CANCELLED DUE TO CORONAVIRUS SITUATION
Open Lecture
Brexit and Beyond? Some Challenges of Conjunctural Analysis
Professor John Clarke, Leverhulme Emeritus Fellow and Professor Emeritus, The Open University, UK
Time: Tuesday, 17 March 2020, at 16:15-17:45
Place: Tampere University, Pinni B, lecture hall B1096, Kanslerinrinne 1, 1st fl.
The UK’s vote to leave the European Union (Brexit) in 2016 has been a significant political and cultural moment for the UK and has potential consequences within and beyond Europe. Since the referendum in 2016, I have been attempting to develop a conjunctural analysis of the moment of Brexit, originally as an alternative to monocausal or epochal accounts of the event which identify it as a matter of populism, nationalism or working class rage, for example. A conjunctural analysis promises to pay more attention to the multiple forces, tendencies, contradictions and crises that become entangled and condensed in such formative moments. In this presentation I will explore some of these entangled dynamics and draw out two challenges that continue to preoccupy me in this process:
(1) How to think about the multiple temporalities that are in play in the moment of Brexit. These range from the immediate questions of intra-party calculations in the realm of UK politics to the longer reaches of globalization and the UK’s stuttering attempts to enter the post-colonial period).
(2) How to think about the national question transnationally. Most attempts at conjunctural analysis have treated the conjuncture as a spatially contained focus – taking place in a particular national formation. But it should be clear that ‘Britain’ is in no meaningful sense a closed space – in economic, political or cultural terms. So how does this conjuncture take place?
Welcome!