Fifteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

Collective identities are often anchored in sets of conscious and unconscious meanings that people share (Fligstein, 2008). The production of a people, their social formation and as such their ‘collectivity’ is reproduced and materialized through a network of apparatuses and daily practices, that facilitate the institutionalization and inculcation of identities from the cradle to the grave (Balibar & Wallerstein, 1991). For example, national identities aimed at defining who is a member of the community, as well as who exists outside of the collective and thus recognized identity (Triandafyllidou, 1998). In Europe, identities are nested in the national, regional and local spheres, becoming activated under different social conditions (Fligstein, 2008). However, the logic embedded in a dichotomous paradigm is unable to accommodate identities that seem to occupy both binaries. For example, the hybrid, ambiguous and unintelligible – due to its illogical existence, European convert to Islam emerges at the crossroad between Europe and the seemingly barbaric ‘other’, Islam (Ní Mhurchú, 2015; Butler, 2008; El-Tayeb, 2011). We consider these experiences of being caught in the ‘in-between’ of dualism; of ‘foreignness’, is a challenge to the ‘master-narrative of sovereignty’, which defines the choices of living in a determinate spatial and temporal space of nationhood (Ní Mhurchú, 2015).