For home and country? Engendering nationalism in the workplace.

Though geographers have taken seriously the ways in which representations of place, race, sexuality and gender are woven into narratives of nationalism through experiences of conflict, spaces of memorialization and the practice of ‘heritage’, less attention has been paid to the ways nationalism is constituted in and through day-to-day space and spatial practice in times of peace. This paper examines how nationalism is produced in and through the workplace. In particular, I focus on how narratives of nationalism were constituted within the early twentieth-century Canadian financial services sector. Through an analysis of archival materials from six Canadian financial institutions, I compare how narratives of nationalism were employed strategically by women and men in efforts to win employment in this sector after the First World War. I argue that the workplace constitutes and important site for the production and deployment of nationalist feeling, and suggest that nationalism has long been used strategically to reach multiple, sometimes competing, goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]