Conflict Geographies of Pollution in Thrace Region of Turkey

Eda Acara

(Department of Geography, Queen’s University, Canada, 2015)

Adviser: Audrey Kobayashi

Dr. Eda Acara finished her Ph.D. at the Department of Geography in Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada in May, 2015 and is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Urban Policy Planning and Local Governments at Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey. She is also teaching part-time at Ankara University and Middle East Technical University. She was formerly trained as a sociologist at the Middle East Technical University and did her Master’s in Gender and Women’s Studies, a joint program at St. Mary’s University, Mount Saint University, and Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.

Dissertation abstract

This thesis addresses the tension between industrial development policies and environmental protection and the rising pollution levels in the City of Lüleburgaz in Thrace, a peripheral region of Istanbul, Turkey. The environmental narratives of second- and third- generation Muslim-Balkan immigrants, who began arriving in the early twentieth century, and Kurdish migrants, who arrived in Lüleburgaz in the post-1990 era, express conflict geographies of pollution across communities and between the communities and the state. Heavy pollution in the Ergene River, where the river is declared ‘dead,’ is not a mere accident but rather a facet of neoliberal environmental governance. By grappling with the question of how ‘the nation’ is continuously reterritorialised within neoliberalised constructions of environment and river politics at the community and policy realms, a politics of non-governance conflicting narratives of Muslim-Balkan immigrants and Kurdish migrants uncover multiple-layered conflict geographies of water pollution in Thrace region. Ethnic-class segregation leads to different community demands with regard to river pollution and environmental degradation in neighbourhoods characterised by different materialities of housing and occupation, a particular facet of non-governance that creates landscapes of invisibility. This analysis contributes to theories on ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ and the ways through which the nation and its various territorial practices at different epochs of neoliberalisation processes not only create consent for neoliberalisation practices but also give way for historical and racialised ethnic conflicts to survive.

Inspiration to undertake this research

My Ph.D. research emerged while I was writing my master’s thesis in Luleburgaz, Thrace region of Turkey. My thesis, A Case Study on the Discourse of Women’s Conscientious Objection in Turkey, was a feminist analysis of women’s conscientious objection to Turkish militarism.

At that time in Lüleburgaz, many of the participants associated water pollution in Ergene River (Thrace region of Turkey; Ergene River merges with the Maritza River which draws the border between Turkey, Greece and Bulgaria) with diverse economic, demographic, and cultural changes in the region.

One of the respondents in this research project, a Bulgarian-Turkish immigrant, related the worsening of the Ergene River basin to the degeneration of the Turkish-Bulgarian culture referring to the Kurdish labour migration as a threat to the environment. By instrumentalising the meaning of ‘environmental pollution’, this participant drew attention to the ethnic conflict between Bulgarian-Turkish immigrants and Kurdish immigrants who had come to Lüleburgaz to work in the industrial zones. This is when I began to wonder about the idea of ‘the nation’ and how it circulates in daily life across constructions of environment. Moreover, what are the consequences of this idea of ‘the nation’ and how widespread is it and in circulation with the neoliberalisation processes in Turkey. That is because the Thrace region, since the 1970s, has been one of the most important hinterland areas for the Istanbul city region to extract human and natural resources.

An in-depth look into one aspect of the dissertation

The Ergene River, a tributary of the Meriç River (Maritza in Bulgarian, Evros in Greek), crosses the border between Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey in Thrace region. The Turkish Ministry of Environment (2004) considers it to be a ‘dead river,’ categorizing it to a level four.^[1] The river has undergone rapid industrialisation and has suffered environmental consequences as a result. My research draws on the tension between industrial development policies and environmental protection and the rising pollution levels in the city of Lüleburgaz in Thrace region, a peripheral region of Istanbul, Turkey.

Within the context of neoliberal environmental governance, different ethnic communities have settled at different points in the industrialisation process where class and ethnic differences between the two ethnic communities create differential privileges and/or relative vulnerabilities. The environmental narratives of second- and third- generation Muslim-Balkan immigrants, who began arriving in the early twentieth century, and the Kurdish migrants, who arrived in Lüleburgaz in the post-1990 era, set in place conflict geographies of pollution across communities and between the communities, and the Turkish state, which has sought to regulate industry, pollution, and the environment.

With the aforementioned context in mind, I focus on the ethnic-class segregation between Kurdish and Muslim-Balkan immigrants at a specific neighbourhood in close vicinity to the Ergene River. A closer look at environmental- and water pollution-related problems in the Kurdish Quarter reveal that absence of infrastructure, in addition to flooding of the Lüleburgaz stream, have not been ‘seen’ by the Muslim-Balkan immigrants and the local and the central government agencies as an environmental problem. According to my Kurdish participants, the illegality of the Kurdish settlement is often given as a reason by the state institutions for the lack of infrastructural, water-treatment facilities and non-governance of these settlements for improvement of their environmental conditions.

It is possible to think of a state’s non-governance to what Prudham (2004) refers to as a neoliberal construction of ‘organized irresponsibility’?^[2] The act of non-governance, I further argue, is a facet with respect to landscapes of invisibility, and thus racialised ethnic conflict together with neoliberalisation of the water sector in Turkey prepare the conditions for reterritorialisation of conflict geographies across river politics. This is why Kurdish people living in the neighbourhood have tended to abstain from taking collective action. As a community tactic to coexist with the Muslim-Balkan immigrants, the phenomenon also suggests the instrumentalisation of invisibility of the Kurdish people. That is also one of the ways through which neoliberalisation processes, which are not only limited by environmental politics but which are diffuse in other policies such as education and social assistance, are able to recreate ethnic-class polarisations. Thus, nationalism and neoliberalism comingle and function together to create obedience, in this case, through a community’s avoidance of being conspicuous in addressing pollution.

^[1] This is the highest level of pollution, encompassing both surface and underground water pollution.

^[2] Prudham (2004:345) argues that neoliberalism has a high potential to generate environmental catastrophes by ‘building organised irresponsibility into regulatory systems.’

Bibliography

Prudham, Scott. 2004. ‘Poisoning the Well: Neoliberalism and the Contamination of Municipal Water in Walkerton, Ontario.’ Geoforum 35:343–59.

Turkish Ministry of Environment and Forestry. 2004. ‘Çevre Atlası’ [Environmental Atlas]. In Ankara: Turkish Ministry of Environment and Forestry.

Perspective on the fields of nationalism, ethnicity, and race

I understand nationalism as ‘both a goal to achieve statehood and a belief in collective commonality’ (Nagel 1998:247). The first goal—achieving, maintaining, and exercising statehood—commonly involves armed conflict in the form of revolution or anti-colonial warfare; the second goal assures the imagination of a common national past and present (Anderson 1991). Furthermore, nationalism is more than a political ideology. It is a constitutive discourse, governing everyday relationships through reordering and governing the family, the relationships of members of the family with each other and the relationship of families with each other and with other institutions (Sirman 2007).

It is important to note that I specifically use the terminology and theories of racialisation in connection to ethnic nationalism within the context of Kurdish-Turkish conflict, as opposed to, for example, ethnicisation. I seek to expand on the meanings of racial vocabularies and discursivity of racialization (Ergin 2008) in connection with ethnic nationalism in Turkey. Simply because racialisation, as a concept provides opportunities to link multiple geographies of racism of Europe and Turkey so that it becomes possible to understand how Turkishness as well as Muslim-Balkan immigrants have been associated with whiteness and Turkish modernity, which is often at the heart of environmental narratives and understandings of urbanity. By this, racialisation of ethnicity as a conceptual framework also grasps ‘national framing of modernity’ (Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller 2002:223).^[1]

^[1] Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller (2002:223) argue that national framing of modernity refers to the separation between ‘the rise of nationalism from that of the modern state and democracy’ which ‘naturalize the nation-state.’

Bibliography

Anderson, Benedict R. O’G. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Revised edition. London: Verso.

Ergin, Murat. 2008. ‘“Is the Turk a White Man?” Towards a Theoretical Framework for Race in the Making of Turkishness.’  Middle Eastern Studies 44(6):827–50.

Nagel, Joane. 1998. ‘Masculinity and Nationalism: Gender and Sexuality in the Making of Nations.’  Ethnic and Racial Studies 21(2):242–69.

Sirman, Nukhet. 2007. ‘Kadınlarin Milliyeti, Milliyetçilik’ [Women’s Nationality, Nationalism]. In Modern Türkiye’de Siyasi Düşünce Cilt 4 [Political Thought in Modern Turkey, Vol. 4], ed. Tanıl Bora and Murat Gültekingil. Istanbul: Iletişim Yayınları.

Wimmer, Andreas, and Nina Glick Schiller. 2002. ‘Methodological Nationalism and the Study of Migration.’ European Journal of Sociology 43(2):217–40.

Reflections on the job market

I have just moved into the job market after recently graduating in May, 2015. So, I am not so sure if anything I can provide would be truly accurate because of my limited experience.

If you recently defended a Ph.D. in the fields of nationalism, ethnicity, identity, and/or race and would like to be featured on our blog, please visit here for more information on how to submit your dissertation abstract.

Slovakia’s Second City in Times of Turbulence: Košice and its Hungarians, Eastern Rite Catholics and Steelworkers in 1948, 1968, and 1989

 Marty Manor Mullins

(Department of History, University of Washington, 2013)

Supervisor: James Ramon Felak

Marty Manor Mullins earned her Ph.D. in East Central European History from the University of Washington in 2013. She conducted research for her dissertation in Košice, Slovakia, with funding provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in conjunction with the Fulbright Program. She remains passionate about the history and people of eastern Slovakia and since 2000 has worked and lived there for more than six years. Her recent publications can be found in Slovo and the Journal of Church and State.

Dissertation Abstract

This dissertation argues that Košice’s experience of the milestone years of 1948, 1968 and 1989 in Czechoslovakia’s history was distinctive from that of Prague or Bratislava due to the city’s unique concentration of Hungarians, Ukrainian-Rusyn Eastern Rite Catholics and steelworkers. These populations were subject to homogenizing agendas from above as the postwar Beneš administration sought to ‘make Košice Slovak’ and the Communist regime implemented industrialization and urbanization plans to change the socio-economic class makeup of the city. Thus, this dissertation is a study of nationalism and ethnicity and religion and class as represented in one city and its nearby districts. It represents the first scholarly analysis of Kosice’s history under Communism and therefore significantly contributes to urban and area studies literature.

The theme uniting these three groups is the two post-1945 governments’ efforts to homogenize the city and its surrounding region. By ridding Košice of its Hungarian majority, by eliminating the Eastern Rite Catholic Church and by establishing a steel mill in Košice to draw in Slovak labor from the surrounding countryside (purging the city of its former bourgeois character), the two Czechoslovak government administrations largely conformed the city and its inhabitants to their desired norms.

This dissertation unearths multiple findings that make Kosice’s Communist experience unique. First, the blow that postwar re-Slovakization dealt to Košice’s Reformed Church significantly contributed to the denomination’s decline across Slovakia. Second, the Eastern Rite Catholic Church was the only confession in the country to be completely liquidated by the Communist regime (in 1950) only to be reinstated in 1968. Third, challenging the assumption that Prague and Bratislava were the only two centers of civic participation in 1968, this dissertation demonstrates that eastern Slovak civil society effected change at local and statewide levels during the 1968 liberalization period. Finally, steelworkers at Eastern Slovak Steelworks (today U.S. Steel) formed the largest collective of blue collar labor in Slovakia during Communism, yet were noticeably absent from initial days of demonstrations in 1989. These findings underline the importance of considering Slovakia’s second-largest city and its surrounding region in any analysis of Czechoslovakia’s postwar years, Prague Spring or Velvet Revolution.

Inspiration to undertake this research

My passions include teaching and Slovakia—a strange combination that afforded me the opportunity to teach at the secondary level in eastern Slovakia and led me to complete my Ph.D. in East Central European History in order to teach at the university level. During my years teaching at Šrobárova Gymnázium in Košice, Slovakia, I discovered that much of what happened in eastern Slovakia under Communism was fascinating history, yet sadly unknown to the English-speaking world. Visits with my neighbors or friends’ parents and grandparents became windows into an incredibly engaging story that I knew I wanted to share both as a teacher and an author. That is why I chose to write my dissertation on the history of Slovakia’s second-largest city during Communism. I hope to publish it in book form in the near future.

An in-depth look into one aspect of the dissertation

My dissertation focuses on the disenfranchised Hungarian minority, the outlawed Eastern Rite Catholics and the state-sponsored steelworkers in the eastern Slovak city of Košice during three pivotal turning points in postwar Czechoslovakia’s history. It is at once a study of nationalism, ethnicity, religion and class as embodied in one city and its nearby districts. The theme uniting these three groups is the two post-1945 governments’ efforts to homogenize the city and its surrounding region. By ridding Košice of its Hungarians, by eliminating the Eastern Rite Catholic Church and by establishing a steel mill in Košice to attract Slovak labor from the surrounding countryside, the two Czechoslovak government administrations largely conformed the city and its inhabitants to their desired norms. My dissertation discusses the noteworthy yet often overlooked contributions these three groups made to the events of 1948, 1968 and 1989 in Czechoslovakia.

Perspective on the fields of nationalism, ethnicity, and race, and reflections on the job market

Although the fields of nationalism, ethnicity and race continue to dominate leading monograph titles, conference agendas and course offerings, the tenure-track job market is unfortunately dismal. This is particularly true in the United States for those of us newly-minted Ph.D.’s in the humanities. Nevertheless, opportunities and outlets for publication do exist and are perhaps even expanding as more publishers incorporate online platforms.

If you recently defended a Ph.D. in the fields of nationalism, ethnicity, identity, and/or race and would like to be featured on our blog, please visit here for more information on how to submit your dissertation abstract.

SEN Journal: Online Exclusives is pleased to present the second featured dissertation. If you recently defended a Ph.D. in the fields of nationalism, ethnicity, identity, and/or race and would like to be featured on our blog, please visit here for more information on how to submit your dissertation abstract.

‘For the Freedom of the Race’:

Black Women and the Practices of Nationalism, 1929–1945

Keisha N. Blain

(Department of History, Princeton University, USA, 2014)

Adviser: Tera W. Hunter

Keisha N. Blain is an historian of the twentieth century United States with broad interdisciplinary interests and specializations in African American History, the modern African Diaspora, and Women’s and Gender Studies. Her research interests include black internationalism, radical politics, and global feminisms. She completed a BA in History and Africana Studies from Binghamton University (SUNY) and a Ph.D. in History from Princeton University. Her dissertation received honorable mention for the 2015 Lerner-Scott Prize from the Organization of American Historians (OAH), which recognizes the best dissertation written in the field of U.S. women’s history. She is currently an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Iowa. Follow her on Twitter @KeishaBlain.

Dissertation abstract

‘For the Freedom of the Race’ examines how a vanguard of nationalist women leaders—Amy Jacques Garvey, Maymie De Mena, Mittie Maude Lena Gordon, Ethel M. Collins, Ethel Waddell, and Celia Jane Allen, among them—engaged in national and global politics during the 1930s and 1940s. With the effective collapse of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA)—the dominant black nationalist organization in the United States and worldwide in the immediate post-World War I era—these women leaders emerged on the local, national, and international scenes, at once drawing on Garveyism and extending it.  As pragmatic activists, nationalist women formulated their own political ideas and praxis.  They employed multiple protest strategies and tactics (including grassroots organizing, legislative lobbying, letter-writing campaigns, and militant protest); combined numerous religious and political ideologies (such as Freemasonry, Ethiopianism, Pan-Africanism, and Islam); and forged unlikely alliances—with Japanese activists, for instance—in their struggles against racism, sexism, colonialism, and imperialism. Drawing upon an extensive evidentiary base of primary sources including archival material, historical newspapers, and government records, my study reclaims the Great Depression and World War II as watershed moments in the history of black nationalism and sheds new light on the underappreciated importance of women in shaping black nationalist and internationalist movements and discourses during this period.

Inspiration to undertake this research

I had a series of questions I wanted answered about black women’s activism, nationalism, and internationalism which took place in the 1930s and 1940s. Much of the scholarship centers on black women’s activism in the Garvey movement of the 1920s, but I felt it was necessary to tell a more nuanced story about black nationalist women’s engagement in national and transnational politics during the twentieth century. I wanted to better understand and explain how black nationalist women’s  political theory and praxis intersected with rising anticolonial and Third World nationalist sentiments, and address how black nationalist women understood and negotiated gender roles in predominately male and masculinist movements of the period.

As I complete my first book based on my dissertation, I have expanded the focus in many ways and naturally, new questions have arisen. However, the project is, in essence, a culmination of the answers to the questions I have been thinking about for quite some time. I’ve learned so much during the process of doing this research, and I’m excited to share my findings with others.

An in-depth look into one aspect of the dissertation

My dissertation moves between the local, the regional, the national and the transnational. Reflecting the larger trends in the scholarship on nationalism, my project explores the interplay between national and geopolitical concerns. In my third chapter, I introduce readers to Celia Jane Allen, a working-poor black woman in Chicago who was actively involved in the Peace Movement of Ethiopia (PME), one of the largest black nationalist organizations established during the Great Depression. During the 1930s, Allen traveled to the Mississippi Delta in order to facilitate a grassroots nationalist movement that galvanized Southern blacks in the rural areas. Deploying black nationalist theory and rhetoric—including the tenets of political self-determination, racial pride, and economic self-sufficiency—Allen attempted to garner support for black emigration to West Africa. Drawing upon a range of previously untapped primary sources and utilizing theoretical perspectives from feminist studies, literary theory, and performance studies, the chapter highlights the crucial role this working-poor black woman played in popularizing black nationalist and internationalist ideas in the U.S. South during the Jim Crow era.

While paying close attention to the local context and collaborations and tensions among local black activists, I also highlight Allen’s influence in the region by charting the impact of her political work in places like Alabama, Tennessee, and Kentucky. By analyzing Allen’s unpublished poetry, I also capture the activist’s global vision of Africa and ‘African redemption’—the complete liberation of Africans and peoples of African descent from racism, European colonization, and global imperialism. I further demonstrate how the PME chapters Allen established in the region provided crucial spaces for impoverished black Southerners to engage black internationalist discourses on the grassroots level. These examples provide glimpses into how my dissertation explores the interplay between geopolitical dynamics and national concerns. By capturing the intricacies of black nationalist women’s politics on the local, national and global levels, ‘For the Freedom of the Race’ makes a significant contribution to the growing body of literature on race, gender, and nationalism during the twentieth century.

Perspective on the fields of nationalism, ethnicity, and race

The scholarship on nationalism, ethnicity, and race has become increasingly more vibrant and more innovative. Over the past twenty-five years, we have witnessed an impressive output of scholarly works that probe the intersecting dimensions of ethnicity, race, and nationality. Much of this work has been interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary—utilizing multiple methodological approaches and drawing insights from a range of disciplines including History, Sociology, and Political Science. Moreover, many of these scholars have employed a transnational or comparative research approach. In so doing, this growing body of scholarship captures the global implications of nationalism and moves beyond the nation-state framework of analysis. By employing an interdisciplinary and transnational approach, scholars have offered valuable insights into the complex and dynamic relationship between nationalism, ethnicity, and race.

Reflections on the job market

Like most fields, the job market is difficult for those who work on race, ethnicity, nationalism and other related fields. However, there are some exciting opportunities for those who are interested in working in these areas. In addition to openings in traditional fields such as history and sociology, junior scholars can apply for positions in a range of interdisciplinary fields including African American Studies, Ethnic Studies, American Studies, and Women’s and Gender Studies. In a stringent job market, teaching experience and publications are essential. I strongly recommend postdoctoral research fellowships for newly-minted Ph.D.’s to strengthen their teaching and research portfolios.

SEN Journal: Online Exclusives is pleased to present a new series that features recently defended Ph.D. dissertations in the fields of ethnicity, race, identity, nationalism, and the interactions between them. This series aims to highlight new exciting research emerging out of these fields, encourage dialogue among scholars, and provide insights on the practical realities of life after a Ph.D.

‘A Hebrew from Samaria, Not a Jew from Yavneh’: Adya Gur Horon (1907–1972) and the Articulation of Hebrew Nationalism

Romans Vaters

(Faculty of Humanities, School of Arts, Languages and Cultures [Middle Eastern Studies], University of Manchester, UK, 2015)

Adviser: Moshe Behar

Romans Vaters holds a BA in Modern Middle East and Islamic Studies from Tel Aviv University, an MA in Middle Eastern Studies from the Jagiellonian University, and now a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Manchester.

Dissertation abstract

This study analyses the intellectual output of Adya Gur Horon (Adolphe Gourevitch, 1907–1972), a Ukrainian-born, Russian-speaking, French-educated ideologue of modern Hebrew nationalism, and one of the founding fathers of the anti-Zionist ideology known as ‘Canaanism’, whose heyday was mid 20th-century Israel. The dissertation’s starting point is that if the ‘Canaanites’ (otherwise the Young Hebrews) declared themselves to be above all a national movement independent of, and opposed to, Zionism, they should be analysed as such. In treating ‘Canaanite’ support for the existence of an indigenous Hebrew nation in Palestine/Israel as equally legitimate as the Zionist defence of the Jews’ national character (both ultimately constituting ‘imagined communities’), this work comes to the conclusion that the movement should indeed be classified as a fully-fledged alternative to Zionism; not a radical variation of the latter, but rather a rival national ideology.

My chief assertion is that the key to a proper understanding of ‘Canaanism’ is Horon’s unique vision of the ancient Hebrew past, which constitutes the ‘Canaanite’ foundational myth that stands in sharp contradiction to its Zionist counterpart. Furthermore, I demonstrate that Zionism and ‘Canaanism’ are incompatible not only because they differ over history, but also because some of the basic socio-political notions they employ, such as national identity or nation-formation, are discordant. A methodology such as this has never before been applied to the ‘Canaanite’ ideology, since most of those who have studied the movement treat ‘Canaanism’ either as an artistic avant-garde or as a fringe variation of Zionism.

This study demonstrates that, despite being sidelined by most researchers of ‘Canaanism’, Adya Horon is beyond doubt the leading figure of the ‘Canaanite’ movement. I believe that only by giving due weight to the divergence in national historiographies between ‘Canaanism’ and Zionism can we grasp the former’s independence from the latter, both intellectually and politically, without negating ‘Canaanism’s’ complex relationship with Zionism and the sometimes significant overlaps between the two. The dissertation makes systematic use of many newly discovered materials, including Horon’s writings from the early 1930s to the early 1970s (some of them extremely rare), as well as his private archive. My study thus sits at the intersection of three fields of academic enquiry: nationalism studies; language-based area studies; and historiographical discourse analysis.

Inspiration to undertake this research

What attracted me to Hebrew nationalism and the ‘Young Hebrews’ in particular was that they were very ‘unusual suspects’ in what is regarded as anti-Zionism. While it is easy to imagine how various left-wing ideologies can bring some Israelis to reject quite forcefully their own state’s founding ideology, in the case of the ‘Young Hebrews’ we are dealing with right-wing nationalists, reared intellectually in the Jabotinskian Revisionism, then transcending it to reject Zionism on the basis of an alternative national vision. This is extremely fascinating since ‘Canaanism’ is certainly not another instance of Jewish anti-Zionism, but an autochthonous nationalism fighting what it regards as an imported, faulty and encumbered imitation of nationalism (meaning Zionism and Pan-Arabism). Their criticism of Zionism’s internal inconsistencies and weaknesses is highly illuminating to everyone interested in Middle Eastern political and intellectual history, and that of course does not entail subscription to any of ‘Canaanism’s tenets.

The second motive is more personal and relates to my own background as a person who spent most of his life in Israel without being born in the country and thus without sharing really in Israeli native patriotism. I believe that the most adequate understanding of ‘Canaanism’ is that the movement represented a form of Israeli patriotism that rejected Zionism flatly. Actually, this rejection is precisely what made it a patriotic Israeli movement. Thus, researching ‘Canaanism’ (and related phenomena) enlightened me on the fact that there are numerous ways of defining Israeliness and Israeli identity, not all of which need to conform to the ideological limits set up by the dominant Israeli state-ideology, and that ‘being an Israeli’ can indeed be framed in a multitude of positions, negotiated and renegotiated. For someone like me, who has spent most of my life in Israel, though not born there and therefore not really able to share in its state-ideology, this was a truly liberating insight. This helped me to phrase an answer to the question which I had had to deal with even since I moved to Israel at the age of eight: what does it mean for me to be an Israeli?

An in-depth look into one aspect of the dissertation

My dissertation examines an aspect of the relationship between historical writings and nationalist ideology in the Israeli context. It spans such apparently distant topics as pre-biblical paganism, mid-20th century Zionist politics, Arab nationalisms (in plural), Herderian philosophy of time, Gramscian sociology of intellectuals and some political and cultural teleologies. While doing research on the methodological core of my dissertation I discovered, to my amusement, that the historiographic ideas we would today describe as post-modern and innovatively deconstructivist were suggested as early as in the 18th century by the German scholar Johannes Chladenius. It is true, as the saying goes, that everything new is well-forgotten old.

Significantly, I was astonished to learn how deeply ingrained an ideology can become in scholarship, to the point of invisibility. In my dissertation, I analysed the ‘Young Hebrews’ movement in Israel, which advocated a Hebrew indigenous nationalism, independent of Jewish residues and, concomitantly, of Zionism. My analytical innovation was to apply nationalism research tools to this movement. Despite the apparent ‘obviousness’ of such an analytical step, I learned that it has never been explored by Israeli scholars. The reason for this, I gather, is that such a perspective would entail the assumption that the Hebrew national identity is as legitimate as the Jewish one. By implication, this might lead one to acknowledge that it is the indigenous Hebrews who have the primary right for national self-determination in Israel and not the newly-arrived Jews; in consequence, Israel might thus become a Hebrew republic, instead of its self-declared status of a state of the Jews, for the Jews, by the Jews.

Therefore, the mere attempt to look at the ‘Young Hebrews’ from the perspective of nationalism studies would be enough to deeply undermine the fundamentals of Zionism. Being committed to neither ideology, I ‘permitted’ myself to do this.

Perspective on the fields of nationalism, ethnicity, and race

I believe that nationalism’s global relevance is particularly beneficial by helping to counterbalance academic anglo-centrism, which in my opinion has become overly dominant in certain spheres of the humanities. I prefer to treat nationalism studies as an analytic method rather than a scholarly field that stands by itself. After all, there is no ‘pure nationalism’ in the sense that there is ‘pure mathematics’ or ‘pure physics’. Every study of nationalism necessarily arises from an empirical background, even when it is highly theorised.

Reflections on the job market

I am perhaps ill-positioned to give testimony here, as I am not acquainted well enough with the realities of the academic job market in the UK, having spent only three and a half years in a single university. Insofar as my relatively narrow perspective permits me to judge, it seems to me that the well-developed career support and advice sector for graduates and postgraduates in British universities (or, at least, in my own alma mater) is a way to avoid the crucial though ‘unmentionable’ fact that academic education no longer guarantees one to have a long-term and stable career in his or her chosen field. During my postgraduate studies, I have attended several workshops and meetings devoted to coping with ‘life outside’, where too many truisms were stated and too few concrete and original ideas were suggested. I am aware, of course, that this not the fault of the University of Manchester (or of any other university, for that matter), but of the global economic reality. But it is distressing to observe that the academia is playing along, pushing too many highly-qualified people to the position of a ‘precariat’ (at least temporarily) by the proliferation of various ‘temporary’, ‘fixed-term’ and other ‘early-career’ positions. I do not believe that there is something particular here that pertains to students of nationalism; rather, this is true for most humanities and social sciences scholars.

If you recently defended a Ph.D. in the fields of nationalism, ethnicity, identity, and/or race and would like to be featured on our blog, please visit here for more information on how to submit your dissertation abstract.

The official blog for the journal Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism (SEN), a publication of the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism (ASEN), SEN seeks to regularly feature recently defended Ph.D. dissertations in the fields of ethnicity, race, identity, nationalism, and the interactions between these.

We welcome the submission of abstracts (approximately 500 words long) that highlight the contribution of a given doctoral dissertation in these areas. The dissertation must have been defended and may be completed in any language and in any humanities or social sciences discipline since January 2014.

The abstract must be written in English, concisely and clearly including the sources analyzed, theories engaged, methods employed, and main findings or argument.

Abstracts should include:

1. Brief introduction of the author, including name, current affiliation, and other relevant information

2. Title of the dissertation

3. Institution where the dissertation was written and approved

4. Name of dissertation supervisor

5. Year the dissertation was approved

6. An abstract in English

7. Inspiration to undertake this research

8. An in-depth look into one aspect of the dissertation

9. Perspective on the fields of nationalism, ethnicity, and race

10. Reflections on the job market

To submit a dissertation abstract, please send the above information to Junpeng Li at jpli3023@gmail.com. We welcome submissions at any time.