Reflections on Polarisation and Inequalities in Brexit Pandemic Times: Fractured Lives in Britain

This is the first interdisciplinary edited collection that examines the manifestation of social inequalities and polarisations in Britain throughout the dual crises of the Brexit vote and the Covid-19 pandemic. The volume demonstrates that Brexit and the pandemic are not self-contained events but rather are major ongoing processes that have impacted all aspects of British social and political life. Drawing on an array of empirical case studies conducted in the wake of the Brexit vote and during pandemic lockdowns, chapters trace how these processes illuminate, consolidate, and amplify existing and entrenched social inequalities and polarisations that shape the fabric of British society, including racial, ethnic, class, migrant, national, and gendered inequalities.

The volume is divided into three parts centred on (a) the nation; (b) the community; and (c) the media. Each section draws on diverse analytical frameworks and methodological approaches from across the social sciences, arts, and humanities to provide empirically grounded critiques of reductive media-led narratives with the goal of accounting for and explaining the reproduction of social inequalities and emergence of polarisations in these Brexit pandemic times. In so doing, the case studies include critical analysis of lockdown novels; the speeches of political elites from across the political spectrum; ’ordinary’ people’s everyday traditional and social media practices; as well as their opinions based on the findings of large-scale surveys and in-depth place-based ethnographic fieldwork conducted across rural, urban, and suburban areas of England. Each chapter also includes artwork by contemporary artist Helen Snell that complements, develops, and extends the book’s core themes and arguments.

This collection will be insightful reading for students and academics across the social sciences, arts, and humanities (especially from the disciplines of sociology, politics, social anthropology, human geography, sociolinguistics, contemporary art, and literature) concerned with questions of social inequality and polarisation.

Katharine Tyler is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Exeter, UK. Her research draws on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork across areas of Britain to contribute to the interdisciplinary field of critical race, ethnicity, and migration studies. In particular, she has mobilised approaches from within critical whiteness studies, postcolonial theory, and feminist sociological approaches to social class to understand the racialised, classed, and postcolonial constitution of Englishness and Britishness. Most recently, she was the Principal Investigator of the two ESRC-funded projects exploring questions of identities and inequalities in the face of Brexit and the pandemic that underpin this volume. She is author of Whiteness, Class and the Legacies of Empire on Home Ground (2012) and co-editor of Majority Cultures of the Everyday Politics of Ethnic Difference (2008).

Susan Banducci is Professor of Political Science at the University of Exeter, UK. Her research addresses how technology and political institutions interact to disrupt democratic processes, including the role of news media. She is particularly interested in how technologies ＂happen to us＂ - especially the social, cultural, and institutional dynamics that shape their impact on democracy. She is the Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded TWICEASGOOD project, which draws on ethnographic and computational methods to examine the day-to-day experiences of women candidates during election campaigns, including their relationship to digital technology and news media as a campaign experience and the impact these relationships have on the representation of women in politics. Her work on elections and public opinion has been published in the Journal of Politics, Public Opinion Quarterly and British Journal of Political Science.

Cathrine Degnen is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Newcastle University, UK. Her work explores social transformation, identity, belonging, and social memory in contemporary Britain. She has published widely on the everyday experiences of later life and older age, personhood and the self, the anthropology of Britain, human and more-than-human relations, and the creative affordances of place. She is the author of Cross-cultural Perspectives on Personhood and the Life Course (2018) and Ageing Selves and Everyday Life in the North of England: Years in the Making (2012).