The conversation discusses what an ethnographic or anthropological approach can bring to political sociology on the causes and consequences of Brexit in the UK, particularly in questioning the simplifications of dominant public opinion research. It points to the lack of awareness of post-colonial approaches to race and multiculturalism in such mainstream understandings, outlining the alternative perspectives found in Northern Exposure’s study of four large towns and small cities in the North of England. The discussion goes on to explore the innovative co-productive approach to impact developed by the project, whose output included local community engagement, videoed policy debates, and a full-length documentary film alongside conventional academic writing. The project Principal Investigator argues for a more critical constructivist epistemology in our understanding of UK politics during the era of Brexit, COVID and after.

In this conversation the joint winners of the 2023 British Academy Peter Townsend Book Prize discuss their books with Mary Daly. The prize is awarded biennially for outstanding work in social policy. Lydia Morris, author of The Moral Economy of Welfare and Migration and Fiona Williams, author of Social Policy: a Critical and Intersectional Analysis, discuss their analyses of social change and social welfare since the start of austerity in 2010. Both authors highlight the ways in which the increasingly restrictive, controlling and punitive policies of migration and asylum at the borders have been carried into domestic welfare policy. Both focus on the immiserating impact on specific populations and the connections to ethnonationalist discourses. For Morris, employing the concept of civic stratification, this ‘welfare/asylum/migration nexus’ is part of a moral economy whose devices of control have far reaching implications for how we are governed as a total population. Williams contextualises these developments in terms of four intersecting global crises: the racialised crisis of borders and the crises of care, of climate change, and of financial capitalism. Both authors consider the forms and influence of social justice resistance.