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Oral Presentation Session
Reviewed by: Association for Political and Legal Anthropology
Of interest to: Practicing and Applied Anthropologists, Teachers of Anthropology in Community Colleges, Students
Primary Theme: Immigration/Migration/Citizenship
Secondary Theme: The Political
The goal of this panel is to explore the re-emerging salience of nationalism and nationality in light of an
ongoing and unprecedented mass displacement of peoples. The increasing mobility of people and things
once led anthropologists to see politics as becoming irreversibly global and the world post-national. Yet
today’s mass displacements have brought the nation to the center of conversations on national self, social
relations, and administrative institutions. Nationalism, as a sentiment and a political program, has found
success through its articulation as a reaction to the refugee crisis (Shoshan 2016, Vollebergh 2016,
Geschiere 2009) while nationality, as an authorized form of identification, structures possibilities for
migrants’ mobility, residency, and livelihood (Longva, 1997; Fassin, 2011; Hoffman, 2016) As an
increasing number of anthropologists respond to the urgencies of these intertwined situations, we feel the
time is right for a broader conversation on the relevance of nationality and nationalism in our displaced
present across Europe and the Middle East.
We welcome papers that consider the relevance of nationality, nationalism, and the nation-state for
displacement across Europe and the Middle East. We are particularly interested in works that go beyond
old debates on the global vs. the national and that seek to understand how nationalism and nationality
might be understood not in opposition to but in relation to broader exigencies (climate change, global
capitalism, securitization, transnational kinship, region formation). By drawing comparisons across the
ways in which people, places, and things are differently caught up in national categories, we can begin to
make sense of ‘the Refugee Crisis’ as a diffuse problem-space generating new articulations of nationalism.
Kabir Tambar
Assistant Professor
Stanford University
Sultan Doughan
University of California Berkeley
Zachary Sheldon
Doctoral Candidate
Unversity of Chicago
Zachary Sheldon
Doctoral Candidate
Unversity of Chicago
Zachary Sheldon
Doctoral Candidate
Unversity of Chicago
Kerem Ussakli
Stanford University
Kerem Ussakli
Stanford University
Kerem Ussakli
Stanford University