MO3351 Doing and Practicing Transnational and Global History

Looking back on the Clavin reading from the beginning of the semester as my research comes together and class discussions have come to a close, I feel like I can understand the exact application of transnational history as he describes it in his article, while also thinking of ways my understanding of it is still expanding to meet my interest in queer history. His categories of ‘time, manner, and place’ look different for different fields of research, and I’ve spent time considering how they might look in queer history. 

Starting with Time. Clavin discusses eurocentric periodization, and how that has created ideas of progress, as it relates with colonialism, that have been imposed on the rest of the world. For queer history, there seems to be a distinction made between before and after the Stonewall Riots (a revolt led by queer and transgender people of color in New York City, which garnered international attention towards LGBTQ+ rights movements). And before and after the AIDS crisis (which created a necessity for organized activism). Because of the proximity of these two events to each other, and the considerable progress made in parts of the world after the fact, a lot of scholarship in queer history is confined to the past 75 years alone. It’s important to note of course that the progress following these events was not global, and should not be taken for granted as watershed moments across the world when in reality it was largely confined to the west (which also gets into a whole thing about homonationalism which I will discuss in another blog post). Queer people have existed across the globe throughout all points of history and continue to do so today, finding ways to look for them outside of modern resources and the western world is important. 

Next, Manner. Manner is interesting to consider when looking into queer histories. Many of the sources available in the archives are ephemeral objects such as flyers for events or badges, existing only in small moments of time. However other ways to look for queer people in history is through the law. Though rarely explicitly mentioned in legal proceedings, the existence of anti sodomy policies, or strict gender codes hint towards an existence of queer people that those in power sought to hide. Other forms of sources available, could be letters and housing records, though historians have traditionally been quick to dismiss such evidence. I’m curious to see how the internet will begin to play a role as a resource for studying queer history, with cites like discord creating spaces for shared communities for queer people across the globe. Or what methods will be discovered in use of uncovering pre-colonial queer cultures in indigenous and non-western local communities.

Through a queer lens of analysis, Clavin’s discussion of place is deeply entwined with the discussion of time, and looking for queer history outside a western context. There is not a singular, universal queer experience, though homonormative assumptions generated in the West largely influence how and what historians look for when searching the archives for queer history. LGBTQ+ identities take many forms and influence people’s understandings of themselves differently. Looking at local communities within a transnational context can help us understand the variety of experiences and how terms have been shared across spaces.

I think that there is so much potential exploring queer history through a transnational lens, and I’m excited to see where my project continues to take me and what I can do with it later on. 

This is a fascinating project proposal. I really like how you start off by setting out the dividing lines within cold war historiography. By using Pekacz and Mitchell you also effectively place your project within its historiographical context.

By highlighting local rock music as a tool of opposition and resistance, you make a compelling point for why your project is important. You move away from grand narratives of history, which see the Cold War as an ideological clash and look at the personal stories of the Cold War. As looking at local experiences is important to your project it may be worth looking at some scholarship on micro history, though this is just an idea.

I think your thematic approach is certainly appropriate for this essay as it will allow you to compare nations and movements. I am particularly interested by the section you say you will do on how the state regulated rock music. It may be worth comparing different state approaches across Eastern Europe as this may provide more context as to how much of a threat rock music was seen in these nations.

Your array of primary sources are novel and brilliant. I think it will be particularly interesting to use recordings of performances and lyrics. It may be worth trying to embed some of these sources within your work to give the reader some visual examples and further engage them.

I like that you already lay out counterarguments your project may face. The use of coded language is an interesting example of how musicians evaded censorship. However, does this not mean that these messages of dissent were only accessible to a few people. Surely if the messages of dissent were coded, they cannot be accessible to masses of young people.

Another small criticism is that using the term “fall of communism” may be a bit too broad. Communism fell across Europe for any different reasons. Whilst rock music may have contributed to its downfall in Germany and Poland you do not explore the impact of Rock music in nations like the USSR or Yugoslavia. Therefore, attributing the rise of rock music to the fall of communism may be too much of a generalisation.

Overall, I think this is an interesting project which will highlight the forgotten dissidents of Eastern Europe. I am really looking forward to seeing the finished result which I am sure will be a very enjoyable read.

This is a highly interesting project proposal. To me, it possesses a particularly sharp historiographical edge as an application of transnationalism. Immigration is, of course, a prominent subfield within transnational history, yet political exiles — such as the White Russians in Paris and  Shanghai — stand in marked contrast to migration in its conventional sense. Their experiences are distinguished by the immediacy and rapidity of their departure, as well as by the near-total loss of a legitimate existence in their homeland. This, in turn, often produces a heightened sense of displacement and rootlessness. For this reason, I think your chosen subject group addresses a relatively underexplored dimension within transnational studies of cross-border movement. Equally compelling is the concept of “statelessness” that you foreground. It strikes at the heart of common methodological assumptions of nationalism —  namely, that people, organisations, and events operate within a clearly defined national framework. By focusing on statelessness, your project demonstrates that individuals were not always anchored to a stable or recognised nationhood, thereby revealing the ambiguity — if not the outright absence — of national identity. In this respect, both your subject and conceptual framework effectively challenge assumptions that are often taken for granted.

While I am not especially familiar with Paris, as someone born and raised in Shanghai I find the potential findings of your research particularly engaging. The legacy of the city’s historical extraterritoriality remains visible today, especially in its central districts, where the streetscape differs markedly — indeed, appears more “Western” — than in suburban residential areas. The period your project examines coincides with the height of privileged foreign presence in Shanghai. Within this context, the case of the White Russians is especially intriguing. Although their foreign background may have spared them the most extreme forms of deprivation, their status as dispossessed political exiles likely placed them below more established communities such as the French, British, and Americans within the city’s hierarchy of power and respectability. This multiplicity of authority makes Shanghai an especially rich setting in which to study stateless communities. In determining their legal status and social treatment, how did White Russians interact and negotiate (perhaps differently )with local Chinese authorities and the various Western powers present in the city? Which authorities did they perceive as most capable of serving their interests? To what extent were they able to exploit tensions between these groups to their advantage? The juxtaposition between the émigrés’ statelessness and the city’s intense cosmopolitanism offers fertile ground for uncovering complex and multilayered transnational connections.

The range of sources you propose to use is impressively broad, encompassing both official archival materials and more grassroots productions generated within the émigré community, as well as records from international organisations and host-state authorities. Together, these promise to build a comprehensive picture of how White Russians abroad navigated their stateless condition and engaged with local structures of power. One possible extension might be to look beyond their interactions with governing authorities and consider their relationships with ordinary residents in their host societies. A small, anecdotal example that I can provide may gesture toward the significance of such interactions: in Shanghai, many locals have long held an affection for a dish known as luó sòng tāng (“Russian soup”), a domesticated version of borscht. While very partial and inconclusive, this hints at the legacy of everyday forms of cultural exchange between Shanghainese and Russian emigrants. Tracing these kinds of popular and social interactions could shed further light on how stateless communities integrated into local environments through personal connections and shared cultural practices. This, in turn, might reveal an additional dimension of their stateless existence — one that complements their more formal efforts to navigate identity and, perhaps, to maintain aspirations of restoring themselves to Russia. 

These readings and their exploration of citizenship and immigration were not only interesting and also made me reflect on the current discussions concerning immigration. I was drawn to Camiscioli’s argument in particular. She argues that the French immigration policy was fundamentally a bio-political project driven by a ‘demographic crisis’ and ‘pronatalist’ anxieties, where immigrants were evaluated as ‘reproductive value’ rather than just labor power. Most of the literature and political debates now seem to be on the opposite, with countries such as France and the UK aiming to supposedly ‘protect’ the ‘biology’ of their countries. She continues, highlighting how this ‘assimilation’ inevitably bled into a sterilization project, moving the act of reproduction from the private sphere to the public in order for its ‘development’. The irony, as Camiscioli points out, is that the state desperately wanted these foreigners to assimilate, yet they simultaneously feared that the very process of “assimilation” would lead the second generation to adopt the same ‘voluntary sterility’ seen in the French population.

Reinecke, however, when looking at British migration policies from the 1800’s-1900’s highlights its restrictive nature to protect the countries industrial development. Reinecke claims that before this period, the British state was largely indifferent to the movement of people and that it was only with the rise of more burocracy that concerns shifted. We see this manifest in Britain through the “Coloured Alien Seamen Order” of 1925, which weaponized the lack of documentation to strip British subjects of their rights, effectively importing racialized colonial hierarchies into the domestic sphere.

These readings were interesting and helped me see the historical echo’s that brought todays political climate regarding biology, citizenship and migration. With political parties such as Reform UK on the rise I am seeing similar rhetoric and phrases which Camiscioli highlights across her text. Is there a way forward, away from these harmful views? Or is this a historical cycle repeating itself?

Writing my short essay on the wider methodological approaches to interwar statelessness, and to an extent statelessness in general, provided me a great many insights on the best method of approaching my project on the White Russian diaspora. One particularly valuable aspect was of course my realisation, or at least the discovery of my belief, that any one approach to statelessness, transnational, supranational, or comparative, each carries inherent flaws that make them ill-suited to a non-supplemented usage.

When reading the historiography I discovered a clear and present disparity between ambition and reality in relation to the universalist ambitions of supranational and international organisations and the material reality on the ground. This confirmed my previous suspicions on the matter that a purely supranational approach to the White Russian diaspora would be wholly inadequate. For such an approach would gloss over problems, such as what migratory freedom the Nansen passport, which both the French and Chinese government recognised, truly granted the diasporic communities within their newfound jurisdictions. Which neighbouring countries also recognised the passport? Did individual border control agents or administrations perhaps refuse to recognise the passport, despite the official policy of their nation? A purely supranational approach would fail to properly address these questions. An accompanying transnational lens would also allow me to cover the international activist-led organisations that agitated for the better treatment of these refugees, and the migratory patterns, if any, that existed within these two diasporas. For instance, did they grow and contract in size along a similar scale? It also became clear how easy it was to fall into the trap of reinventing the assumptions of so-called ‘methodological nationalism’, the assumption that nation-states are the default unit for analysing social issues. This ‘reification’ would most likely have come from a project solely rooted in, or overly weighted towards, a comparative approach, wherein I would approach the White Russian diaspora through a purely bilateral ‘host’ vs ‘home’ lens, when what could be classified as ‘home’ for many amongst the diaspora did not exist anymore in any meaningful sense of the word.

Overall, the short essay proved to me that my project on the White Russian diaspora requires a synthesised approach of all three methodologies discussed previously. This synthesis has pushed me to firmly adopt a combinatory method of analysis moving forward with my project on White Russian communities in Paris and Shanghai. The Nansen passport will serve as a supranational entry point, whose implementation, or lack thereof, can be analysed comparatively to investigate how it was locally adapted, contested, or outright ignored under dissimilar structural conditions. Finally, émigré-produced sources and infrastructure can be utilised transnationally to partially bypass the flaws inherent to applying an overly ‘from above’ approach to the project.

Working on the short essay provided me with significant insight into the direction I want to take my broader project. One of the most valuable aspects of the process was engaging directly with Comanche Nation documents, particularly those relating to membership and consultation in national projects, and comparing these to international frameworks such as United Nations definitions of indigeneity.

This comparison revealed a striking imbalance. While global institutions like the UN position themselves as authorities in defining indigeneity, they often do so through frameworks that emphasize marginalization and historical subordination. In contrast, Indigenous-led documents foreground governance, procedural integrity, and active political participation. Seeing these side by side made it clear that indigeneity is not just being described differently it is being constructed differently depending on who is doing the defining.

Interestingly, when discussing my project with classmates and friends, many were familiar with major international organisations like the UN, but far fewer were aware of Indigenous-run institutions or governance structures. This gap in awareness mirrors the imbalance I encountered in the research itself. Prior to this project, I also had limited exposure to these Indigenous-led frameworks, which further highlights how dominant narratives shape both academic and public understanding.

This has pushed me to more explicitly centre the question of agency in my project: who gets to define indigeneity on the global stage? Is it large international organisations, or Indigenous nations themselves? Moving forward, I want to dedicate a section of my project to this tension, drawing more heavily on Indigenous-authored sources, community documentation, and, if possible, interviews. This will allow me to ground my analysis more firmly in Indigenous perspectives rather than relying predominantly on external interpretations.

Hello Rosie! Your proposal offers an interesting perspective on the Cold War, Eastern Europe and the collapse of the USSR which I am eager to read more about. Your focus on cultural transnational exchanges and how they interacted in Eastern Europe with political contexts through the example of rock music is particularly interesting. 

I enjoyed the nuanced approach you’re taking, by studying how both individuals but also states gave meaning and tried to mobilize rock music in different ways and contexts. It resonated a lot with the content of Fidelis’ Imagining the World from Behind the Iron Curtain : Youth and the Global sixties in Poland, which we had the opportunity to explore during the book speed dating session. In this book, she highlighted how communist states and in this case Poland, were directly involved in the opening of their societies to western culture although it was highly regulated but also reappropriated and pushed further by individuals. I look forward to seeing how you will explore those ambivalent movements as well as how rock music and the imaginary associated with it was instrumentalized but also constructed differently depending on the actors and the context. 

I feel like your project is also a great opportunity to explore individual testimonies and practice micro history, notably by highlighting the meaning individuals gave to rock music and how those individual meanings sometimes participated in community-building and notably the creation of transnational communities, but also how they were shaped and interacted with socio-cultural contexts.

As I am not entirely familiar with the subject, I was also wondering if cultural exchanges regarding rock music only involved exchanges between western countries and eastern European countries or if there were also exchanges with other non-western countries since Fidelis in her book mentions how a cultural imaginary was also built around “global south” countries and notes forms of cultural exchanges. It might be interesting to look into it. 

Overall your proposal is really clear and well-thought and I look forward to hearing more about your findings in your presentation!

Having received feedback from my project proposal, and the conference presentation and final essay nearing closer, I thought I would take this reading week to build upon my project, analyse my feedback, and begin to delve into more detail on the project. Furthermore, with my short essay serving as a wider literature review on race and sport, I feel I now have a better understanding of the field, and how it has developed, and can build this into my project, within the frame of race and golf.

Firstly, whilst it was outlined with my project, I feel I can now confidently some up my project argument within a sentence:

The racial issues withing golf have changed over time, and while figures like Tiger Woods have impacted the image of golf on a transnational scale, deeper, entrenched class and racial barriers still exist, and continue to shape access to the sport.

Being able to condense my argument like this will prove valuable for the conference presentation, due to its time limited nature, and provides a clear and concise roadmap for those reading or hearing about my project. Beyond this, I have narrowed down my key topics to speak on in the presentation. These include:

• my condensed argument (above)
• The context of golf and exclusion
• Woods as a breakthrough figure, and his transnational effect (impacts and limitations)
• Junior golf and wider structural racial issues
• Evidence that golf has changed more in image yet less in structure

Thus, from this I have given myself key areas to read up on further to help construct my conference presentation. These include Golfs exclusionary history, Tiger woods and representation and how the media framed his impacts, and structure and access within golf – like Junior golf, participation, cost barriers and club culture. If I can narrow down key texts and scholarly views on these key areas, this will help analyse the changing nature of racial issues within the game of golf.

Building on the feedback from my proposal, my comments said that there was a risk of this becoming a ‘love affair’ between myself and Mr Woods. However, the comments said I had made an effort to analyse the topic through an analytical lens. As Mr Woods has already had his fair share of affairs, I want to continue this and not let my personal connection to golf take over. Thus, as my project continues, I will constantly try to step back and ensure that I am analysing the issues of race and golf as a historian, not as a golfer.

irstly, I would like to say that this reads as a very interesting project proposal. It is not a topic I can personally say I have heard of before, and thus I am intrigued into how this final essay, or project, will shape up. Furthermore I enjoy the knowledge displayed of the pundits and their techniques, even if only explained briefly due to the nature of this short proposal. Is this something you will look to explore further in your full project? I feel it would be interesting to shed light on the creation methods, and analyse their use, in both the context of the exploration of Indian Pundits, and the context of global exploration. Beyond this, it would be interesting to explore how this integration of techniques from the pundits challenges Ideas of science being purely European.

You acknowledge how you will be challenged by engaging with competing with the European and Indian interpretations of the Pundits. This is a good point – and do you feel you could struggle to find a balance of material from both perspectives, to create an effective judgement?

Your Primary sources, particularly those from the Pundits’ diary entries seem highly valuable. These will, and clearly already have, provide a level of personal insights into the pundits lives, and explorations in ways that some primary sources, produced for the masses, may struggle to uncover. Thus if used effectively, and acknowledged for personal biases, I feel you could uncover some key personal insights for the project.

Your final point is one that stuck with me. The overlooked nature of these Indian pundits is a classic theme of British Imperialism – do you plan to look into themes of post-colonialism and issues like the lack of representation within the Royal Geographical society? It seems clear that the pundits were not marginal figures in the history of Himalayan exploration, but central to it, and thus they should be remembered as the figures of transnational exploration and global knowledge that they were.

I am looking forward to seeing how your project unfolds – best of luck.

This project presents an intriguing topic and nuanced approach by combining a transnational lens with an intersectional lens. By taking a transnational perspective to the study of second wave feminism, this project appears to be filling an important gap in the historiography of this subject which has typically focused on feminism within specific nations. This proposal also highlights the important distinction between first wave and second wave feminism, as both, upon further study, possess different characteristics in terms of political focus and methods of activism. This comparison has, as mentioned in the proposal, become a dominant method of analysis in scholarship regarding second wave feminism. Therefore, distinguishing this wave in isolation and in the proper context seems vital. The historiographical context given in this proposal thus provides a strong understanding of the topic, as well as points to the gaps which the project seeks to fill. 

Exploring the circulation of ideas, or lack thereof, during this period of feminism across borders introduces a fascinating point of argument in this project, one that I have never personally encountered. I also like how the project de-centers a Eurocentric framework and works to include transnational networks between non-Western countries too. The proposal also states how it will implement an intersectional perspective on this subject, by examining how second wave feminism interacted with other social issues and political movements. This is a historiographical focus I have seen in the past and one that I find becomes increasingly popular due to its relevancy and depth of understanding. This is particularly done through analyzing the intersection between gender and race. Through including this, I believe this project will contribute effectively to this important line of research, while also revealing the transnationalism present within this area. 

Overall, this project proposal presents a compelling case of analysis as it brings together both intersectionality and the role of transnational networks and underpinnings, both of which were integral to second wave feminism and to understanding it better as a movement. 

The events of 1968 are often remembered as a global moment of protest, where ideas, tactics and solidarities travelled across borders. Yet examining these movements more closely reveals a more complex picture, one in which transnational connections were both enabling and deeply constrained. By compring Fidelis’ study of Poland and Davis’ analysis of Spain, it becomes clear that while activists engaged with global imaginaries and networks, their ability to translate this into tangible political success remained limited. At the same time, historians today may be attributing a form of agency that was not fully realised in the moment itself.

Fidelis’ article on Poland challenges traditional narratives of march 1968 by placing student protests within the framework of the ‘global sixties.’ Rather than viewing Polish student protests simply as dissdents opposing a repressive regime, she presents them as participants in a broader transnational left. These students engaged with global ideas (drawing on anti-imperialist struggles such as Vietnam and invoking figures like Castro) to articulate their critiques of both Soviet domination and global power strucutres. However, these connections were often more rhetorical than practical. Polish activists operated within a system that severely restricted international exchange, meaning that their engagement with the ‘Third World’ functioned largely as a symbolic language rather than a basis for sustained collaboration.

This liimitaiton was further stressed by the state itself. The communist regime appropriated transnational discourse, especially anti-imperialism, and redeployed it to undermine the protests. By framing students as foreign-influenced ‘Zionists’ or agents of imperialism, the state weaponised the same global imaginaries that the student wanted to mobilise. In this sense, Polish activists did not suceed in translating their transnational engagement into political transformaiton. Instead, their movement was violently suppressed and its global language turned against them.

Contrastingly, Davis’ article on Spain presents a more sustained and embedded form of transnational activism. Focusing on local movements in Santa Coloma de Gramenet, Davis demonstrates how activists actively integrated Third World imaginaries into their political practice. Rather than merely referencing global struggles, Spanish activists built networks that connected local issues, such as urban inequality and authoritarian repression, to broader anti-imperialist and revolutionary frameworks. Progressive Catholic figures, for instance, drew on latin American liberation theology, while radical leftists adopted models inspired by movements in Algeria, Cuba and beyond.

These cases show that transnational connections are real but uneven. In Spain, activists embedded global ideas into local movements and sustained them over time, though often through imagined rather than direct links to the ‘Third World.’ In Poland, students were far less successful, as their protests were crushed and their transnational language was turned against them by the state.

This raises a broader question. As highlighted by Clavin, transnational history highlights flows and connections, but can risk overstating how coherent or effective they actually were. In both Poland and Spain, activists clearly saw themselves as part of a wider global struggle. They exercised agency through imagination and engagement with global ideas, but their ability to act as truly effective transnational actors was limited by repression, weak networks, and Cold War structrues.

So did they succeed? In immediate political terms, not really, but if success means contributing to a wider transnational political culture, their actions matter in a different way. What did not fully work at the time is, in hindsight, understood as part of a broader global history, one in which agency is nnot only exercised, but also reconstructed.

While it may be somewhat unfair to comment on this proposal as we were previously paired up to analyse each-others work, on second reading and with more time to reflect I have come to appreciate its contribution much more fully. What stands out immediately is obviously its focus on and questioning of the ‘Blitz spirit’ as a powerful but potentially overly homogenising framework. Its goal of asking how exactly Jewish Londoner’s experiences of this ‘resilience’ may have differed from that broader story is a very interesting one. From my understanding the project is an examination of whether Jewish resilience during the Blitz was shaped by factors such as entrenched antisemitism, communal networks, and cultural practices, rather than simply a part of a homogenous ‘British’ cultural monolith.

The proposal also makes a strong historiographical intervention by questioning how far the traditional narrative of the Blitz has obscured the experiences of minority communities. The so-called ‘stiff upper lip’ that is often a stereotype of pre-21^st century British culture is I believe the main motivating factor behind the blanketing of a ‘Blitz spirit’ across class, ethnic, and social lines. By foregrounding Jewish Londoners, particularly in the East End, the project seems well positioned to show that resilience was not a uniform culture-blind experience, but was instead one shaped by, and perhaps gated behind, the perceived integration, or lack thereof, of existing communal structures. This places the topic in a significant spot not just within Blitz historiography, but also for broader discussions of how national wartime narratives, organic and deliberately imposed, can flatten the true experiences of marginalised groups.

The proposed range of sources is also a source of strength. Any approach to such a topic would obviously require primary sources in the form of Jewish-led newspapers, testimonies, diaries, and others, with their usage providing a rich foundation for examining both communal and individual experiences. I also think the combination of spatial, social, and transnational approaches is a good one, as it neatly neutralises the inherent problem of such a project where it must remain rooted in the London East End while still connecting this localised experience to the larger context of World War Two. As I spoke about previously I believe the Battle of Cable Street, while coming before the Blitz, is a must-tackle subject when approaching the topic of the East London Jewish community. Cable Street was and remains a kind of foundational myth for the anti-fascist movement and Jewish community in London and Britain as a whole. It may therefore help illuminate some of the roots of the resilience identified in the proposal that relied on both formal community organisation and everyday acts of survival.

Overall, this is a strong proposal with a clear research question, an important intervention, and an broad yet deep base for its sources. Its focus on Jewish Londoners has the potential to make a meaningful contribution by showing the uneven distribution of Blitz resilience across social and ethnic lines, and by offering a more nuanced understanding of wartime London than the traditional culturally homogenising ‘Blitz spirit’ narrative.

The topic selected for your project is a very interesting and under-explored one in recent historiography despite the intense grip The Troubles held over the British and Western public consciousness. What stands out is of course its emphasis of the transnational framework through which Ulster Unionism must be analysed, such an approach feels entirely absent from the public view of The Troubles, in comparison to the Republican side whose connections to things such as the Irish diaspora in America are a far more well-known fact. From my understanding, the project asks how Ulster unionists cultivated international support and legitimacy during the Troubles, and how their rhetoric and public outreach were deliberately adapted for non-Ulsterite audiences.

Your explicit contrast between the uneven application of transnational history to Republicanism and Ulster Unionism shows that you yourself are not unaware of the historical niche your chosen topic sits within. I also think the proposal is particularly strong in challenging the long-standing assumption of Unionism as a parochial, internationally-reclusive movement by investigating the very real attempts made by its proponents to achieve a similar scale of international support as was achieved by Irish Republicans.

The proposed source base is another real strength, a topic such as this thrives off of primary sources: speeches, pamphlets, advertising campaigns, political appearances and tours make the sheer breadth of available sources almost endless. Ulster: The Facts is particularly useful because it points to the kind of source that could reveal how unionists consciously fashioned their message for foreign audiences. The inclusion of murals as a possible source is also very interesting, I must admit I would not have thought to them at all. One possible further method of analysis could be to engage more explicitly with historiographical shifts in the study of Ulster Unionism as an ideology, such as how scholars have extrapolated its political language and relationship into the modern day. This might help more firmly situate the project within existing debates about Ulster Unionism and Unionism in general and simultaneously reinforce the significance and necessity of a transnational approach to the topic.

Overall, this is a very strong proposal that identifies a clear historiographical gap and proposes a valuable analysis of it utilising an impressive range of sources. Its emphasis on rhetoric, persuasion, and international image-making gives it the potential to make an important contribution to the study of the Troubles and to transnational Ulsterite history.

“Tensions of Transnationalism” by Malgorzata Fidelis was a valuable piece to consider the global influence on the formation of global movements and the gradual prominence of nationalism in legitimizing arguments against the state. Fidelis did a great job of managing multiple scales in this work, as not only do they contrast the difference of the student movements in the 60s in Poland compared to other European countries, but they also emphasize the differences between the elite youth who imagined themselves as a part of a global struggle compared to the rural populations who depicted the dissatisfaction with the state through nationalist images and arguments. I appreciated their consideration of local differences, as it was helpful to understand how people within a territorially bounded space (even if the social sciences portray them as culturally resonant) can share common concerns about their country, yet, due to their personal experiences, interact with and express these concerns in different ways. As such, Presthold’s definition of the transnational imagination and people framing local circumstances within a global historical trajectory in a manner that shapes collective desires was a useful term to add to my toolbelt. In general, I have found that reading works that problematize transnational communication rather than understanding these interactions as solely positive and empowering, as other scholars have portrayed them, has been fruitful to my understanding of the transnational perspective, especially by helping me understand their strengths and differences.

It was very insightful for my own work, reading about how different actors and parties handled this balance between the global and the national and how that shaped future discourses, especially as Poland shifted to utilizing nationalism to legitimize their claims after the state violently squashed youth protest movements and began an anti-semitic campaign that emphasized “proper” belonging to the nation based on ethnic groups and a rejection of cosmopolitan culture and incorrect forms of internationalism. In a way, this shift echoes how the right in my research essay simultaneously promotes nationalism while shaping their ideology through international communication, as their own use of global networks is deemed proper because it does not challenge the sanctity and loyalty of their respective states.

The overlap of this back-and-forth struggle in Poland is interesting when considering my own project on political movements on the right, as both Fiedelis and I study political movements that comment on the role of the state and the importance (or lack thereof) of the nation in a rapidly globalizing world. Fidelis’s focus on examining the way contemporary actors understood and articulated their feelings about a rapidly interconnecting world to interpret local events is quite resonant with my own work. Furthermore, similar to Fidelis, I also attempt to showcase the entanglement between transnational connections/networks and articulations of nationalism.