Reflections on Polarisation and Inequalities in Brexit Pandemic Times

Katharine Tyler is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Exeter, UK. Her research draws on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork across areas of Britain to contribute to the interdisciplinary field of critical race, ethnicity, and migration studies. In particular, she has mobilised approaches from within critical whiteness studies, postcolonial theory, and feminist sociological approaches to social class to understand the racialised, classed, and postcolonial constitution of Englishness and Britishness. Most recently, she was the Principal Investigator of the two ESRC-funded projects exploring questions of identities and inequalities in the face of Brexit and the pandemic that underpin this volume. She is author of Whiteness, Class and the Legacies of Empire on Home Ground (2012) and co-editor of Majority Cultures of the Everyday Politics of Ethnic Difference (2008).

Susan Banducci is Professor of Political Science at the University of Exeter, UK. Her research addresses how technology and political institutions interact to disrupt democratic processes, including the role of news media. She is particularly interested in how technologies "happen to us" - especially the social, cultural, and institutional dynamics that shape their impact on democracy. She is the Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded TWICEASGOOD project, which draws on ethnographic and computational methods to examine the day-to-day experiences of women candidates during election campaigns, including their relationship to digital technology and news media as a campaign experience and the impact these relationships have on the representation of women in politics. Her work on elections and public opinion has been published in the Journal of Politics, Public Opinion Quarterly and British Journal of Political Science.

Cathrine Degnen is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Newcastle University, UK. Her work explores social transformation, identity, belonging, and social memory in contemporary Britain. She has published widely on the everyday experiences of later life and older age, personhood and the self, the anthropology of Britain, human and more-than-human relations, and the creative affordances of place. She is the author of Cross-cultural Perspectives on Personhood and the Life Course (2018) and Ageing Selves and Everyday Life in the North of England: Years in the Making (2012).