School of Social and Political Science

Description

This paper asks what might we better understand about generations, temporalities, and sociocultural assumptions linking ‘the young’ with the future and ‘the old’ with the past by exploring everyday experiences of Brexit and the coronavirus pandemic in England? The twinned processes of Brexit and Covid-19 have made this the single most tumultuous period in post-war British history. Both the debates over Brexit and the pandemic have provoked deeply emotional responses linked to senses of belonging, not belonging, trust, connection, fear, hope, and division. They have also provoked sharply divisive accusations of blame, often articulated from different generational perspectives. In this paper, I am particularly interested in examining what my research interlocuters (during two periods of fieldwork between 2018-2020 and 2020-2021 over six field sites in England) in their late teens, twenties and early thirties had to say about ‘the old’, and what interlocuters in their sixties, seventies, and eighties had to say about ‘the young’, when reflecting on their everyday experiences of Brexit and of the covid-19 pandemic. What, I ask, can these two extraordinary and overlapping events help us better learn about intergenerational solidarity, intergenerational hostility, and the work of affect in how we imagine social relations through intergenerational time?

Speaker: Cathrine Degnen from Newcastle University