Why does Nationalism Remain so Persistent in Global Politics?

Speaker: Dr. Angharad Closs Stephens (Geography Department Chair, Swansea University, UK).

Abstract

Identity is widely acknowledged to be a felt experience, yet questions of atmosphere, mood and public sentiments are rarely made central to understanding global nationalism. This talk will ask what difference it makes when we address national identity as principally an affective force? By examining national affects, we will trace how ideas about ‘us and them’ take form in ordinary spaces, in ways that are both deeply felt and hardly noticeable, and which move between empathy and exclusion. We will look specifically at the case of the 2015 refugee crisis in Europe.

Speaker's Profile

Angharad Closs Stephens is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at Swansea University and author of The Persistence of Nationalism: from imagined communities to urban encounters (2013). She has published in Citizenship Studies; Emotion, Space and Society; Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Cultural Geographies, GeoHumanities and International Political Sociology and has published several short essays in the Society & Space open site. From 2014-17 she was assistant editor for Citizenship Studies and since 2019, is associate editor for the Welsh-language international journal, O'r Pedwar Gwynt. In 2018-19, she was recipient of a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to work on a project titled 'National Affects: towards a political geography of atmospheres'.

Date: Monday, December 15, 2025

Time: 13:20-15:15 (JST)

Venue: H-173

Language: English

Registration: Please use the QR code or Link (except for the IRL102 students).