Affective practices of everyday nationalism in an Australian preschool

Abstract

Nationalism as an ideology seeks to assert the primacy of national community in children's thinking, beings and feelings through curricula and official school rituals. Another form of nationalism permeating the daily routines and mundane spaces of everyday life, however, often remains imperceptible to our critical gaze. This paper brings these invisible practices into sight in young children's institutional lives and uniquely focuses on their affective and emotional dimensions. To understand how these affective practices operate, it zooms in on two situations, first, in which a teacher invites young children to engage with the nation's affective and emotional dimensions, and second, where affective practices of nation are performed by children. Situations are drawn from an ethnographic study in an Australian preschool. The paper calls for more recognition of and a critical engagement with everyday nationalism and its affective practices that often go unnoticed yet seamlessly reproduce exclusive ideals of nation.

Everyday nationalism in Swedish preschools: something old, something new and something borrowed

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“…Together, this makes certain cultural practices appear as normal or given, while others appear as deviant. In this way, the concept of cultural heritage is closely related to the more analytical concept of everyday nationalism (Millei 2021;Skey 2011;Skey and Antonsich 2017), which builds on Billig's seminal work on the concept of banal nationalism (Billig 1995). The two concepts are closely related, but not mutually exclusive.…”

Learning Nation in Early Childhood Education: Multi-Sited Comparison between Pedagogies of Nation in Australia and Hungary

“…Nation is emotional and affective (e.g. Anderson 2009;Millei, 2019a) and our last two examples concern its emotional aspects, illustrating how positive attachment to nation is mobilised. In the first example, while the story explicitly draws upon national symbols, our attention is focused on the emotional ways the teacher performs her reading.…”

Strengthening The Sense of Patriotism in Madrasah Ibtidaiyah, Indonesia Based on The Islamic Boarding School System

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