SKEY mindless markers MAY 2015.pdf (104.01 kB)
Mindless markers of the nation’: The routine flagging of nationhood across the visual environment
The visual environment has increasingly been used as a lens with which to understand wider processes of social and economic change with studies employing in-depth qualitative approaches to focus on, for example, gentrification or trans-national networks. This exploratory paper offers an alternative perspective by using a novel method, quantitative photo mapping, to examine the extent to which a particular socio-cultural marker, the nation, is ‘flagged’ across three contrasting sites in Britain. As a multi-national state with an increasingly diverse population, Britain offers a particularly fruitful case study, drawing in debates around devolution, European integration and Commonwealth migration. In contributing to wider debates around banal nationalism, the paper notes the extent to which nations are increasingly articulated through commerce, consumption and market exchange and the overall significance of everyday markers (signs, objects, infrastructure) in naturalising a national view of the world.
History
Published in
SociologyVolume
51Issue
2Pages
274 - 289Citation
SKEY, M. 2015. Mindless markers of the nation’: The routine flagging of nationhood across the visual environment. Sociology, pp. 1-16.Publisher
© The Author. Published by SageVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Acceptance date
2015-08-10Publication date
2015-08-10Notes
This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Sociology and the definitive published version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0038038515590754ISSN
1469-8684Publisher version
Language
- en