Report on the annual conference of the Association for Ethnicity and Nationalism

Gonul Bozoglu, a PhD student in the sociology department recently participated in the annual conference of the Association for Ethnicity and Nationalism (ASEN) on ‘Nationalism and Belonging’ at the London School of Economics on 1-3 April. This was a great opportunity to get to grips with the ways in which political theorists, economists and others think about nationalism and to become familiar with some of the latest ideas about belonging as a London School of Economics, LSE new way of thinking about identity. She particularly enjoyed sessions about the politics of national days (in Scandinavia) and theories of belonging.

A number of the sessions related to new ideas about the complexities of belonging and provided really interesting ways of thinking. There were also many sessions focusing on particular areas of the world, such as a session on the Middle East and Gonul’s own session on Turkey, where she co-presented ideas from a forthcoming publication about historical nostalgias and contemporary politics in relation to museum representations in Istanbul and Ankara.