Sanja Vico discusses her new book, ‘Doing Nation’ in a Digital Age Banal Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in Polymedia Environments, with Mirca Madianou, Sandra Obradović, and Birgül Yılmaz. We’ll be live on Facebook, YouTube, and Zoom on 19th March from 1630 – registration is required to join us on Zoom.

This is a joint event with the Centre for European Studies at the University of Exeter.

About the book

This book introduces a new theory of national identity, arguing that the nation does not only represent an abstract “imagined community” but also represents embodied cultural and discursive practices.

Drawing upon a detailed case study of Serbian Londoners, this truly interdisciplinary study positions media as constitutive of national identities. The author contends that nations come into being and are sustained through everyday interpersonal communication practices that have increasingly become mediated, especially for migrants. She develops the concept of “doing nation” to argue that we should think of the nation as a dynamic process. Situated first within a particular migration context, the concept is then applied more broadly as everyday communication practices are becoming increasingly mediated worldwide.

Covering a breadth of key theories and concepts in this field, including diaspora, ethnicity, nationalism, cosmopolitanism, social media affordances and polymedia, this book will appeal to scholars and students researching digital media, migration, identities, nationalism and cosmopolitanism in the social science disciplines.

Sanja Vico

Sanja Vico is a Lecturer (E&R) in Communications and Digital Media at the University of Exeter, and a collaborator on the ERC-funded project Justice Interactions and Peacebuilding at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). She received a PhD in Media and Communications from Goldsmiths, University of London, having previously graduated from the LSE and the Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Belgrade. She has published on issues of digital media in contexts of migration, identity, nationalism, cosmopolitanism, post-conflict justice and reconciliation. Her monograph titled “‘Doing Nation’ in a Digital Age: Banal Expressions of Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in Polymedia Environments” was published with Routledge in December 2024. She was awarded for her article “‘Globalised Difference’: Identity Politics on Social Media” by ECREA in 2019.

Mirca Madianou

Mirca Madianou is Professor in the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her current research focuses on the social consequences of communication technologies, infrastructures and artificial intelligence (AI) in a global south context especially in relation to migration and humanitarian emergencies. She is currently Principal Investigator on a British Academy grant on digital identity programmes in refugee camps in Thailand. Her latest book, ‘Technocolonialism: when technology for good is harmful’ was published in November 2024. Earlier books include: Mediating the Nation: news, audiences and the politics of identity, and Migration and New Media: transnational families and polymedia. At Goldsmiths, Mirca is academic co-director of the newly established Migrant Futures Institute and co-convenor of the Digital Culture Unit.

Sandra Obradović

Sandra Obradović is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the Open University and a researcher at the Electoral Psychology Observatory (EPO, LSE). She completed her PhD in Social Psychology at the London School of Economics in the UK. She serves on the editorial board for the European Journal of Social Psychology. She specializes in researching how group identities and group boundaries are constructed, mobilised and resisted, and the consequences this has for political behaviour, including in contexts of post-conflict societies, populism, polarization and elections.

Birgül Yılmaz

Birgül Yılmaz is Senior Lecturer in Intercultural Communication at the University of Exeter, where she is one of the University Senators. She is a critical sociolinguist, applied linguist, and ethnographer conducting ethnographic and discourse analytic research projects that focus on language, forced migration, and everyday social inequalities in humanitarian settings, and has held research and teaching positions internationally, with roles in Greece, the UK, the USA, and Hong Kong. She was awarded a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, during which I conducted an 18-month ethnography with refugees living in two neighbourhoods in Athens.