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Brexit Britain Ethnography of a Rupture

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Brexit Britain Ethnography of a Rupture Brexit Britain Ethnography of a Rupture Gabriel Popham | 5821568 MSc Cultural Anthropology: Sustainable Citizenship Supervisor: Dr. Diederick Raven Word count: 19,752 Table of Contents Acknowledgements 2 Abstract 3 Introduction 4 Haunted by collapse 4 ‘Betwixt and between’ 5 June 24, 2016: A city concussed 7 Research objectives and Structure 9 1 – Conceptual framework 12 #BrexitShambles 12 Theorising mess 14 Fieldwork overview 20 Citizen ethnography: Methodology and ethics 22 2 – A tale of two countries 26 Political ecology: Clashing scales in Brexit Britain 26 #UniteforEurope 30 A cosmopolitan vision 33 3 – Rethinking control 37 Fast-capitalism 37 ‘Europe will be built on its crises’ 44 4 – Technological affordances 47 #1DayWithoutUs 47 Mediating the Public 51 Conclusion 56 Bibliography 58 Appendix I 70 Appendix 2 72 Ethnography of a Rupture A sense of belonging to what-has-been and to the yet-to come is what distinguishes man from other animals. John Berger 1 Brexit Britain Acknowledgements This project would never have happened had it not been for the help, support and encouragement of those around me. But more importantly, this project would literally never have come together without the amazing energy of the people in DiEM25 UK. In particular, I am hugely grateful to those who found the time to sit down for a chat with me, and although I wasn’t able to include as much material from our interviews as I would have liked, I hope that I have managed to convey the kind of collaborative ethic that – as I see it – is at the heart of DiEM25. A special word of thanks to Jon for getting me involved in the first place, and to Rosemary for always being supportive of my ideas, even when they led to nothing. My interest in many of the issues covered below began when I was an undergraduate student at SOAS thanks to the intellectual generosity of my professors, in particular Mahnaz Marashi, Caroline Osella and David Mosse. However, it is mainly thanks to my supervisor, Diederick Raven, that I felt encouraged enough to try and put these ideas into practice. At key junctures of my research, I was fortunate enough to be able to speak to Cathrine Thorleifsson, Jeremy Gilbert, and Robert Wallis, whom I thank for sharing some thoughts on their own work and for showing me how to think through some of the crucial issues in this project. Coming to the end of this degree was definitely the most difficult thing I’ve ever done, and I don’t know how I could have done it without my friends and family. I could not possibly thank my parents enough for always believing in me, for always challenging me to push a little bit harder, and also, crucially, for the invaluable comments and feedback on the final draft of this thesis. Thank you also to Oli and Anto for sharing the difficulties of research and for being such great friends. Last, but by no means least, thank you to my partner Sara for always being there for me and for giving me such incredible support, especially in the hectic last few weeks when it felt like this thesis would never come to an end. Now, hopefully, we can find the time to be slow. 2 Ethnography of a Rupture Abstract 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. 3 Brexit Britain Introduction Haunted by collapse For many people living in the United Kingdom and abroad, Brexit was felt like a sudden rupture in the normal state of affairs: after forty years of membership, the British people voted (by the smallest of majorities to leave the !uropean Union" Beyond the anxieties over what this would mean in practice, some also saw in Brexit the spectre of how previous supra$national blocs, such as %ugoslavia and the &oviet Union, began their collapse seemingly out of nowhere" 's &arah (reen writes in her introduction to the collected thoughts of twenty-four anthropologists in the days following Brexit, )my immediate reaction to the results *+, was to remember 'lexei %urchak’s book, !verything was forever, until it was no more (%urchak .//0 " 1n the book, %urchak describes the feeling of many people in 2ussia when the &oviet Union broke up: it came as a complete shock because they thought it would never happen3 but once it had happened, it was not really a surprise at all4 ((reen et al" ./56, 789 " This theme of sudden, unexpected (and yet, in hindsight, wholly predictable collapse came back time and again during the three months that 1 spent conducting ethnographi# ;eldwork in London" =n my very ;rst night, 1 went to an event in >entral London titled Brexit: 'n Unorthodox ?iew5" Former (reek ;nance minister %anis ?aroufakis, :urkish novelist !lif Şafak, and >roatian philosopher &re ć ko @orvat were there to present a !uropean perspective on Brexit and publicise the nascent Aemocracy in !urope Movement ./.0 (Di!B.0 , a pan$!uropean political movement in which they work as coordinators, and within which 1 conducted a part of my ;eldwork. @orvat in 1 DiEM25.official. “Brexit: An Unorthodox View.” Accessed August 8, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=AraqxOnOS64&t=553s 4 Ethnography of a Rupture particular drew similarities between %ugoslavia and the !uropean Union., arguing that the toxi# combination of rising nationalism, labour reforms, and 1MF-mandated structural adjustment programmes that contributed to the disintegration of %ugoslavia could also be perceived C albeit in different ways C across !urope today, from the (reek debt crisis to the rise of populist, often ethno-nationalist parties in various !uropean countries" ' few weeks later, one of my interlocutors, a (reek woman called !leni who has been living in London for years and whom 1 met at one of Di!B.0-s meetings, told me that she shared very similar fears: I was born in Georgia, and I lived in the Soviet Union… after the Soviet Union collapsed there was a war, it was a really bad situation… the financial system collapsed completely, and it was literally – one of the reasons why I’m in DiEM25, I can see that happening again, the EU is literally following the steps of the Soviet Union… I’ve been thinking about it since everything started with Greece, I was sure that we’re headed towards that, and I think Britain will be the first country. The very first one [in the USSR] was either Latvia, Estonia or Lithuania… then it was Poland and then Ukraine, and then it was a domino. &hortly after the Brexit referendum, many were concerned that if the Detherlands, Fran#e, and (ermany were to elect populist right$wing governments, Brexit might turn out to be the beginning of the end for the !U, especially given Donald :rump-s election as Eresident of the United &tates (Follain ./56 " 'fter twelve months of government mismanagement, gaffes and general confusion about Brexit, that Fworst$case-scenario- no longer seemed as likely, so much that Brexit has apparently )vaccinated !urope against populism4 (Guatremer ./58 " Meanwhile, many of those who voted 2emain in the referendum have turned their attention to the implications of Brexit, and have begun articulating publi# responses to many of the issues involved, su#h as neoliberalism, austerity, immigration, populism, democracy, and the future of citiHenship" 1n the months following the referendum, there was almost an explosion of linkages between the embodied and embedded dimension of Brexit, and its past and future rami;cations, both in the UK and elsewhere" Betwixt and between If these linkages have any significance at all, it is because they have been made from a position of liminality3, caught “betwixt and between” Britain’s European past and whatever 2 Collected in an edited volume on post-socialist transition in Yugoslavia (Horvat and Štiks 2013).
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