Public seminar: Political attitudes, Euroscepticism and Brexit examined through archived personal narratives

Hosted by NTNU Community's Team Knowledge for Democracy and Citizenship and the project Living Democracy: Citizenship and Belonging through Life Narratives With Professor Nick Clarke (University of Southampton) and Dr. Jonathan Moss (University of Sussex). Wednesday October 21 @ 09:00 – 11:00. Place: Kalvskinnet, Akrinn: U 301 ( Map ) Coffee/tea, fruit and waffles. The seminar is open to everyone. Please register to help us plan catering: Abstract: Mass Observation and British politics: Pathways to Brexit and beyond. In this talk, we introduce the Mass Observation Archive and report findings from our previous and current research using the archive to study popular understandings of British politics. Mass Observation has collected observations, diaries, and responses to ‘directives’ – sets of open-ended questions and tasks – from across the UK during two periods: 1937-1955 and 1981 to the present. Comparing materials from these two periods, we found that British citizens became increasingly anti-political over the last century; increasingly disaffected with formal politics. Analysing responses to directives on Europe from 1982 (10 years after Britain joined the EEC) and 2016 (when Britain voted to leave the EU), we found that a folk theory of Euroscepticism was already circulating among British citizens in the early 1980s, but in 2016 many voters remained uncertain of how to vote in the referendum, not least because they lacked trust in politicians and experts. A slim majority voted to leave, with many votes determined by cognitive shortcuts – especially feelings and imaginative geographies. In the talk’s final part, we turn to our current project on how political understandings develop over the life course. We are in the process of reading the Mass Observation Archive ‘vertically’, following 50 older panellists through writing they submitted to the archive over more than two decades. This approach allows us to see how recent British politics – characterised by 14 years of Conservative government, the Brexit vote, and fragmentation of the two-party system – was driven by values learned during earlier periods of socialisation, events of the early twenty-first century, and experiences accumulated by voters with age. The seminar is hosted by NTNU Community and Team Knowledge for Democracy and Citizenship. About the speakers Professor Nick Clarke is Professor of Political Geography at the University of Southampton. His research focuses on citizenship, democracy, political participation, political culture and the development of political understandings across the life course. Dr. Jonathan Moss is Associate Professor at the University of Sussex and a historian of modern Britain. His research explores political culture, political disaffection and popular understandings of politics in contemporary Britain. Together with Will Jennings and Gerry Stoker, Clarke and Moss co-authored The Good Politician: Folk Theories, Political Interaction, and the Rise of Anti-Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2018). The book examines changing relationships between politicians and citizens through the voices of ordinary people recorded in the Mass Observation Archive from the 1940s to the present. More recently, Moss co-authored The Politics of Feeling in Brexit Britain: Stories from the Mass Observation Project (Manchester University Press, 2024), which explores the role of emotions and feelings in public debates about Brexit. Clarke and Moss are currently working with Dr. Alex Hill on the Leverhulme Trust-funded project The Making of ‘Grey Power’: How Political Understandings Develop over the Life Course . About The Mass Observation Archive The Mass Observation Archive is a unique British archive documenting ordinary people’s everyday lives, experiences, thoughts, and attitudes. Mass Observation was established in 1937 with the ambition of creating an “anthropology of ourselves” – a systematic record of how ordinary people experienced society and their own everyday lives. The archive contains diaries, personal accounts, observations, and responses to open-ended questions on topics ranging from politics, war, and social change to family life, work, and everyday activities. The original project continued until the early 1950s and was revived as the Mass Observation Project in 1981. Since then, thousands of volunteers have contributed written accounts, many over several decades. The archive therefore provides a rare opportunity to explore both everyday life and wider social change through people’s own accounts and experiences over time. Today, the archive is held by the University of Sussex Special Collections at The Keep in Brighton ( )

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