‘There are times when I feel like a bit of an alien’: middling migrants and the national order of things

Who Can Represent the Nation? Elite Athletes, Global Mega Events and the Contested Boundaries of National Belonging

“…It is worth noting, here, the role of humour in marking out someone as belonging to a particular group. While the link between comedy and national identity has been studied in more general terms (Medhurst, 2007), knowing about, and getting, particular jokes or forms of comedy requires some degree of immersion in a given cultural setting and can be an important way in which people can distinguish themselves from others, including in national terms (Skey, 2018).…”

Guest Editor’s Introduction: “Everyday Nationalism in World Politics: Agents, Contexts, and Scale”

“…Another challenge for everyday nationalism is to turn outward to engage with global phenomena rather than remaining focused on the diversity of practices within individual cases (Malešević 2019). Recent work by Michael Skey aims to update banal nationalism and everyday nationalism by pointedly engaging with globalization, migration, and other related phenomena that do not easily fit within their conceptual frameworks (Skey 2009;Skey and Antonsich 2017;Skey 2018). The current (as of this writing) global health crisis potentially provides additional clues to resolving this issue by drawing attention to the seemingly sudden emergence of nationalism in response to pandemic (Antonsich 2020;Bieber 2020).…”

Kinship, whiteness and the politics of belonging among white British migrants and Pākehā in Aotearoa/New Zealand

“…As a result, the extent to which the British remain an "intimate other" (see Pearson above) may have begun to wane. They are perhaps best described as 'middling migrants,' relatively affluent and occupying a cultural in-between space "neither completely foreign nor entirely familiar" in their host society (Pearson 2014, 504;Skey 2018). In addition, since the 1970s, decolonising movements and the politics of biculturalism (Author 2 2019) have forced Pākehā, the settler majority group of New Zealanders of European descent 2 , to reconsider their place and identity in Aotearoa/New Zealand.…”

“…This elaboration is thus an active process and we analyse narratives of 'kinship' to further a nuanced understanding of how notions of 'race', nation and culture are mobilized as part of a politics of belonging within the settler state. We ask how 'cultures of shared ancestry' are negotiated through the selective maintenance of kinship among the Pākehā majority population and white British ''middling migrants'' (Skey 2018) in Aotearoa/New Zealand. We show that white British migrants and Pākehā deploy kinship differently but that both processes of claiming and distancing from kinship serve a similar purpose of asserting belonging in the settler polity.…”