Nationalism in Comparative Perspective

Marharyta Fabrykant, associate researcher of LCSR, took part in  XIII April international Academic Conference on Economic and Social Development (HSE). The conference was hosted on 3-5 April. 

Marharyta Fabrykant, associate researcher of LCSR, took part in XIII April international Academic Conference on Economic and Social Development (HSE). The conference was hosted on 3-5 April. Marharyta gave talk about "Nationalism in Comparative Perspective".

Due to the travel grant of the Laboratory for Comparative Social Research I was able to take part in all the three days of the conference and get an overall impression of the event. Conferences, especially as large and with complicated structure as this one, tend to dissolve into separate fragments, with the loss of connection between sections, panels, even neighboring presentations. Nevertheless, the April conference of the HSE seemed to sustain its wholeness due to the recurring theme, which was explicitly stated in the subject o the seconf plenary session, several presentations and round tables and occasionally was appeared unplanned. This theme was trust.

The initial context was that of trust between the government, business and civil society as a necessary prerequisite of modernization and, at the same time, one of its most important results. However, the very beginning of the section with my participation “Socio-cultural Processes” was marked by apparent perplexity caused by the multitude of existing definitions and kinds of trust. This immediately led to posing a general methodological question on the relation between trust as an individual intention and an institutionally implemented feature of society. Here the background of the “eternal problem” of the difference between sociology and social psychology highlighted the issue of mutual trust between representatives of different disciplinary traditions with dissimilar and therefore suspicious conceptual frames or, to make it even more complicated, varying meaning of the same concepts.  And at the session focused on trust and its inter-country comparative research, the most actively discussed issue was that of general possibility of understanding culturally specific features by means of universal methodology and, consequently, the extent and conditions of trust to the contemporary social sciences and humanities.

My presentation “Nationalism in Comparative Perspective” was a part of the session “Migration and Nationalism in a Comparative Socio-cultural Perspective” and, notwithstanding its academic emphasis (it contained the results of quantitative empirical testing of the main theories of nationalism) caused many questions. The audience was interested in details of applying regression analysis, differences between mundane and scholarly understanding of nationalism, implications of main conclusions and my personal motives for choosing such a controversial subject.  Answering the last and most difficult question, I thought that the possibility for self-disclosure within the academic discourse is as n evidence of the general atmosphere.

By Marharyta Fabrykant