In celebration of the London 2012 Olympics, SEN Journal: Online Exclusives is delighted to present a selection of exclusive previews on the theme of nationalism, ethnicity and sport over the next few weeks.
By focusing on London’s 2012 olympic bidding, our first article by Mark Falcous and Michael Silk explores the relationship between British nationalist identity politics and sport, terrorism, place re-imagining, mega-event bidding, and corporate neo-liberalism.
Photo credit: tableatny, flickr
Stephan Feuchtwang, Felix Römer and Hans Steinmüller in conversation with John Borneman. Chair: Peter Skrandies
Friday 15th June, 3-5pm, London School of Economics and Political Science, Old Building, room 3.28
In 1967, psychoanalysts Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich famously analyzed postwar Germany as a ‘fatherless society’ that was unable to mourn. John Borneman, a Princeton anthropologist, discusses what has happened to this thesis, and the different forms in which Germans have in the postwar period killed their fathers, both at home and in national politics.
SEN Journal: Online Exclusives is delighted to present this interview with Professor Richard Jenkins, Professor of Sociology at the University of Sheffield. He was one of the keynote speakers at the 2012 ASEN Conference.
Vesselina Ratchev and Karen Seegobin interviewed Professor Jenkins at the 2012 ASEN Conference, held at the London School of Economics and Political Science on 27-29 March, 2012.
1. What are the main themes you’ve been working on this year?
When I was asked to give the keynote lecture, I thought I was going to give a fairly straight forward talk about boundaries and suddenly discovered that I am not really sure what boundaries are. But like Rogers [Brubaker] I also have a long standing interest in religion because of my interest in Denmark and Norway.
SEN Journal: Online Exclusives is delighted to bring you an exclusive interview with Emeritus Professor of Sociology Michael Banton, who has been dedicated to the fields of sociology and anthropology for over 50 years. Professor Banton has written extensively on race relations and race theories.
Karen Seegobin interviewed Professor Banton at the 2012 ASEN Conference, held at the London School of Economics and Political Science on 27-29 March 2012.
Karen Seegobin interviews Prof. Michael Banton at the 2012 ASEN Conference
1. What are the main themes you’ve been working on this year?
Well, I’ve just written a paper that I’ve sent to a journal about majority sentiment. All the writing in sociology about majorities is seen from the perspective of minorities. We talk about prejudices about minorities and discrimination…and so in talking about the troubles of minorities, we get a picture of the majority that is biased because it is a reflection of the concern with minorities. I’ve been trying to use this notion of social capital as a source of majority sentiment.
SEN Journal: Online Exclusives would like to present this interview conducted with Professor Rogers Brubaker, a Professor of Sociology and UCLA Foundation Chair at the University of California, Los Angeles. He gave the Ernest Gellner Nationalism Lecture at the 2012 ASEN Conference and was also one of the conference’s keynote speakers. You can view a video of the Gellner Lecture on the ASEN YouTube channel.
Vesselina Ratchev and Karen Seegobin interviewed Professor Brubaker at the 2012 ASEN Conference, held at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Professor Rogers Brubaker giving the Gellner Lecture at the 2012 ASEN Conference
1. What are the main themes you’ve been working on this year?
I’ve been working my way into the literature on religion.
2. What is the best book on nationalism that you’ve read in the past year?
Well actually the most significant reading experience of the past year has been reading an old book. Why just new books? The old book I read which was very compelling and interesting is by Jose Casanova called Public Religions in the Modern World.
3. What new directions are nationalism studies taking?
The quality of nationalism is such that it is continually reinvented in new forms, so there is a guarantee that there will be continually ample material and that the literature will continue to evolve. There has been a massive cultural turn in nationalism studies in the last few decades, but it’s not a sharply bounded field. It’s marked off from the study of ethnicity, but there are interesting inter-penetrations. I think the religion-nationalism nexus is something which is increasingly interesting to a number of people. For instance, I spoke to someone yesterday who was doing an edited volume on nationalism and Islam.
4. What was the key piece of news from the last year that you found the most interesting?
I can think of some pieces not in the last year but the last three, namely the whole set of issues about economic crisis and nationalism. Once again, this is a rather undeveloped research terrain.
SEN Journal: Online Exclusives would like to thank Professor Brubaker for taking the time to be interviewed. For more on the topics discussed, please take a look at the following SEN articles, which can be found in the print edition:
Tibi, B. (2010), Ethnicity of Fear? Islamic Migration and the Ethnicization of Islam in Europe. Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, 10: 126–157.
Hellyer, H. A. (2011), The Allure of Politicisation of Religion – and the Necessity of Empirical Justification. Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, 11: 329–332.