Progressive intellectuals at the turn of the last century founded the modern American university, created its disciplines and edited the journals that codified their thoughts. They created the ligaments of the national administrative and regulatory state; they helped legitimate the creation of a national financial and industrial corporate economy. Through the writings of Lyman Abbott, Albion Small, and Simon Patten, three features of progressive thought are underlined: the primacy of a narrative, their hostility to “principled” or abstract-philosophical (...) forms of political and social thought, and their confidence that historical modes of social inquiry would produce “laws”? of progress that would guide practice and anchor values integrating self and society on a democratic basis. Five topics contain these animating features: national patriotism, the new industrial economy, a new democratic ethic, social Christianity, and their critique of the dominance of constitutional jurisprudence and law in American political institutions and practices. (shrink)

This paper emphasizes the crucial role that language use plays in climate change communication. In particular, this paper examines UN public discourse and narratives about climate change. It will be shown that the climate change is often described as a "threat to human wellbeing" and as an external enemy—the Other. On the other hand, humanity is often portrayed as a victim of climate change. The consequence of this rhetoric and logic of apocalypse is insufficient action in relation to climate change. (...) The narrative construction of the Other that is described as a threat is founded on binary oppositions: we/they, self/other, culture/nature, human/non-human and so forth. As long as climate change is described as an external enemy and "independent matter" and climate policy is based on binary oppositions, action to combat climate change will remain insufficient. (shrink)

Israel’s affiliation to the west can be observed in various ways. Israel is a full member of many European organizations, and the Council of Europe as well as a participant in European sports leagues, and the Eurovision song contest. However, this affiliation is not ‘natural’, and evolves from Israel’s exclusion from its geographic region due to geopolitical reasons. For Jewish-Israeli society this affiliation is a significant component in its national narrative. This narration is performed through a process of (...) ‘othering’ Israel within the Middle East. In this article the author demonstrates how the process of ‘othering’ veiled Muslim women, which is a phenomenon observed by many scholars in the past decade, is incorporated into this national narrative and results in the construction of a porno-chic feminine model for secular Jewish-Israeli women. By investigating the discursive construction of women’s bodies as symbols in a geopolitical conflict, the author shows how contemporary national and international discourses employ secular Israeli women as ‘definers and defenders’ of imagined national boundaries. (shrink)

National humiliation is increasingly being used as a way of explaining certain kinds of international conflict. In this paper, I argue that while such explanations are presented on the back of plausible assumptions about emotion, such assumptions also make it unlikely that humiliation can play the myriad of explanatory roles attributed to it, e.g., to explain the rise of Hitler, growing Chinese antagonism towards the West, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, etc. In response, I consider some other ways humiliation may (...) play a role in international conflict and argue that what is likely to be most relevant are not humiliating experiences, felt by individuals or groups, but rather humiliation narratives, which are often used as a discursive mechanism to justify conflict. This is important because it means a nation’s willingness to engage in international conflict depends not on something which seems intractable (i.e., the emotions felt by its citizens), but something more malleable: the narratives it accepts as frames for historical events. (shrink)

From 1957 to 1973, Barcelona Zoo was transformed from a small-scale, antiquated establishment harboring very few animals, a place that was still in a poor condition following the Spanish Civil War, into a new, larger, modern, and internationally recognized institution that included up-to-date animal enclosures and that boasted one of the first dolphinariums in Europe, as well as a famous white gorilla as its icon. From its very beginning, this renovation involved an intense popularization campaign. In this paper, by describing (...) the public discourse generated throughout this transformation and by analyzing the roles played by Antoni Jonch, the director of the zoo at that time; Josep Maria de Porcioles, the then-mayor of Barcelona; and General Francisco Franco, the Spanish dictator who was head of state during this period, I will highlight how the context of the dictatorship not only authorized the new Barcelona Zoo but is, in fact, crucial to its understanding. The narratives that surrounded the renovation of the zoo focused on its civic and educational purpose, with a firm emphasis on modernity. The zoo was a modern space for learning about animals in order to become better people. These narratives were not only suitable to the policies, ideas, and aims of Porcioles’ City Council and Franco’s dictatorial regime; in fact, they completely matched them. Both local and national governments benefited from the restructuring of Barcelona Zoo and from its public discourse as a tool for social control and an instrument for their own propaganda, legitimation, and perpetuation. (shrink)

This article is the first in a series in which I propose to draw on the emergent and poly/trans disciplinary field of Food Studies in order to pursue questions of national identity, political struggle, cultural resistance and psychological survival in Palestine. There are several perspectives from which this connection between food and territoriality may be theorised. At first instance, for the purposes of this paper, I ask whether it is appropriate to draw on the cultural property paradigm in order (...) to spotlight the possibilities and significance of claiming their cuisine as the intangible cultural heritage of Palestinians. This essay is a rhetorical cry for the repatriation and rehabilitation of regional specialties. The need to acknowledge, safeguard and celebrate Palestinian culture, its distinctive genius and the abundance and refinement of its traditions is part of the struggle for meaningful political change. The Palestinian ethnographic research included in this paper was conducted in collaboration with Bait al Karama, a local NGO founded and run entirely by women, for local women. My methodology is rooted in the relationship between activism and academia. (shrink)

The classic national history narrates the formation and progress of a nation-state as a reflection of principles such as a national character, liberty, progress, and statehood. Today there appears to be a growing nostalgia for them, and with it for the role that history once played in the life of the nation. This paper argues that such nostalgia is justified insofar as it expresses skepticism about the philosophical assumptions of much social science history. In doing so, it defends (...) the use of concepts such as narrative and tradition. Yet this paper argues that such nostalgia is not justified insofar as it sides with an analysis of these concepts in terms of given principles of nationhood and statehood. Rather, the paper argues for a shift from developmental historicism to radical historicism. Radical historicism would treat traditions as pragmatically constructed and narratives as contingent. It would thus lead to denaturalizing accounts of the nations as dispersed, discontinuous, and disrupted, and arguably to histories of networks of peoples rather than nations. (shrink)

Resumen: La impronta colonial en el pueblo mapuche llevó a gran parte de sus producciones culturales al borde de la extinción; una de ellas es el tallado monumental en madera, vinculado a procesos ceremoniales en la cultura ancestral. No obstante, desde la década de los noventa, este reaparece junto con los procesos de recuperación y fortalecimiento de la identidad cultural, y adquiere una rápida expansión en el antiguo territorio mapuche dinamizando la frontera política y cultural de este pueblo bajo dos (...) vertientes, como práctica cultural tradicional o como expresión de un arte moderno mayoritariamente urbano. En este marco, este trabajo indaga cómo la instalación del tallado monumental resignifica los espacios urbanos y rurales del Güllumapu. Se sostiene que estas producciones culturales actúan semiotizando el espacio de contacto cultural, refundando el antiguo wallmapu o territorio mapuche, proceso que se realiza al inscribir una fuerte carga simbólica que convoca un nuevo sentido del tiempo-espacio histórico en el territorio mediante una “producción de localidad”, articulando categorías de identidad cultural y nacional, y colaborando en la recuperación de las fronteras al construir una narrativa de la identidad cultural y nacional en un contexto adverso.: The colonial stamp on the Mapuche people led their cultural productions in large part to the brink the extinction. One of these is monumental wood carving, linked to ceremonial processes in the ancestral culture. However, since the 1990s, this has reappeared together with the processes of recovery and strengthening of the cultural identity, and has rapidly expanded into the old Mapuche territory, invigorating the political and cultural border of this people with two main focuses: as a traditional cultural practice or as an expression of mainly urban modern art. In this framework, this study investigates how the installation of monumental carving is redefining the urban and rural spaces of Güllumapu. It is maintained that these cultural productions act by semiotizing the cultural contact space, refounding the old wallmapu or Mapuche territory, a process done by inscribing a strong symbolic power that summons a new sense of the historical time-space in the territory through a “production of place”, articulating categories of cultural and national identity and collaborating in the recovery of the borders by constructing a narrative of the cultural and national identity in an adverse context. (shrink)

By and large, contemporary news stories are stories about a particular nation, told to an audience that is seen and addressed in national terms. However, the understanding of the exact ways in which national imagination becomes engrained in the narrative conventions of news reporting is still rather limited, in particular when it comes to audiovisual genres. This article aims to fill a part of this blank by examining the links between national imagination and the narrative (...) conventions of television news. Building on existing debates about different modes of news reporting, the article distinguishes two distinct sets of narrative conventions at work in television news: one typically found in routine reporting, the other characteristic of crisis and celebratory reporting. It is argued that each of these two sets of conventions is tied to a different form of nationalism, and normally arises in a different political climate. Links between national imagination and narrative conventions vary accordingly. To demonstrate this, the article provides a comparative analysis of narrative structures in selected samples of television news bulletins broadcast in the early 1990s in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The concluding section reflects on the external validity of the chosen case study and surveys supportive evidence from four other relevant cases, drawn from the UK and Israel. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article discusses some common narratives found in discourses on national identity in Russia and Japan, and their temporal transformations reflecting the needs of a nation as it becomes a colonial empire. National identity discourse is examined from the viewpoint of national antagonism arising from an external threat. Russian and Japanese intellectuals, with their vastly different historical and cultural heritage, have dwelled upon similar issues pertaining to modernization of the state and adoption or rejection of foreign ideas (...) and ways of life. There are several themes in Russian and Japanese discourses on national identity that share a significant overlap, particularly themes of national uniqueness and a ‘special path’, deterministic worldviews, imperial cosmopolitanism/messianism and criticism of ‘Western’ philosophical systems and concepts. This article elucidates the shared aspects of these narratives and philosophical inquiries in Russia and Japan and puts them into a historical context. (shrink)

National days often represent unifying narratives about nation-states. Recent calls for historical redress within settler-colonial nations, however, have been based on redefinitions of triumphalist historical narratives, incorporating darker histories of colonialisation’s ongoing effects. This has resulted in controversy about national days, especially in Australia (celebrated on the anniversary of British colonisation). Discussions about Australia's national day may show us if, and how, these competing historical narratives can be integrated into a unified national story. A critical discursive (...) examination of Australian news media articles demonstrated the ways historical narratives were deployed to construct competing understandings of the national day’s meaning. Analysis showed how the narrative of colonisation as a force for cultural advancement was used to justify celebrating the current date. In contrast, acknowledging and reckoning with the past was positioned as crucial to moving forward, and, correspondingly, that changing the date was necessary. Respecifying the historical narrative in this way brought together a more complex, nation-building story unifying Indigenous peoples, settlers, and newer migrants in celebrating the (new?) national day. Such reimagined national stories offer potential ‘golden futures’, but risk allowing nations to continue to avoid reckoning with their dark histories, and, especially, the connection of these to present-day inequalities. (shrink)

It is amazing how polarizing and, at the same time, ahistorical narratives can be heard about the problems discussed, especially in Anglophone countries in recent times, and on social media: identity policy, cultural policy, racism, patriotism, white privilege, patriarchy, sexism, gender, and others. Stoic pragmatism is not in agreement with the most recent populism and neo-tribalistic class of narratives, which highlight division and the polarization of groups of people against other groups of people as the very axis of argumentation. Even (...) more importantly, stoic pragmatists, especially those who happen to have a Central and Eastern European sensibility, may insist on the specificity of the situation of the region as a whole, and the current war in Ukraine only makes this specificity much more articulated. What I mean is that it is difficult to confront active identity and diversity issues when historical contexts and the geographical space have their own narratives about identity, including national identity, in the name of which, for example, Ukrainians fight against Russians these days, and Poles and Balts fought not that long ago. (shrink)

Shifts in the national cultural identity of the US have been reflected in shifts in the US’ dominant constitutional narratives. For the United States, “inter-legality” has been less a matter of dealing with alternative non-state legal narratives than of contending with constantly arising and competing narratives about the “correct” nature of the “official” legal order of the state. The US Supreme Court has claimed to have the “last word” in resolving these arguments but because that Court is so often (...) sharply divided and because the Court membership and the nature of its “last words” changes so often, where a significant element of the society seeks to advance its ideas and interests, it will often do so in legal and constitutional terms. As the national culture undergoes changes, a competing constitutional narrative may gain ground and even ultimately prevail, at least for a time, and achieve Supreme Court “endorsement” for its claims. (shrink)

In the 1990s, social movements against large dams in India were celebrated for crafting a powerful challenge to dominant policies of development. These grounded struggles were acclaimed for their critique of capitalist industrialization and their advocacy for an alternative model of socially just and ecologically sustainable development. Twenty years later, as large dams continue to be built, their critics have shifted the battle off the streets to new arenas – to courts and government committees, in particular – and switched to (...) a techno-managerial discourse of maintaining river health. What accounts for this change? This article traces the trajectory of cultural politics around Indian rivers within the larger imagination of the nation, the rise of economic liberalization and Hindu nationalism, and the emergence of environmental bureaucracies. It argues that, alongside being shaped by this context, current anti-dam campaigns also contend with the legacy of earlier social movements, their gains as well as losses. This political field has narrowed the potential for radical critique, large-scale collective mobilization and, ultimately, keeping rivers alive. (shrink)

How to integrate artificial intelligence technologies in the functioning and structures of our society has become a concern of contemporary politics and public debates. In this paper, we investigate national AI strategies as a peculiar form of co-shaping this development, a hybrid of policy and discourse that offers imaginaries, allocates resources, and sets rules. Conceptually, the paper is informed by sociotechnical imaginaries, the sociology of expectations, myths, and the sublime. Empirically we analyze AI policy documents of four key players (...) in the field, namely China, the United States, France, and Germany. The results show that the narrative construction of AI strategies is strikingly similar: they all establish AI as an inevitable and massively disrupting technological development by building on rhetorical devices such as a grand legacy and international competition. Having established this inevitable, yet uncertain, AI future, national leaders proclaim leadership intervention and articulate opportunities and distinct national pathways. While this narrative construction is quite uniform, the respective AI imaginaries are remarkably different, reflecting the vast cultural, political, and economic differences of the countries under study. As governments endow these imaginary pathways with massive resources and investments, they contribute to coproducing the installment of these futures and, thus, yield a performative lock-in function. (shrink)

Christopher Hill's National History and the World of Nations reminds us of the conjunctural moment of an emerging world market in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the promise it offered for vitalizing a “world history” yet to be written. More importantly, it supplies the silhouette of a radically different interpretive approach, formed by the force of a centrifugal perspective that—through its concentration on how France, the United States, and Japan were simultaneously motivated to construct representations of (...) self-identity in national narratives—converged to disclose the possibility of a wider world no longer held hostage to the geopolitical category of the “West.” Hill's account shows that the impulse behind the formation of national history employed different strategies to imagine a singular linear historical narrative of national identity that aimed both to remove the spectacle of coexisting, different, multiple temporalities and to weld large and regionally disparate populations into a single people who, in a new time, would be instructed to recognize themselves in the nation's story. In Hill's reckoning, national history in France, the United States, and Japan appears simply as another name for historical necessity that sought, through processes of naturalization and nationalization, to overcome the unstable and uneven relationship between state and capital but that failed to conceal the deeper reality of determinations demanded by the relations of capital at the local and international levels. (shrink)

A pervasive feature of populism is the use of rescue narratives to stimulate emotional adherence with audience predicated on evoking fear versus hope for salvation. This paper argues that restricting the rhetorical appeal of rescue narratives to the affective domain obscures the argumentative function that these narratives partake in constructing political arguments. It, thus, claims that rescue narratives can perform as arguments when used to provide reasons to justify political action. The paper examines the way(s) Donald Trump employs rescue narratives (...) as arguments to justify military interventions in Iraq and Syria. The analytical framework supplements the argumentative strategies of the Discourse-Historical Approach to Critical Discourse Studies with pragma-dialectics’ argumentation schemes. The analysis shows that the different elements of the narrative construct premises for argument schemes adduced to justify the rightness of claims. Conceptualizing Trump’s rescue narratives as arguments prompts a reflection on the possibility of narrative discourse to be associated with the domain of reason. (shrink)

Since Estonia is in the midst of a national redefinition and examination of past traditions and future aspirations, it makes an excellent case study for the potentiality of theatre as an arbiter of national identity. The changing value of the institution itself is part of the equation (will Estonians continue to appreciate and attend the theatre in coming years?). In addition, the historical role of Estonian theatre as a repository for national narratives, especially literary ones, makes it (...) a significant site for struggles around print and technology, and between embodied performances and archival performatives.This essay introduces a series of articles that address how Estonia and its theatre might be regarded and understood in light of its history, memories, present experiences, and future possibilities. The idea of pretence that lies at the heart of theatricality itself provides an ideal means for interrogating national identity in a time of great instability and flux. The examples of productions discussed in these three essays share more than a deliberate utilization of the rubrics of theatricality. It seems no coincidence that the reworking of national classics, Estonian national myths, and ethnic folk songs and ceremonies takes place concurrently with the representation of new technologies, commodity capitalism, and diasporic collisions. Embodying precisely the predicament of culture in a country reassessing its past and confronting its future, the theatre is an important institution for national resignification. (shrink)

This article studies the narratives of voices identifying the harrowing aftermath of the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan, and the representations of the contemporary effects of partition in Bapsi Sidhwa’s novel Ice Candy Man. The narrative unfolds past experiences through the eyes of different characters and surroundings from different social, political and religious backgrounds. The novel vividly portrays the horror of violence during the partition, as communities that once coexisted peacefully become engulfed in a whirlwind of hatred and (...) bloodshed. Sidhwa’s polyphonic narrative experiences reflect the multifaceted nature of violence, from communal riots to personal tragedies creating a poignant portrayal of human suffering and resilience. The theme of partition, violence, and memory permeates throughout the novel, encapsulating the socio-political upheavals that marked the birth of two nations – India and Pakistan. This paper, therefore, attempts to analyse the novel in order to understand the ideas of the ‘polyphonic narrative’ of Mikhael Bakhtin’s theory and many other postcolonial critic’s ideas. For portraying the human experience amidst a backdrop of partition and historical turmoil in shaping narratives as presented in the text by applying the theoretical framework of Postcolonial theory. (shrink)

This volume aimed to highlight narrative identities of European cities or city neighbourhoods that have been overlooked, such as mid-sized cities. These cities are neither small towns nor metropolises, cities that are now unveiling their appeal or specificity. The present special issue thus covers a range of representations of cities. The articles investigate more systematically how different texts deal with various cities from different experiential and fictional perspectives. The issue covers the geographical scope across Europe, from east to west (...) or vice versa, as well as a range of different works of national literature(s), but with a clear emphasis on mid-sized European cities that have until now been deemed as lesser-known, secondary, peripheral, ‘other’ cities that are in the focus of the research of the COST project Writing Urban Places. New Narratives of the European City, within which this journal issue is being published. (shrink)

The Green Revolution is often seen as epitomising the dawn of scientific and technological advancement and modernity in the agricultural sector across developing countries, a process that unfolded from the 1940s through to the 1980s. Despite the time that has elapsed, this episode of the past continues to resonate today, and still shapes the institutions and practices of agricultural science and technology. In Brazil, China, and India, narratives of science-led agricultural transformations portray that period in glorifying terms—entailing pressing national (...) imperatives, unprecedented achievements, and heroic individuals or organizations. These “epic narratives” draw on the past to produce meaning and empower the actors that deploy them. Epic narratives are reproduced over time and perpetuate a conviction about the heroic power of science and technology in agricultural development. By crafting history and cultivating a sense of scientific nationalism, exceptionalism, and heritage, these epic narratives sustain power-knowledge relations in agricultural science and technology, which are underpinned by a hegemonic modernization paradigm. Unravelling the processes of assemblage and reproduction of epic narratives helps us make sense of how science and technology actors draw on their subjective representations of the past to assert their position in the field at present. This includes making claims about their credentials to envision and deliver sustainable solutions for agriculture into the future. (shrink)

Narrative identity is said to consist of a few key reference points—places, events, peoples, ceremonies, rites, ideas, and values—that translate into sites of memory that are representative of a person’s or a community’s past. In this essay I explore the role of traumatic memories in the formation of collective identity, the national or transnational sites of memory that are officialized by the state. I argue that collective traumas need to be counterbalanced by personal memories that can diminish their (...) pain and thus enable people to regain their lost sense of being at home. To demonstrate this claim I discuss the twentieth-century traumas that have affected European identity by and through the life stories of W. G. Sebald’s characters in The Emigrants and Austerlitz, which combines the collective and the personal narrative identity. I conclude that the performative aspect of the past needs to be translated into personal forms of commemoration that surpass the official memory archive, which task requires a comprehensive and sensitive understanding of those traumas at both the individual and collective levels. (shrink)

In his 21st-century explorer’s uniform, Nordiclooking Spencer Wells kneels alongside nearly naked, smaller, African hunters who sport bows and arrows. Featured on the National Geographic Web site, “Explorer-in-Residence” Wells hold a bachelor’s and doctorate degree in biology. He is also a filmmaker who both masterminded and hosted National Geographic’s 2002 documentary, The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey, which explains to non-scientists a molecular anthropology narrative of how humans left Africa 60,000 years ago to populate the rest (...) of the globe.In his latest exploratory adventure, Wells is the project leader and spokesperson for the recently announced “Genographic Project,” a “landmark study of the human journey.” In April 2005, National Geographic and IBM, with funding from the Waitt Family Foundation, launched the Genographic Project as a five-year “research partnership” that aims to “trace the migratory history of the human species” and “map how the Earth was populated.”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Narrative Formulation RevisitedOn Seeing the Person in Mental Health RecoveryAnna Bergqvist (bio)The use of narrative in mental health contexts models consciousness as something necessarily embodied, as already part of the world, in an inherently value-laden and perspectival way. As such narrative presents a powerful tool for critical reassessment and reevaluation of preconceived ideas in relating to difficult concepts in clinical interactions.Narrative structures can reveal psychological (...) differences between persons in a way that matters for the provision of effective treatment and management. As emphasized by Solomon (2015), narrative reasoning is also motivated by distinctly first-personal concerns that are operative in the practitioner–client relationship. I maintain that the dynamics of that interpersonal relationship are part and parcel of what it means to address the patient's needs to be seen as a person in humanistic empathetic care—without thereby reducing truth to an individual person's perspective to encourage positive transformation.1The notion of empowering narratives to encourage positive change is a core concept behind the emphasis on the critical role of empathy in explaining human development and psychoanalytic change within the self-psychology tradition but is also key to recovery-based models of the significance of person-centered quality of life in medicine more generally. This is defined in mental health as recovering a good quality of life as determined by the values of (by what matters or is important to) the individual concerned (Allott, Loganathan, & Fulford, 2002; Fulford, 1989, 2004; Fulford, Peile, & Carroll, 2012). The importance of strengths in this regard was reflected for example in the UK government program on values-based mental health assessment. The 3 Keys program, as it was called (National Institute for Mental Health in England, NIMHE, and the Care Services Improvement Partnership, 20082) identified three shared 'keys' to good practice in mental health assessment: three things that were identified in a wide-ranging consultation as being important alike by health professionals of all kinds and by 'service users' thus understood as patients and carers (Fulford, Duhig, Hankin, Hicks, & Keeble, 2015a; Fulford, Dewey, & King, 2015b). The third of these keys was defined in [End Page 7] the subsequently published Good Practice Guidance, as "a person-centred focus that builds on the strengths, resiliencies and aspirations of the individual service user as well as identifying his or her needs and challenges" (NIMHE, 2008: 6); and the guidance included a number of real-life case examples of best recovery practice reflecting this aspect of mental health care (Slade et al., 2014).What my (Bergqvist, 2018, 2020, 2022, forthcoming) account adds to this claim is that while such choices are revelatory or expressive of a distinctly first-personal stance, they do not constitute or determine selfhood and self-interpretation in a fixed way. Moreover, the reason is that one can also adopt a second-personal stance on one's own experience and address oneself, where the relationship between the first- and the second-personal narrative perspective on experience and self-understanding is itself a dynamic and open-ended evaluative process.Anna Bergqvist Anna Bergqvist is Reader in Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University since 2021, and has been Postgraduate Research Coordinator and AHRC North West Doctoral Pathway Consortium Lead for Philosophy since 2020. I was elected to a Visiting Fellowship at St Catherine's College University of Oxford for Michaelmas Term 2021. Her service to the profession out with the University includes acting as Secretary of the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) Section for Philosophy & Humanities in Psychiatry (October 2020 – present), Executive Committee Member of the Royal College of Psychiatry (RCPsych) SIG in Philosophy (February 2020 – present) and External Examiner, University of Liverpool (November 2019 – present, 4-year tenure). She is also Director of the Values-based Theory Network at St Catherine's Collaborating Centre for Values-based Practice at the University of Oxford, and Member of its Whiteness and Race Equality Network. Her approach to philosophy bridges the disciplines of moral philosophy, moral psychology and philosophy of psychiatry to improve lives through her reputable expertise in moral perception and co-production as a mechanism for change.Notes1. Here I side with Goldie (2012) and Solomon (2015), who... (shrink)

Alongside the institutionally constructed European identity, research shows that insights into citizens’ sense of belonging are valuable as well in assessing questions of identity. The tendency to conflate European identity with EU identity has spurred debates about the components that underlie European identification. The online subsidiarity adopted by the EU through e-platforms has allowed for a new form of citizenship where e-citizens legitimate the issues under debate. This article examines the contents of European and national identities in the e-debaters’ (...) comments posted on the Debating Europe platform. Drawing on narrative and discursive approaches, we propose a framework to operationalize the legitimation and identification categories used by e-debaters within their discursive construction of European identity. The qualitative empirical research shows three main legitimation clusters: the “EU as a loss,” “inclusive gain,” and “exclusive gain.” We discuss these findings within the broader context of Europeanization, identity multiplicity, and the conditions of the EU enlargement policy. (shrink)

The Book of Joshua constitutes a vital biblical resource for interpreting modern narratives of conquest and colonialism. As a historical narrative, it reveals the fluid and complex character of national memory; as a national narrative of origins, it points to processes and motifs that shaped the identities of both Israel and the United States; as a scriptural narrative, it presents a revelatory vision that illumines contemporary narratives of conquest and evokes the stories of both colonizing (...) and colonized peoples. (shrink)

A dominant cultural narrative within Costa Rica describes Costa Ricans not only as different from their Central American neighbours, but it also exalts them as better: specifically, as more white, peaceful, egalitarian and democratic. This notion of Costa Rican exceptionalism played a key role in the creation of their health care system, which is based on the four core principles of equity, universality, solidarity and obligation. While the political justification and design of the current health care system does, in (...) part, realize this ideal, we argue that the narrative of Costa Rican exceptionalism prevents the full actualization of these principles by marginalizing and excluding disadvantaged groups, especially indigenous and black citizens and the substantial Nicaraguan minority. We offer three suggestions to mitigate the self-undermining effects of the dominant national narrative: 1) encouragement and development of counternarratives; 2) support of an emerging field of Costa Rican bioethics; and 3) decoupling health and national successes. (shrink)

National history has once again become a battlefield. In internal political conflicts, which are fought on the terrain of popular culture, museums, schoolbooks, and memorial politics, it has taken on a newly important and contested role. Irrespective of national specifics, the narratives of new nationalism are quite similar everywhere. National history is said to stretch back many centuries, expressesing the historical continuity of a homogeneous people and its timeless character. This people struggles for independence, guided by towering (...) leaders and inspired by the sacrifice of martyrs. Unlike earlier forms of nationalism, the main enemies are no longer neighbouring states, but international and supranational institutions. To use national history as an integrative tool, new nationalists claim that the media and school history curricula should not contest or question the nation and its great historical deeds, as doubts threaten to weaken and dishonour the nation. This book offers a broad international overview of the rhetoric, contents, and contexts of the rise of these renewed national historical narratives, and of how professional historians have reacted to these phenomena. The contributions focus on a wide range of representative nations from around all over the globe. (shrink)

This paper analyzes how cultural diversity in Argentina is calling into question modern political concepts like republic, nation or democracy. The phenomenon of population movements, the demand for recognition of indigenous people's rights, or the conflicts arising from claims to regions' right to life and identity - as in the case of the town of Gualeguaychú in Argentina - challenge the logic of the nation-state and its sovereignty as well as the republican principles of liberty, equality and fraternity. The author (...) examines how far the representation of the Argentinean republic at the time of its foundation included a standardizing vision of diversity, and how the legacy of this representation brought about an ambivalence between a universalist wish to take part in the progress of humanity and the reality of an exclusive democracy that valued one culture over others. It studies the narrative of national identity and attempts to describe how, proceeding from this narrative, the opposition between civilization and barbarity affects the way Latin Americans see the great challenges presented by the future of democracy, and by the recognition of the plurality of cultural allegiances. (shrink)

The Hastings Center addresses fundamental ethical issues in the areas of health, medicine, and the environment as they affect individuals, communities, and societies. With a small staff of senior researchers at the Center and drawing upon national and international experts, The Hastings Center pursues interdisciplinary research and education that includes both theory and practice. Founded in 1969 by philosopher Daniel Callahan and psychoanalyst Willard Gaylin, The Hastings Center is the oldest independent, nonpartisan, interdisciplinary research institute of its kind in (...) the world. From its earliest days The Hastings Center has understood that the moral problems arising from rapid advances in medicine and biology are set within a broad intellectual and social context. The Center's collaborations with policy-makers, in the private as well as the public sphere, assist them in analyzing the ethical dimensions of their work. (shrink)