Populism can be described as a ‘thin ideology’ (Mudde, 2004) that sets up a framework of a pure people versus a corrupt elite. However, it could be argued that this thin ideology is becoming a dominant force in the political arena as evidenced by recent by the rise of Trump and Farage, Brexit and to some extent, the increasing popularity of the Scottish Nationalist Party. Furthermore, in Europe, Inglehart and Norris (2016) note the number of seats gained by populist parties in national and European parliamentary elections has increased three-fold since the 1960s. Against this background of the claimed failing of the nation as epitomised in Trump’s and Farage’s pronouncements, popular nationalism has emerged as form of political claim making which depicts the nations as besieged by refugees, asylum seeking and “illegal immigrants” and denuded of sovereignty by supranational institutions. This has led to a number of exclusionary policies, pronouncements and proposals aimed at protecting the nation such as Brexit and raft of immigration laws (see Fassin, 2011, Bhatia, 2015, Vaughan-Williams, 2008). This joint paper seeks to address popular nationalism as a discursive style enacted through symbolic practices which aim to construct the people and the nation as homogeneous entities. Emma Guion Akdağ will identify to what extent the higher education sector in Scotland identifies with populist ideologies by revealing possible evidence of Scottish nationalism in the discourses of Scottish Higher Education strategy and policies. The neoliberalist, managerialist and entrepreneurial marketization of internationalisation in Higher Education in Scotland not only poses ethical issues but a disturbing sense of how a ‘global citizen’ is constituted in this context. Mostafa Gamal will attend to the Scottish Higher English curriculum in order to explore the ways in which it articulates a “cultural construction of nationness as a form of social and textual affiliation” (Bhabha, 2004) which aligns with Scottish nationalism. This reproduction of nationalism through established myths and traditions canonised through the curriculum, the banal nationalism (Billing, 2004) and the re-branding of a range of institutions (Police Scotland, Education Scotland and Visit Scotland) throws into relief the tensions inherent in the discourse of global citizenship promoted in policy documents of the Scottish Government.

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