How are identities being forged during the age of globalization? This collection of essays, by scholars from various disciplines and regions of the world, discusses both the construction and deconstruction of identity in its engagement with culture, ethnicity, and nationhood. The authors explore the tension resulting from the desire to create a new cultural space for identities that are at once national, regional, linguistic, and religious. Among the wide-ranging approaches, Tanja Stampfl looks at the elusiveness of cultural identity in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner; Dawn Morais investigates issues of ethnicity and nationality in Malaysia’s tourism advertising; and Cathy Waegner explores ethnic identities as globalized market commodities. Throughout the volume, identity is approached from a variety of sites—fiction, news analysis, film, theme parks, and field work—to contribute new insight and perspective to the well-worn debate over what identity signifies in societies where the existence of minorities, both indigenous and immigrant, challenges the dominant group.

What are the imagined communities that compel men to kill or to die for an idea of a nation? This notion of nationhood had its origins in the founding of the Americas, but was then adopted and transformed by populist movements in nineteenth-century Europe. It became the rallying cry for anti-Imperialism as well as the abiding explanation for colonialism. In this scintillating, groundbreaking work of intellectual history Anderson explores how ideas are formed and reformulated at every level, from high politics to popular culture, and the way that they can make people do extraordinary things. In the twenty-first century, these debates on the nature of the nation state are even more urgent. As new nations rise, vying for influence, and old empires decline, we must understand who we are as a community in the face of history, and change.

Imagined Communities: Constructing Collective Identities in Medieval Europe offers a series of studies focusing on the problems of conceptualisation of social group identities, including national, royal, aristocratic, regional, urban, religious, and gendered communities. The geographical focus of the case studies presented in this volume range from Wales and Scotland, to Hungary and Ruthenia, while both narrative and other types of evidence, such as legal texts, are drawn upon. What emerges is how the characteristics and aspirations of communities are exemplified and legitimised through the presentation of the past and an imagined picture of present. By means of its multiple perspectives, this volume offers significant insight into the medieval dynamics of collective mentality and group consciousness. Contributors are Dániel Bagi, Mariusz Bartnicki, Zbigniew Dalewski, Georg Jostkleigrewe, Bartosz Klusek, Paweł Kras, Wojciech Michalski, Martin Nodl, Andrzej Pleszczyński, Euryn Rhys Roberts, Stanisław Rosik, Joanna Sobiesiak, Karol Szejgiec, Michał Tomaszek, Tomasz Tarczyński, Przemysław Tyszka, Tatiana Vilkul, and Przemysław Wiszewski.

Classical Heritage and European Identities examines how the heritages of classical antiquity have been used to construct European identities, and especially the concept of citizenship, in Denmark from the eighteenth century to the present day. It implements a critical historiographical perspective in line with recent work on the "reception" of classical antiquity that has stressed the dialectic relationship between past, present and future. Arguing that the continuous employment and appropriation of lassical heritages in the Danish context constitutes an interesting case of an imagined geography that is simultaneously based on both national and European identities, the book shows how Denmark’s imagined geography is naturalized through very distinctive uses of classical heritages within the educational and heritage sectors. Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

This two volume handbook provides a comprehensive examination of policy, practice, research and theory related to English Language Teaching in international contexts. More than 70 chapters highlight the research foundation for best practices, frameworks for policy decisions, and areas of consensus and controversy in second language acquisition and pedagogy. The Handbook provides a unique resource for policy makers, educational administrators, and researchers concerned with meeting the increasing demand for effective English language teaching. It offers a strongly socio-cultural view of language learning and teaching. It is comprehensive and global in perspective with a range of fresh new voices in English language teaching research.

Imagined Communities and Educational Possibilities focuses on three main themes: imaged communities expand the range of possible selves, technological advances in the last two decades have had a significant impact on what is possible to imagine, and imagination at even the most personal level is related to social ideologies and hegemonies. The diverse studies in this issue demonstrate convincingly that learners and teachers are capable of imagining the world as different from prevailing realities. Moreover, time and energy can be invested to strive for the realization of alternative visions of the future. Research in this special issue suggests that investment in such imagined communities offers intriguing possibilities for social and educational change.

In a landmark study of history, power, and identity in the Caribbean, Pedro L. San Miguel examines the historiography of Hispaniola, the West Indian island shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic. He argues that the national identities of (and often the tense relations between) citizens of these two nations are the result of imaginary contrasts between the two nations drawn by historians, intellectuals, and writers. Covering five centuries and key intellectual figures from each country, San Miguel bridges literature, history, and ethnography to locate the origins of racial, ethnic, and national identity on the island. He finds that Haiti was often portrayed by Dominicans as "the other--first as a utopian slave society, then as a barbaric state and enemy to the Dominican Republic. Although most of the Dominican population is mulatto and black, Dominican citizens tended to emphasize their Spanish (white) roots, essentially silencing the political voice of the Dominican majority, San Miguel argues. This pioneering work in Caribbean and Latin American historiography, originally published in Puerto Rico in 1997, is now available in English for the first time.

This book is a concise and engaging analysis of contemporary literature viewed through the critical lens of cosmopolitan theory. It covers a wide spectrum of issues including globalisation, cosmopolitanism, nationhood, identity, philosophical nomadism, posthumanism, climate change, devolution and love.

This book addresses key concepts of modern anthropology like "difference" and "identity" in the light of ethnographic evidence from various local settings stretching from Morocco to Indonesia. As the antagonistic and destructive aspects of social identification are also discussed, the book is a contribution to conflict theory, it provides elements of orientation in a world marked by a proliferation of ethnic movements and of nationalisms which become more narrow and more aggressive.

Government forces mean the notion of a 'community' school has become less defined by decisions on core curriculum. This collection explores the extent to which collective notions of school-community relations have prevented citizens from speaking openly about the tensions created where schools are imagined as communities.