Popular imaginative geographies and Brexit: Evidence from Mass Observation

Abstract

The EU Referendum of 2016 was one of the most significant events in recent British political history. It is widely recognised that citizens engaged with the referendum through understandings of Britain, the EU, the world, and their place in it.This study complements existing research where such understandings have been inferred from citizens' demographic characteristics, the characteristics of their localities/regions, or elite discourses. It builds on existing research where a more direct engagement with citizens' understandings has been achieved through interviews or focus groups, allowing the content of understandings to be thickly described. To these latter studies, this paper makes three main contributions. First, it focuses on popular imaginative geographies, which are conceptualised drawing on literatures in Geography and Political Science as fast-thinking heuristics. Second, it brings new evidence to the conversation in the form of volunteer writing for Mass Observation. Third, the focus is on the content of popular imaginative geographies, but also how and why such geographies were used by voters in the referendum. The main findings include that many Leave supporters imagined Britain as an islandeither a once great military and imperial power, an island separate from Europe, needing freedom from Europe to engage in the wider world; or a small island, a full container, close to the rest of Europe and vulnerable to mobilities across Europe's borders. By contrast, many Remain supporters imagined Britain as post-imperial, small, vulnerable, and under threat of isolation from Europe and exposure to a chaotic, uncertain, dangerous world. Both groups engaged with the referendum through such popular imaginative geographies because the referendum presented voters with a difficult task, the campaigns provided few trustworthy facts, and voters therefore had to rely on cognitive shortcuts, including popular imaginative geographies.

“Anyone Who Inspects the World Around Him Is in Some Measure a Geographer”: Pasolinian Contributions to an Ecology of the Edges

“…It uses a sort of geographical reasoning that is quite different from that found in the academic disciplines of geography (Rocksborough 2010), particularly because it belongs to a very different imaginary world, which it helps to reinforce among the public. Finally, for Chevalier, para-geography posed problems similar to those identified by certain Anglo-Saxon geographers who have studied the relationship between academic and popular geography: para-geography and popular geography contribute to difficulties in interpreting geographic discourse in the public space (Rocksborough 2010), or they reproduce simplistic conceptions of the discipline, such as those of a science of distant lands or of memorising altitudes; sometimes reinforcing naturalistic readings of historical constructions (Hammett and Jackson 2021) at the origin of what could be called ordinary geopolitics (Dittmer 2010;Clarke and Moss, 2021) or touristic clichés (Dellmann 2018).…”