From 'here' and 'there' to 'here and there': an autoethnographic research journey into the boundaries of hybridity and the international through narratives of multiple nationalities

Abstract

This thesis takes an ethnographic and autoethnographic approach to explore the narratives of people of multiple nationalities within a theoretical framework that draws on hybridity theory and on interpretivist insights. Through in-depth interviews with people of multiple nationalities, we get a sense of the contours of the national and the international, and the possibilities of a transnational perspective. In the dominant discourse of International Relations, politics is located 'out there' rather than in the everyday, the main political actors are discrete nation-states and ethnic groups rather than ordinary people with complex cross-cutting identities, and the focus is on bounded categories rather than on process, the multiple, and the relational. Alongside the more dominant discourses, postcolonial, poststructural, feminist, and critical theory approaches in the social sciences are providing conceptual tools with which we can explore what it might mean to research difference, not by looking at the identities and bounded categories or 'the thing itself' but by focusing and refocusing on the actual encounters and relations, and placing them into the context of the broader processes and discourses. In this 'third space' we are more interested in the contestation and negotiation that takes place, and that works to define the boundaries and limits of discourses and knowledges. In the particular example of multiple nationalities, we can see how the dominant discourse of the nation-state and culture as bounded and tied to people and territory weighs on the participants’ narratives. Yet at the same time, they are challenging this discourse by redefining culture, by questioning their own frames, by resisting simplistic namings and exclusions, and by representing themselves in terms more complex than allowed by the dominant discourse. In a broader sense, we are all part of this intersection of the international and the local, the here and there, enacting and redefining our space within it and our relations to others.

This thesis begins to explore this territory, and begins to re-imagine a different kind of International Relations.