LAUSR

Introduction Few things in the world are as fascinating as people’s experience of the everyday, in part because so much about everyday existence would be considered surprising or even scandalous if it were not so common. Michael Billig’s (1995) landmark study of “banal nationalism” transformed the study of nationalism by exposing a myriad of ways that nationalism is a pervasively unnoticed facet of everyday life in the West, in turn spawning a broad literature devoted to uncovering the hidden reproduction of the nation through architecture, advertising, bank notes, maps, mass media, textbooks, and unwaved flags (to name a few). Building on Billig’s work, the approach that has come to be known today as “everyday nationalism”1 draws from the same intellectual well but focuses on the ways that people actively reproduce or challenge the nation through ordinary daily practices (Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008). By centering analysis on agents and social practices rather than social structures, everyday nationalism bore the potential to transform again the way that scholars study nationalism and to make in-depth qualitative research useful for broader comparison and generalization (Goode and Stroup 2015). This special issue represents an attempt to move the field of study closer to this goal by drawing together contributions that address themethods, scope, and applications of everyday nationalism as an approach. It grew out of a research workshop on “Everyday Nationalism in World Politics,” which was held at the annual conference of the British International Studies Association in Bath, England, in 2018.2 The goal of the workshop was to recognize the increasing thematic scope and diversity of research on everyday nationalism—in the case of the workshop, including work on citizenship and migration, peace and conflict, authoritarianism and legitimacy, and religion and belonging—while starting to tease out sets of methodological best practices. In moving from workshop to special issue, contributors were asked specifically to address one of these thematic areas, to situate the place of everyday nationalism within their respective disciplines, and to address the methods used in observing, coding, or analyzing everyday nationalist practices. The contributions to this special issue bring to light core methodological concerns, create opportunities to build bridges with other disciplines, explore the diversity of everyday nationalism, and creatively exploit the tension between banal and everyday nationalism. Individually, the contributions to this special issue help to move everyday nationalism out of its disciplinary andmethodological silos and advance it toward a broader, comparative relevance. As a collection, the articles shed light on the need to unpack the meaning and usage of “the everyday” if we are to resolve the ongoing confusion between banal nationalism and everyday nationalism. In the concluding section of this introductory essay, I argue for treating the everyday as an ensemble of characteristics concerning the nature of agents, the context for exercising agency, and the scale of observations and measurement. Doing so not only enables a clearer demarcation of banal