Brexit: Modes of uncertainty and futures in an impasse (original) (raw)
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Alongside the emergence of various populisms, Brexit and other contemporary geopolitical events have been presented as symptomatic of a generalising and intensifying sense of uncertainty in the midst of a crisis of (neo)liberalism. In this paper we describe what kind of event Brexit became in the impasse between the UK's EU referendum in 2016 and its anticipated exit from the EU in 2019. Based on 108 interviews with people in the NorthEast of England, we trace how Brexit was variously enacted and felt as an end, advent, a harbinger of worse to come, non-event, disaster, and betrayed promise. By following how these incommensurate versions of Brexit took form and co-exist, we supplement explanatory and predictive approaches to the geographies of Brexit and exemplify an approach that traces what such geopolitical events become. Specifically, we use the concept of "modes of uncertainty" as a way of discerning patterns in how present uncertainties are lived. A "mode of uncertainty" is a shared set of practices animated by a distinctive mood through which futures are made present and felt. Rather than treat uncertainty as a static, explanatory context, we thus follow how different versions of Brexit are constituted through specific "modes of (un)certainty"negative hope, national optimisms, apprehensive hopefulness and fantasies of actionthat differentiate within a seemingly singular, shared sense of uncertainty. K E Y W O R D S anticipation, Brexit, hope, modes of uncertainty, structures of feeling, uncertainty PROLOGUE: IN AN IMPASSE Jane was "dismayed" by the result. She'd gone downstairs to watch the news after texting her sister in Sweden, something that she wouldn't normally do unless it was serious, and couldn't remember ever feeling that unhappy "without it being a personal … or family thing." For Jane, a retired grandmother in her 70s, "it was that emotional … as if something bad had happened in the family." Her observed rise in racism and the expression of far-right views had "shaken her faith in humanity." She was worried for her children and grandchildren, and "what sort of a world it's going to be for them." Jane's hope was that Brexit wouldn't "be as bad as it seems it could be," but she feels that her generation have let younger generations down. While Jane hadn't been shocked by the result, Sally had been "surprised," despite voting to leave. Her surprise had quickly given way to another feeling: that "this might be what we need…," that we should "GO FOR IT!" She hadn't liked the way the country had been going for a while and had been relieved to get a Conservative government in the last election. Despite feeling that Brexit was "absolutely" the right thing to do for the country, she recognised that it was likely to be "a bumpy time," but was sure: "we can weather the storm … in the end it will be to the good." Sensing that "the mood
Waiting for Brexit: Crisis, Conjuncture, Method
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2021
Geopolitics in the UK has come to be dominated by Brexit. From campaigns for a public vote, Leave and Remain referendum campaigns, the resulting vote to leave the EU on 23 June 2016, invoking Article 50, and ongoing international negotiations, Brexit has captured the interest of human geographers. Emerging geographical writings on these matters have pointed to Brexit as a political and everyday event, a moment of uncertainty and crisis, an affective outcome and public mood, and a prism for understanding race, class, and migration relations (
International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 2020
Brexit Worlds I was in Goldsmiths sociology department and it was October 31-Halloween-and the day that Boris Johnson had repeatedly said that 'come what may' the UK would be leaving the European Union today and that for him it was 'do or die' and if it did not happen he would 'die in a ditch'. Some on the Tory right who were in the hard Brexit European Research Groupthe ERG had said that had we not left Britain would 'explode' and that there would be riots in the streets. But none of this happened even though it was a mantra that had been so often threatened. It was part of a narrative world that had been created around Brexit by those who were determined to leave without a deal if necessary, because for them, it was the leaving itself that was a matter of faith and could alone allow Britain and its four nations to be free from what they had framed as the 'shackles of the EU', an allusion back to slavery showing how issues of race were at the unspeakable core of a hard Brexit. With the date of the 31st October so firmly set in the nation's mind and it being presented as a critical moment in which we would 'leave or die'-there was a way that language had become an instrument that was deployed so readily in the tabloid press and in the wider media to capture our consciousness and frame an unbelievable world that felt endless and which we might desperately want to escape, but somehow felt trapped and obsessed with. It was in an uncanny time when we realised that what had been promised was not going to happen, and when our attentions have been displaced on the general election that had just been announced for December 12, that so many people, be they 'leavers' or 'remainers', felt an unspeakable anxiety about what all the threats had been about. For many discussions around Brexit-the 'B' word as it had been framed-were to be avoided, even if at another level they could feel inescapable.
Critical Discourse Studies, 2019
While the exact nature of Britain’s exit from the EU – or ‘Brexit’ as it has been popularised – is still as unclear as whether it will take place at all, the complex ontology, unfolding and impact of such an unprecedented event have been investigated widely in several aca- demic fields and especially in the sizeable body of work at the intersection of sociological, political and communicative dimensions (see for example, Clarke & Newman, 2017; Evans & Menon, 2017; Koller, Kopf, & Miglbauer, 2019; Ridge-Newman, Leon-Solis, & O’Donnell, 2018; Outhwaite, 2017; Wincott, Peterson, & Convery, 2017). While our special issue joins the existent studies, it also differs from such work by specifically taking a critical discursive perspective. In doing so, we rely on an interpretation of Brexit as a ‘critical juncture’ (see below) in which different historical and contingent discursive nexuses and trajectories have been at play. Hence, we focus on the interplay between socio-political contexts as well as, therein, on various patterns of discursive work of both mediatisation and politicisation of Brexit, both before and after the UK 2016 EU Referendum. Through our focus, we explore a variety of context-dependent, ideologically-driven social, political and econ- omic imaginaries that were attached to the idea/concept of Brexit and related notions in the process of their discursive articulation and legitimation in the UK and internationally. Our contribution has thus three interrelated aims. First, the articles in this special issue provide evidence of how the Brexit referendum debate and its immediate reactions were discursively framed and made sense of by a variety of social and political actors and through different media. Second, we show how such discourses reflect the wider path-dependent historical and political processes which have been instrumental in defining the discursive and mediatic contexts within which Brexit has been articulated. Third, we identify discursive trajectories at play in the ongoing process of Brexit putting forward an agenda for further analysis of such trajectories.
Political Studies
The time-travelling political scientist stepping out of her time machine today, having started her journey even 5 years earlier, would be amazed and, no doubt, shocked by the world in which she found herself. What sense, if any, might she make of British politics after the vote for Brexit – and, indeed, of the politics which gave rise to it? And what does the answer to that question tell us about how the vote for Brexit happened, how it was allowed to happen, its wider implications (both political and economic) and the seismic changes in and through which British politics is currently being remade? In an inevitably prospective and necessarily provisional way, I seek to reflect on the paradoxes of populism and neoliberal globalism that Brexit reveals as a way of drawing out a few of its implications for the conduct of British political analysis in a world in which Brexit could happen yet was essentially unforeseen.
Brexit Britain Ethnography of a Rupture (2017)
2021 edit: An updated and abridged version of this research can be found at https://www.academia.edu/49236053/Whats\_the\_problem\_with\_Brexit\_notes\_from\_the\_middle\_of\_Britains\_crisis This thesis is the outcome of three months of ethnographic fieldwork in London, the year after the Brexit referendum. By conceptualising the referendum as a moment of rupture, as the beginning of an in-between period in British society, the central aim of this thesis is to trace some of the ways in which individuals and collectives have started to come together and shape strategic narratives about contemporary British society, articulating different scale-making projects within technological and political assemblages. The fieldwork upon which this thesis is based is defined as a multi-speed approach to ethnographic research: on the one hand, it consists of embedded and embodied knowledge drawn from participant-observation and from interviews with politically active individuals; on the other hand, it consists of mediated knowledge drawn from research in and of cyberspace. A secondary aim of this thesis is to account for the role of digital technologies in political discourse and practice. In terms of theory, this thesis aims for a relational understanding of Brexit, both as a process caught up in multiple flows and relations, and as a force that actively produces relations among different groups in British society. In other words, Brexit is here understood as a problem that catalyses the emergence of different (and divergent) publics, which in turn frame Brexit within specific scale-making projects. In the final instance, these scale-making projects can be understood as horizons of public intervention, that is, as alignments of temporalities, spatial scales, and technologies that enact meaningful and intentional public interventions at specific junctures of society. By paying attention to these horizons, this thesis aims to bring into focus some of the potential social formations and cultural becomings that are currently emerging in Brexit Britain, trying as far as possible not to speculate on what will actually happen after Britain leaves the European Union.
Performing Brexit: How a post-Brexit world is imagined outside the United Kingdom
Theresa May's claim that 'Brexit means Brexit' demonstrates the malleability of the concept. The referendum campaign showed that 'Brexit' can be articulated to a variety of post-Brexit scenarios. While it is important to analyse how Brexit gives rise to contestation in the United Kingdom, Brexit is also constructed from the outside. Brexit signifies more than the technical complexities of the United Kingdom withdrawing from the European Union. It works both as a promise of a different future and performatively to establish a particular past. Brexit works as a frame with potential to shape perceptions in three domains. The first is identity. How does 'Brexit' shape national and European identities in distinct national environments? The second is how Brexit shapes understandings of geopolitical reality and influences conceptions of what is diplomatically possible. Third is the global economy. How does 'Brexit' work within intersubjective frames about the nature of global economic order?
Corvinus Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 2021
This is an interesting and coherent book which offers a specific interpretation of Brexit by examining the political discourse and investigating its linguistic and rhetoric context. The author applies the method of critical discourse analysis, which links the micro analysis of speech acts (speeches, public statements, political adverts, and interviews) with a macro approach that critically assesses the relationship between speech acts and the historical and socio-economic profile of Britain. The Brexit debate is used as a case study to demonstrate that power is embodied in discourse and knowledge, and that sophisticated verbal constructs are capable of manipulating a range of dispositions, emotions, and identities to the extreme.