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Welcome!

This blog will focus on the country Austria, and it's entries into the Eurovision song contest. I will be exploring several interesting themes throughout the next 10 weeks, so stay tuned!

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Blog Post One: National Identity in Austria

National Identity, Defined The term “national identity” has recently become quite a strong term. It’s so easy to confuse it with “stereotype”, a dangerous idea considering the two are so different. If someone tells you they’re British, German, French, etc, you’ll immediately find you have predisposed ideas about that person, just from learning their nationality. I’d like to explore this idea, explore what it is that makes up these ideals. Are there common threads between different national identities, or a factor that all national identities have? Is a national identity an acceptable way to generalize a country? These are questions I will hopefully try to answer in not only this post, but also in my future posts on this blog. In this post, we will be taking a dive into the national identity of Austria. First however, we should define national identity. A national identity is the combination of aspects and attributes that give a national population a distinctly unique identity....
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Blog Post 3- Critiquing the National Brand

Critiquing the National Brand  In this blog post, I will be exploring the ways Austria’s national identity is presented through the National Brand they present in the Eurovision Song Contest. My first blog post was focused on exploring Austria’s national identity as well, but without the national brand component. A portion of this post will be dedicated to correcting the mistakes that I made in that first blog post, and redefining Austria’s national identity. Once their national identity has been established, I will explore how some of their past performances relate, or do not relate, to their identity.    The first thing I’d like to address, was a major shortcoming in my first blog post, regarding Austria’s national identity. Austria does have its national identity tied to its former oppressor, but that oppressor was a fascist Nazi Germany rather than any socialist group like I’d previously mentioned. Their current identity is still evolving, and has been ...
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Blog Post Two: The Nation On Stage

Austria has become a staple participant in the Eurovision Song Contest. Although they are not one of the “big five”, they have appeared in 50 events since the contests creation in 1956 (Austria, 2019). Even with all these entries, they have found limited success, only winning the contest twice. The last time they won the show was in 2014, with Conchita Wurst’s “Rise Like a Phoenix” . After the win, they were given the host spot and hosted the 2015 Eurovision Song Contest in Vienna. In this post we will be taking a close look at two of Austria’s recent performances to hopefully extrapolate a deeper understanding of the Austrian attitude towards diversity. The first song we will analyze was Austria’s 2016 entry to the ESC held in Stockholm, Sweden. The song is called “Loin d’ici” performed by the 19 year old, Austrian performer, ZOË. She is the daughter of the band Papermoon’s founder, and has been surrounded by music her whole life, releasing her first single at a mee...
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