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.

KEYWORDS:

• Everyday nationalism
• affective practice
• preschool
• pedagogy of nation
• childhood studies
• early childhood education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 In New South Wales, 65.5% of people were Australian born, in the Cessnock area of the preschool 85.5% were Australian born, and the next largest groups being England 1.9%, New Zealand 0.9%, Scotland 0.4%. In Cessnock 74.2% of people had both parents born in Australia. http://www.censusdata.abs.gov.au/census_services/getproduct/census/2016/quickstat/SED10017.

2 It is also possible that she does not understand the barbecue as an exclusively male domain. She may also want to enact the masculine discourse.