An interview with Anna Triandafyllidou (26/7/01)

Anna Triandafyllidou currently is an EU-Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence at the Centre of European Studies of New York University as well as a research member of the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies (European University Institute, Florence). Her current research interests include immigration policies and the idea of national identities.

 

[Q] Your talk about the role of the Other in making the concept of a nation has probably been the most qualitative one presented at the Summer School. How would you characterize your approach?

[AT] My theoretical and disciplinary approach is quite different from the mainstream of the approaches presented in the Summer School. I am myself a sociologist but my work is closely related to social psychology and to critical discourse analysis. The version I have presented in my paper was a theoretical approach on the development of mutual identities, so you might call it a sociological approach which looks better to group relationships, and in this sense it is socio-psychological, but it looks also at the historical context within which the nation develops, so in this sense in this sense is also historical-sociological. In terms of method, I certainly belong to a more qualitative tradition, without this meaning that I do not value the quantitative one, but let's say in my analysis I try to make a more in-depth qualitative analysis without completely neglecting the quantitative dimension.

[Q] Among the aims of the Summer School was to concoct qualitative and quantitative approaches. What have you learn from the latter and what do you think you have taught to its proponents?

[AT] It is a completely different approach the one that most papers here have adopted, which present various efforts to modelize in terms of mathematics phenomena which belong more to the social or political realm. In this sense, I have to say I have learnt a lot, because I was only very marginally aware of this kind of research, so now I know a little bit more about it. On the other hand, I am afraid there is a problem of communication between my approach and these approaches: the critique I can make to these approaches is namely that not everything can be reduced to variables, as they can be so qualitatively different that they cannot be integrated into a mathematical model. Some of the criticisms that I have I received, although valid in their own tradition, in a way may be negligible from my own point of view. To put it very simply, when you adopt a mathematical perspective and try to analyze socio-political phenomena, you attribute to these phenomena some kind of objective nature, while in my own approach I have as a starting point the idea that we can only have an intersubjective view of things. So in this sense my own analysis represents one part, as much as possible, a large part of social reality, but I do acknowledge that I only represent one part and there can be complementary views, while, I a afraid, that in the other approach, because of its very nature, there may be a conflict with my own views.

[Q] Any other comment on the Summer School?

[AT] I have to say that the it has been very well organised, and this is not to be neglected, because organization, both academic and administrative, is very important in this sort of events. I think the Summer School has been very interdisciplinary, but this intedisciplinarity risks to have been extream, so that we cannot talk to each other, for we come from very different backgrounds, and we do not converge in terms of the thematic interests we have. On the other hand, I have to say I have been informed about the more general initiative on polarization and conflict that Joan Esteban and the other people have been developing and in this more long term perspective I think the Summer School is very useful.

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