“It can’t get any worse”: Imagining the opportunity to be political throughout Brexit
During the protracted negotiations before and four years after the referendum vote for the UK to leave the EU (Brexit), residents of Harpurhey, North Manchester, England, began to voice their experiences of what they perceived to be a cycle of marginalisation over time in what was, for them, new and experimental ways. This paper ethnographically explores the “double devaluations” (Kalb 2020) of their labour value, of Harpurhey as a “deprived” area, and of its residents as perpetually and by choice “dependent” upon welfare. Rather than a shift towards neo-nationalist alliances, we find new ways of “being political” by expressing a “desire for the political” (Dzenovska and De Genova 2018). Organising and then perceptively critiquing seemingly intractable political and economic change, they dared to imagine a future, however formed, beyond the present and past cycle of marginalisation because, as it stands in Harpurhey, “either way, it can’t get any worse”.
Date: 14 November 2024, 15:30 (Thursday, 5th week, Michaelmas 2024)
Venue: Kellogg College, 62 Banbury Road OX2 6PN
Venue Details: The Hub (wheelchair accessible)
Speaker: Katherine Smith (University of Manchester)
Organising department: Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS)
Organiser: Dace Dzenovska (University of Oxford)
Organiser contact email address: info@compas.ox.ac.uk
Part of: Perspectives of Place
Booking required?: Not required
Booking url: https://www.compas.ox.ac.uk/event/perspectives-of-place
Cost: Free
Audience: Public
Editor: Nathan Grassi