Rethinking Nationality in the Context of Globalization

Abstract

Globalization poses a significant challenge to the nation as a social form and consequently to theories that rely on nationality as a conceptual category. This article reviews a range of approaches to the conceptualization of nationality within mass communication, media theory, and cultural studies: mainstream nation-based theories, critical nation-based theories, relational theories, globalization theories, and contextualist theories. An analytical strategy is then proposed within which nationality is conceptualized as one particular logic among others that organize economic, political, technological, and cultural territories and flows.

Assessing global diffusion with Web memetics: The spread and evolution of a popular joke

“…The speed and scale of these global flows have accelerated in recent decades (Wiley, 2004), following the rapid development of new ICTs and the Internet (Castells, 2001;Ess & Sudweeks, 2001). Globalization is a political issue because according to its critics, it serves the economic, cultural, and political interests of the West-for example, leading to other countries consuming and adapting to Western (and particularly American) culture and ideologies (Beck, Sznaider, & Winter, 2003;Bloch & Lemish, 2003).…”

Assembling Social Space

“…Our work develops that line of thinking by drawing on assemblage theory (DeLanda, 2006;Deleuze & Guattari, 1987;Marcus & Saka, 2006;Massumi, 1992;Ong & Collier, 2005;Wiley, 2005;Wise, 1997Wise, , 2000Wise, , 2005 to construct a non-Euclidean model of social space. We then use that model in the analysis of recent ethnographic fieldwork and interviews conducted Concepción, Chile (also see Wiley, 2004Wiley, , 2006aWiley, , 2006b. In the proposed model, the social space of a given individual is not assumed to be the legal or politically recognized territory within which he or she was born, nor is it seen as the immediate geographical locale in which an individual is currently living.…”

“…Modern theories of communication and culture have become problematic in light of four interrelated features of late modernity: the imbrication of places and territories within regional and global networks (Held, McGrew, Goldblatt, & Perraton, 1999;Sassen, 2000aSassen, , 2000bWiley, 2004); the disembedding, distantiation, and technological mediation of social relations (Adams, 2005;Appadurai, 1990;Castells, 1996Castells, , 2009Giddens, 1991;Rouse, claims about the defining characteristics of modernity and postmodernity or focuses on the ontological and epistemological assumptions undergirding theory. There have been too few empirical, contextualized studies of actual practices and experiences to determine whether the utopian and dystopian narratives and counternarratives of late modern theory are in fact descriptive of actual processes (Couldry, 2000;Sassen, 2007;Tomlinson, 1994).…”

Globalization and Culture: The Three H Scenarios

“…These flows do not eradicate local cultures, they only change some of their traits and reinforce others. Along the same line, Wiley (2004) contends that national cultures, which are fluid constructs, have become part of a heterogeneous transnational field of culture.…”