1st Edition
"Brexit" as a Social and Political Crisis Discourses in Media and Politics
Through a focus on media and political discourses both before and after the UK 2016 EU Referendum, this volume provides a set of comprehensive, empirically based analyses of Brexit as a social and political crisis. The book explores a variety of context-dependent, ideologically driven, social, political, and economic imaginaries that have been attached to the idea/concept of Brexit in the UK and internationally.
The volume’s wider contribution has three dimensions. First, it provides evidence of how the Brexit referendum debate and its immediate reactions were discursively framed and made sense of by a variety of social and political actors and through different media. Second, the contributors show how such discourses were reflexive of the wider path-dependent historical and political processes which have been instrumental in pre-defining the key pathways along which Brexit has been articulated. Third, the book identifies key patterns of national and international framing in order to discover the key, recurrent discursive trajectories in the ongoing process of Brexit – including after UK’s formal departure from the EU in January 2020 – while putting forward an agenda for its further, in depth and systematic analysis in, in particular, politics and the media.
The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Critical Discourse Studies.
Introduction - The critical juncture of Brexit in media & political discourses: from national-populist imaginary to cross-national social and political crisis
Franco Zappettini and Michał Krzyżanowski
1. Splendid isolation again? Brexit and the role of the press and online media in re-narrating the European discourse
Marzia Maccaferri
2. The Brexit referendum: how trade and immigration in the discourses of the official campaigns have legitimised a toxic (inter)national logic
Franco Zappettini
3. ‘Out is out and that’s it the people have spoken’: uses of vox pops in UK TV news coverage of the Brexit referendum
Andrew Tolson
4. Populism at work: the language of the Brexiteers and the European Union
Carlo Ruzza and Milica Pejovic
5. ‘Crisis’ as a discursive strategy in Brexit referendum campaigns
Samuel Bennett
6. Brexit and the imaginary of ‘crisis’: a discourse-conceptual analysis of European news media
Michał Krzyżanowski
Biography
Franco Zappettini is a Lecturer and Director of Postgraduate Research in Communication and Media at the University of Liverpool, UK. His research focuses on the textual/discursive analysis of different forms of political and organisational communication including mediated forms of populism, such as tabloid populism and Euroscepticism in the British press. He has published internationally in peer-reviewed journals. His latest publication is the monograph European Identities in Discourse: A Transnational Citizens’ Perspective (2019).
Michał Krzyżanowski holds the Chair in Media and Communication Studies at Uppsala University, Sweden. He also remains affiliated to the Department of Communication & Media at the University of Liverpool, UK, and in 2018–19 he held the prestigious Albert Bonnier Jr. Guest Professorship in Media Studies at Stockholm University, Sweden. He is one of the leading international scholars working on critical discourse studies of race, ethnicity, and the politics of exclusion in the context of communication, media, and social change as well as of the challenges to democracy posed by the global rise of right-wing populism and neoliberalism. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Language and Politics and a co-editor of the Bloomsbury Advances in Critical Discourse Studies in addition to sitting on a number of boards in various journals and book series.
