Brexit with a little ‘b’: navigating belonging, ordinary Brexits, and emotional relations
Abstract
This article analyses senses of belonging and belonging disrupted via the lens of Brexit with a little ‘b’: namely at the level of ordinary experiences in the flow of daily lives. Our interlocutors recount these as deeply emotionally charged experiences. Their accounts supplement and help nuance more widespread popular explanatory models of the referendum vote and its outcomes. Examining brexit through the intersection of belonging and emotion permits new insights into how place became linked in social imaginaries with Leave and Remain. It also permits closer analysis of how senses of belonging are relationally and differentially mediated by other identities, including class, race, ethnicity, and migration status, and how these intersect unevenly with and have a consequence for people's senses of belonging. This includes demonstrating how the privileged sense of belonging of many white middle-class Britons (both Leave- and Remain-supporting) was disrupted and their sense of ontological security jarred, as well as how people navigated the multiple social and cultural outcomes of the referendum in their daily lives, networks of intimate social relations, and local places.Citation
Degnen, C., Tyler, K. and Blamire, J. (2024) Brexit with a little ‘b’: navigating belonging, ordinary Brexits, and emotional relations. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 30 (1), pp. 23-41. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.14043Publisher
WileyJournal
Journal of the Royal Anthropological InstituteAdditional Links
https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9655.14043Type
Journal articleLanguage
enDescription
©2023 The Authors. This is an open access article published by Wiley on behalf of Royal Anthropological Institute under a Creative Commons licence. The published version can be accessed at the following link on the publisher’s website: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.14043ISSN
1359-0987Sponsors
This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council for the project ‘Identity, Belonging and the Role of the Media in Brexit Britain’ (Grant Ref: ES/R005133/1).ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1111/1467-9655.14043
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Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/