Social polarisation, red walls and bat signals: how social science helped make Brexit and Boris Johnson

November 8, 2023 | 5:00PM - 7:00PM
 | 
In-person
Centre for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (CERES), Global Migration Lab, Europe & Eurasia

This event is over

This event took place in-person at Room 108N, North House, 1 Devonshire Place, Toronto, ON, M5S 3K7
Everyone knows who won Brexit. But not everyone knows how. Behind the Rasputin-like manoeuvring of Boris Johnson's master strategist Dominic Cummings, lies an entire strata of respectable British political science which has all too readily conceptualised, mapped, measured and confirmed the new political alignment and its consequences that Cummings (and others) carried to victory in the UK in June 2016 and December 2019. Presenting a Bourdieusian spin on the mainstream public opinion scholarship that constitutes the field of "Brexitology" and its powerful doxa, this talk offered an alternative explanation of Brexit and after that may have significant parallels elsewhere where "populist" insurgence has shaken the foundations of "liberal democracy."
Co-Sponsor: Global Migration Lab Co-Sponsor: Canada Research Chair in Global Migration Co-Sponsor: Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies
Centre for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (CERES), Global Migration Lab, Europe & Eurasia
Olga Kesarchuk olga.kesarchuk@utoronto.ca

Speakers

Adrian Favell

Chair in Sociology and Social Theory, University of Leeds and Director of the Radical Humanities Laboratory, University College Cork

Randall Hansen

Canada Research Chair in Global Migration, Department of Political Science
Director, Global Migration Lab, Munk School
University of Toronto