Perspectives of Place

Empires we lose: Why an English woman in Boston has nowhere to go 

Speaker: Dace Dzenovska, COMPAS, University of Oxford

Location: Mawby Room, Kellogg College

Following Latvian migrants to Boston, Lincolnshire, I met Zhenya, a Russian-speaking man who referred to himself as someone with migration in his blood. Zhenya came to Boston in 2004. He spoke good English and was once praised for doing so by an English woman who said: “You can pick up and leave, go back to your country if things here are not good, but we don’t have anywhere else go to.” This talk is an anthropological and historical interpretation of the woman’s lament that she does not have “anywhere else to go.” I show how studying Latvian mobility in relation to the actual and imagined immobility of the disintegrating working class in the East Midlands and North England enables analysis of the spatial distribution of labour, dispossession, and the good life in a post-Cold War imperial landscape. 

Linking multiscalar contestations over place in Peterborough, Brighton and Yiddishland

Speaker: Ben Rogaly, University of Sussex

Location: The Hub, Kellogg College

This presentation takes off from where my last book, Stories from a Migrant City (MUP, 2020), based on ten years of research in Brexit-era Peterborough, ended: multiscalar contestations over the place between resurgent racial nationalism and a non-elite cosmopolitanism. The story now moves to Brighton and Hove, a much-desired, if often unaffordable, coastal city, where progressive politics and a liberal self-image rub up against the legacies of British colonialism. Among the latter, contestations over Zionism, Israel and Palestine will be explored, first within Brighton and Hove and then through virtual and actual travels beyond the city to the non-territorial place known as Yiddishland.

Northern Exposure: Race, nation and disaffection in post-Brexit Wakefield

Speaker: Adrian Favell, University College Cork, and Andrew Wallace, University of Greenwich

Location: Mawby Room, Kellogg College

The ESRC Project (2018-2022), Northern Exposure: Race, Nation and Disaffection in "Ordinary" Towns and Cities after Brexit , set itself the task of challenging simplifications about diversity and social polarisation that predominate in the political sociology of Brexit and after. It was based on a wide range of oral history interviews with mainly elderly residents in four typical mid-sized towns in the North of England and extensive co-productive fieldwork with local authorities and third-sector actors there. The presentation will offer both an introduction to the human geography and political landscape of the North of England, as well as a detailed study of two marginal, socio-economically deprived locations in the West Yorkshire coal mining district of Wakefield that might be assumed to be archetypes of post-industrial decline and associated White English political disaffection. 

NORTHERN EXPOSURE PRESENTS: From Where We Stand, A Film by Lucy Kaye

A film by Lucy Kaye

With Adrian Favell, University College Cork

Location: The Hub, Kellogg College

Lucy Kaye's one-hour documentary and deep dive into the life and times of residents of three post-industrial towns in the North of England is moving, visually haunting, and (in parts) disturbingly raw. It is part of Northern Exposure, a four-year project at the University of Leeds. It took a sociological look at political disaffection -- and issues of austerity, deprivation, race and nation -- in the North of England after Brexit and during COVID. The film premiered at the Leeds International Film Festival in November 2023. 

“It can’t get any worse”: Imagining the opportunity to be political throughout Brexit

Speaker: Katherine Smith, University of Manchester

Location: The Hub, Kellogg College

During the protracted negotiations before and four years after the referendum vote for the UK to leave the EU (Brexit), residents of Harpurhey, North Manchester, England, began to voice their experiences of what they perceived to be a cycle of marginalisation over time in what was, for them, new and experimental ways. This paper ethnographically explores the “double devaluations” (Kalb 2020) of their labour value, of Harpurhey as a “deprived” area, and of its residents as perpetually and by choice “dependent” upon welfare. Rather than a shift towards neo-nationalist alliances, we find new ways of “being political” by expressing a “desire for the political” (Dzenovska and De Genova 2018). Organising and then perceptively critiquing seemingly intractable political and economic change, they dared to imagine a future, however formed, beyond the present and past cycle of marginalisation because, as it stands in Harpurhey, “either way, it can’t get any worse”.

“There must be something better than here”: The role of place in shaping the mobility aspirations of young people in coastal towns

*Please note: due to illness, this seminar has been cancelled*

Speaker: Avril Keating, University College London (UCL)

In this seminar, I will reflect on the role of place in shaping the mobility aspirations of young people in coastal towns in England. In the Global North, youth mobility has become a normalised part of the journey to higher education and ‘cosmopolitan’ adulthood. However, we argue that this is only part of the story for young people in coastal towns. Many of these coastal towns now face persistent socio-economic and infrastructural challenges. Against this backdrop, many coastal youth feel that they are marginalised within their towns and that the town is on the margins – culturally, economically, and geographically. This sense of marginality simultaneously propels youth out-migration and stigmatises those who stay behind. To make this argument, I draw on qualitative data we generated with young people in three coastal towns in England, including in-depth interviews, mapping workshops, and participatory arts and place-based methods.

From the ground up: Faultlines of war and peace in rural England

Speaker: Vron Ware, London School of Economics (LSE)

Location: Mawby Room, Kellogg Hub

This seminar will consider contemporary writing on and from small places in England, asking what can be learned about the politics of racism, xenophobia and multi-culture from these neglected and sometimes remote vantage points. The terms ‘colonial countryside’ and ‘rural racism’ are undoubtedly relevant to broader discussions of English national identity. Still, they can also risk deepening the divide between urban and rural (as well as past and present) in ways that often obscure the continuities. The presentation will draw primarily on two studies of particular places in central southern England that I have carried out recently: Return of a Native: Learning from the Land (Repeater 2022) and England’s Military Heartland: Preparing for War on Salisbury Plain (co-written with Antonia Dawes, Mitra Pariyar & Alice Cree, MUP Jan 2025).