Shifting identities: austerity and the loss of national identity

OVER THE PAST three years, the concept of the nation state and the shared, cultural understandings which underpin it, have been examined in a participatory project involving people from two groups which are increasingly alienated from their respective states: people from Ashington, Northumberland, which has seen its traditional source of livelihood decline in the wake of the dissolution of the mining industry; and people from Aboriginal Australian communities around Brisbane, which have seen their traditional lives destroyed during colonialism.