Eyal Lavi
My research interest is identity and belonging and their relationship to real and mediated place. Specifically, I want to explore the daily and banal construction of national identity through the daily practices of media consumption and discourse and the dialogue between this and other, non-spatial identities. The de-territorialisation of culture from place in globalisation presents new potentialities for symbolic identity practices which are not embedded in locality. National identity is often seen as a casualty of this process, and I want to examine whether this is the case. There is some evidence that national identity is being replaced by a cosmopolitan outlook, and will assess this claim by looking at banal cosmopolitanism as a rival, or extension, of banal nationalism. I am interested in the effectiveness of cosmopolitanism an an ideology, identity and cultural reality.
Media figures (celebrities, politicians etc) are a cultural product well- suited as a focal point for these questions because they are at once local and global, public and personal, real and imaginary. By interviewing media consumers about their favourite famous figures I examine several related issues: whether media consumers form ideas of collective belonging and related standards of behaviour through talk of celebrity; whether media figures help them to make sense of global complexity and its effects on the local; and how identity interacts with media in the private and public realm.
Methodologically I am interested in developing a way to look at cultures comparatively while not relying on the nation-state as the taken-for-granted container of society and culture. How we can study media and popular culture as complex trans-cultural flows while not losing the ability to make grounded claims is the challenge. I will use the experience of migration as a productive perspective and will examine whether there are differences between native and immigrants in their attitudes to media: do they have varying modes of engagement with their adopted culture and the one which they left behind? Do they relate differently to local and global celebrities? Contrasting the experience of two nation and migrants between them I want to examine whether there is a new cosmopolitan subjectivity emerging, one that is formed in the tension between local and global and feels equally at home and outside it in both.