Twentieth International Conference on Diversity in Organizations, Communities & Nations

Abstract

Since the referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU, there has emerged a highly controversial picture of Britain as deeply polarised along racial, ethnic, class, geographical, and generational lines. Crucial to this popular image is the idea that the ‘white working class’, and particularly older generations of people, living in post-industrial areas of Britain, were motivated to vote Leave because they are anti-immigration and dissatisfied with the loss of national sovereignty; this is in contrast to a supposed younger middle class ‘cosmopolitan elite’ that reside in the South East of England and who are thought to represent the pro-Remain camp. Yet, hitherto, little attention has been paid ethnographically to the everyday experiences of those living in so-called Brexit Britain. In this research project, a team of ethnographers – located in different geographical areas in England – explore with a diversity of research participants from a wide range of different social backgrounds what they think about questions of immigration, local, national, and European belonging in the face of Britain’s exit from the EU, and focuses on the differing emotional registers that shape people’s engagements with what it means to belong or not to Britain and Europe.