Conference 2023: Nationalism and Multiculturalism
The 32nd Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism (ASEN) will take place on 3-5 April 2023. This year’s theme will be Nationalism and Multiculturalism. The Annual Conference will take place in Loughborough and is organised in cooperation with the Loughborough University Nationalism Network (LUNN).
Call for papers
‘Multiculturalism is dead, long live to multiculturalism’.
About ten years ago, key European leaders like Angela Merkel, David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy pronounced the death of multiculturalismarguing it had failed to incorporate migrants and their children into European societies. A decade on, we now live in times of rampant nationalisms, frequently imbued with anti-immigration if not overtly xenophobic positions. Yet, if multiculturalism as political rhetoric is dead, it is certainly alive and thriving as a demographic fact, through a range of cultural practices and even as a model of policy interventions in many contemporary societies.
The conference explores the tensions between nationalism and multiculturalism in order to reflect on demographic change in increasingly diverse societies.
By exploring how the nation changes when its population changes multiculturalism is not only understood in normative terms, as a political principle for integrating a diverse population, but also as a descriptor of the ‘transition to diversity’ (Richard Alba) which characterises many contemporary societies.
Thus, along questions which speak more closely to multiculturalism as a normative principle and a policy paradigm (we are also interested in questions which interrogate the relationship between nation and diversity in its everyday aspects.
The conference is intended to cover cases from all parts of the world and welcomes papers based on different theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches. We also invite contributions from different disciplines and fields, such as sociology, geography, anthropology, psychology, political science, political theory, demography, migration studies, cultural studies, media and communication studies, critical racial studies, philosophy, history, and law.
Themes may include, but are not limited to:
- Nationalism and diversity
- Race and nation – racism and nationalism
- Nationalism and belonging
- Religious diversity and national societies
- Multiethnicity in post-colonial states
- Competing nationalisms in multinational states
- Critical perspectives on ethnicity and race
- Nationalism, acculturation and assimilation
- Liberal nationalism and group differentiated rights
- Nationalism, multiculturalism and interculturalism
- Multicultural citizenship
- Empires and multiculturalism
- Evaluating the ‘politics of recognition’
- Migration, multiculturalism and minority rights
- Nationalism and demographic change
- Nationalism, transnationalism and diaspora
- Everyday multiculturalism and everyday nationalism
- Nations between multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism
- Multiculturalism and intersectionality – (gender/sexuality/class/age/ethnicity/race)
- Media, diversity and everyday nationalism
- Media and the imagination of diverse, plural nation
- Global media and multiculturalism