Dennis Galvan, “Everyday Nation Building: Creativity, Culture and Political Community in Senegal and Indonesia”

27 May 2014 in Classics 110 from 5:30-7. 

Political Scientist Dennis Galvan previews his forthcoming book, Everyday Nation Building: Creativity, Culture and Political Community in Senegal and Indonesia. Through a close examination of cases from Senegal and Indonesia, Prof. Galvan develops a new scholarly approach to nation building, emphasizing the everyday practices and performances that are central to the politics of nation.

Dennis C. Galvan is Vice Provost for International Affairs and Professor in the Political Science and International Studies Departments at the University of Oregon. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from U.C. Berkeley in 1996, and his B.A. in International Relations from Stanford University in 1987. Galvan researches institutional adaptation, nation building, political culture, and the creation of locally meaningful, sustainable models of development in the global south. He has conducted field research in West Africa since 1986, primarily in a cluster of thirty villages in Senegal’s Sine region, and in Central Java, Indonesia since 1999. Central to all his work is a concern for how ordinary people adaptively transform the nation-state, markets, law, local government, and natural resource management systems to suit their changing and mutable notions of political morality, heritage, and identity.