards minority groups like Muslim women. In conducting a critical discourse analysis of the online discourse through the lens of postcolonial feminism, media reception theory is used as a theoretical framework to illustrate how the online discussions about Halal-TV constitute a public sphere on issues of sameness and diversity, media representation, and religion in Sweden. This case study thus acts as a glimpse into the concurrent Swedish society and media institutions’ approaches towards religious and cultural diversity and representation in the public broadcasting media.

The current research integrates social cognitive theories of psychological construals and information processing with theories of social identity to identify the conditions under which multiculturalism helps versus hinders positive intergroup relations. Three experiments investigated how abstract vs. concrete construals of multiculturalism impact majority group members' attitudes and behavioral intentions toward ethnic minorities in the US. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that construing multiculturalism in abstract terms by highlighting its broad goals reduced majority group members' prejudice toward ethnic minorities by decreasing the extent to which diversity is seen as threatening the national group. However, construing multiculturalism in concrete terms by highlighting specific ways in which its goals can be achieved increased majority group members' prejudice toward minorities by amplifying the extent to which diversity is seen as threatening the national group. Experiment 3 then revealed that a different concrete construal that incorporates values and practices of both majority and minority groups reduced perceived threats to the national group and in turn attenuated prejudice and increased desire for contact with ethnic minorities. Collectively, these experiments demonstrate when and why multiculturalism leads to positive versus negative intergroup outcomes, while identifying new ways in which multiculturalism can be successfully implemented in pluralistic nations.

This dissertation problematizes the populism – national identity relationship looking at contemporary Turkey, where populism was combined with an increasingly Islamic, conservative nationalism under the rule (2002-present) of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its personalistic leader R. T. Erdoğan. It demonstrates how populism can play a strategic role in the elite-led promotion of alternate conceptions of national identities. The underlying premise is that the issues of populism, its effects and implications on political institutions and competition, when and how populism becomes successful cannot be understood independently of nationalism as a sociological and political phenomenon and of the specific ideas populism serves. Combining data collected on the field through elite interviews and participant observation with other sources, I show that populist (people-worshipping and anti-establishment) leadership and mobilization have been primary agents in the AKP’s construction of a competitive-authoritarian political landscape in Turkey and in the government-sponsored imposition of a religiously-colored nationalism. With inter-temporal and within-case comparisons and process-tracing, I first put AKP dominance in Turkey in historical perspective, and then identify a central causal mechanism that accounts for the pace and intensity of Turkey’s authoritarian drift since the party’s second term. I situate AKP’s abandonment of initial promises of European Union-oriented pluralist reforms in (two) major power struggles that significantly heightened the costs of losing power while diminishing incentives for genuinely democratizing reform. I demonstrate that mutual distrust between Turkey’s secular state elite and Islamist political elite spiraled into an acute political confrontation starting in 2007, wherein the incumbents de-legitimized and pacified opponents with a combination of legal and extra-legal methods, and a populist meta-narrative that framed this struggle in terms of Turkey’s democratization and prosperity versus the privileges of a narrow elite alien to the values of the heartland. I then evaluate critical implications, like how the incumbents and their partners crossed a critical threshold for state-capture and top-down Islamization by 2011, subsequently attaining a proto-hegemonic orientation (i.e. towards the replacement of the existing pluralistic democracy) and cartel party status (i.e. privileged access to state-regulated channels of communication). I explain that the particular ways in which this new elite achieved their supremacy and their arbitrary transformation of society led to cross-class civic opposition, erupting in 2013 at the Gezi Park protests (and more recently culminating in a grassroots appreciation of secularism). Third, I discuss the impact of the intra-Islamist conflict that also surfaced in 2013, after the colluding parties started fighting over the spoils of state-capture. In the face of such crises and souring relations with the West, the AKP leadership employed a strategic narrative combining populist antagonism and polarization with suspicious-minded, anti-Western nationalist perspectives which frame pro-democracy opposition as foreign-orchestrated initiatives aiming to suppress the national will, foment instability, and derail AKP’s quest to end Western domination over Turkey. Late-stage populist rule, in this case, is characterized by the equation of party survival to national survival and the manufacturing of consent for authoritarianism through nationalism. The findings advance the limited literature on populism in power, showing that the disappearance of an establishment to rally against does not mean that populism withers away and that populism can remain potent thereafter via attachment to various ideologies, and that we are better off seeing populism as something that actors do (as opposed to what they are); e.g. to differentiate themselves from alternatives, to win or securitize elections, to rationalize the reorganization of power relations, to avoid accountability, to keep party ranks unified, and critically, to promote new identities. / 2023-10-25T00:00:00Z

In this study, identity construction among Yugoslavs in Sweden is explored through Jugoslaviska riksförbundet i Sverige (Yugoslav National Association in Sweden, JRF). The activities and structure of the JRF are understood through the lens of strategies and perception, grounded in the theoretical frameworks of social identity theory and integration from the migrant perspective. These perspectives highlighted how the JRF constructed its identity according to expectations placed upon them by both the Swedish integration policy and the Yugoslav’s perception of them as “temporary workers abroad”. This did not mean a placid acceptance of these expectations, but rather the JRF used them to influence perceptions of the organization. The JRF adopted organizational structures and policies from Yugoslavia and adapted them to the Swedish context. This resulted in a decentralized organizational structure in which the primary activity of the national association was political, and thus the JRF’s notion of “Yugoslav” and how to maintain such an identity was grounded in political activity, such as advocating for the national communities within the organization or sending youth labor brigades to Yugoslavia.

The American Dream has been the inspiration of many political speeches, political writings, and works of literature throughout American history. Most recently, it has inspired political groups like the Center for the New American Dream and academic groups like the Xavier University Center for the Study of the American Dream. As of late, the notion of the American Dream has begun to crop up more often than not in main stream political discourse, especially surrounding the topic of immigration with the aptly named Dream Act. Why has the American Dream drawn this new attention and inquiry? Why and how is it important to American Political thought? What does it mean? Why does it endure? As a complex issue of American culture, this thesis will use disparate methods of analysis to form answers to these questions. The American Dream is often referred to as our national myth. It is comprised of the many ideals and narratives which undergird American politics and culture. Through examination of literary works of fiction and of political texts, this research will examine the meaning and the history of the American Dream. Then, using secondary survey data, this research will examine the implications and state of the American Dream. Finally, to answer the question of why the American Dream endures, this research will employ elements of psychoanalytic and Marxist theory to argue that the Dream works as a cycle of American political thought.

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