Conversation
Rethinking impact in political sociology: the Northern Exposure project on disaffection and hope in the North of England after Brexit
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Abstract
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.
Keywords
BrexitEnglandpublic opinionimpactepistemologyCopyright statement
© The author(s) 2025. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International LicenseCite this article
Favell, A. with Williams, F. (2025), ‘Rethinking impact in political sociology: the Northern Exposure project on disaffection and hope in the North of England after Brexit’, Journal of the British Academy, 13(2): a25 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/013.a25crossref
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This kaleidoscope of short pieces derives from two Fellows Engagement Week sessions (2022, 2023) in which speakers from across the British Academy—Theatre Studies, Anthropology, Modern History, History of Science, English, Philosophy, Music—gave ten-minute talks on the civic value of the arts and humanities. The British Academy’s SHAPE acronym, answering the Royal Society’s STEM formulation, understandably stresses the economic importance of arts and humanities in today’s challenging technological world (E is for Economy). The remit of this forum, however, was to remake and reclaim arguments for the civic importance of arts and humanities, recognising that accounts of the arts are often based on 19th-century arguments that no longer have force today. Three themes emerge from this forum: the importance of collaboration, the non-instrumental significance of aesthetic experience, and the centrality of language to civic life. (This article is published in the thematic collection ‘The arts and humanities: rethinking value for today—views from Fellows of the British Academy’, edited by Isobel Armstrong.)
The impact of colonialism and empire and then of transport, logistics, advertising, media, cinema, radio, tourism, and the internet extended the global reach of English. With 1.13 billion speakers, one in seven in the world now has some English competence. Within this global circulation of English, we have the global teaching of English language and literature, most recently captured for Britain in a June 2023 British Academy report, the relevant findings of which are the decline in the information age and under neoliberal governments of university students reading English Literature and the rise of Creative Writing and world literatures in translation. I distinguish global from world Englishes as the hegemonic language of global trade and finance from more bottom-up Englishes mixed with other languages on the streets; discuss the state of English studies globally; and propose decolonising and denationalising the curriculum. The notion of national languages, identifying a language with national unity, is a very modern idea, only about three centuries old and arising with the formation of modern nation-states. We might use the lived histories of global and world Englishes to transcend both romantic revolutionary and far-right exclusionary nationalisms in literary and language studies in favour of more cosmopolitan, multilingual, and convivial approaches.
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