?
DIGITAL DEBATES ON SOVIET MEMORY IN THE NATIONAL IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION OF POST-SOVIET MIGRANTS
Three theoretical premises inform this research. First, in line with Anderson (1983) and Wodak, my principal operating assumption has been that a nationa is an 'imagined community' (Anderson 1983) and that national identities are iagined, constructed, 'generated and reproduced through discourse' (Wodak et al. 1999: 186). The second premise is formulated by Hall, who describes 'identitiy as a "production", which is never complete, always in process' (Hall 1990: 222). The third premise is attrubutable to both Hall and Wodak. As Wodak et al. put it: "Loosely speaking, the personal dimension of national identity has appeared on the one hand in relation to the themes of history and culture, and on the other hand in relation to the themes of "selfhood", "sameness", "equality", "similarity", "difference" (or the "other"), "uniqueness" and "autonomy" (the counterpart of which is "heteronomy" - an antonym for autonomy) "unity", "community" and "group" (Wodak et al. 1999: 26). Hall also considers national identity as 'always constructed through memory, fantasy, narrative and myth' (Hall 1990: 226).
These three tenets, the siscursive character of national identity construction, identity coustruction as a dynamic process, and the close relationship between national identity and national culture, have informed and in part determined my methodology, corpus and key topics for investigation. My research is carried out within the framework of discourse analysis and a mixed methodology which combines qualitative and quantitative approaches.