Search

This thesis explores the lived experience of race as told through narratives of the city. It draws on photo diaries, observations and qualitative interviews with 32 people aged between 20 and 30 years old in three areas of Manchester. It examines how discourses, which construct UK cities as tolerant and multicultural spaces, are reproduced by the respondents and yet are contradicted by their everyday experiences. It argues that narratives that actively silence race, for example through notions of tolerance and colour-blindness, obscure the ways that people are differentially positioned and makes it difficult to name difference and name racism. The thesis explores a series of dilemmas that form part of the struggle to reconcile multiple and often contradictory levels of experience and situates these within the broader political context. The thesis engages with discussions around what have been broadly defined as ideas of ‘post-race’. It argues that the city becomes a useful avenue through which to direct this discussion, because it acts as a location in which race is imagined in conflicting ways; simultaneously as a site of segregation and conflict and cosmopolitanism and ‘mixing’.The thesis explores how people talk race through their representations of different spaces of the city. It argues that people’s stories about their relationship to place help make perceptible the different ways that they deal with difference. Race is silenced in narratives of place, emerging primarily through coded references to class and criminality, except when it is articulated with exotic and ‘sympathetic’ representations of the ‘ethnic’ or ‘migrant’ neighbourhood, or with a white underclass. It also examines how, within these narratives, people talk about knowing others that they emphasise are racially or ethnically different. Notions of tolerance and colour-blindness are invoked throughout these narratives and used to suggest that they are emblematic of a new generation. The thesis argues that the respondents' narratives resonate with national discourses of multiculture that imagine liberal spaces of cosmopolitanism and, simultaneously, silence inequalities and exclusion. The central problem is that these discourses and processes of silencing do not take account of the meanings of race and how people are differentially positioned. Consequently, they disable questions about the significance and the effects of race. This has implications for how racism can(not) then be named. People subjected to racism are, instead, under pressure to assimilate and conform to the behavioural norm. The thesis argues that respondents’ narratives of the everyday can, therefore, be interpreted as a form of orientalism (Puwar 2004). They are indicative of the kind of multiculturalism that ‘tolerates’ and ‘bestows rights’ on the racialised Other, but does nothing to demythologise the Other, or engage with the needs of minorities (Amin, 2010). The façade of ‘racial etiquette’ when it is constructed as such, thus implies a ‘refusal to understand’ (Foucault 1978), because to do so would necessitate confronting the currency of racism and the fact of white privilege.

Facebook has frequently been implicated in Britain's 2016 EU referendum result, and support for leaving the EU has been linked to wider right-wing, right-wing populist and nativist movements which have found certain footholds online. However, limited qualitative sociological research has so far been conducted into support for Brexit, let alone its relationship to social media use. In particular, social media research focuses on big-data analysis; the question remains how and why individuals engage with pro-Leave and related right-wing, right-wing populist and nativist material online. There is also a dearth of research on the political social media use of 'non-digital-natives', the group statistically most likely to support Leave, and on research into Facebook, which is by far Britain's most popular social media platform. This project sought to understand how Facebook was used by non-digital-native Brexit supporters to engage with pro-Leave and related right-wing, right-wing populist and nativist content, and the significance of this engagement to their social and political lives. In doing so it aimed to shed light on the complex nexus between the recent phenomenon of support for Brexit, long-standing discontents with ethnic and religious diversity and liberal social change, and the evolving role of social media platforms in our political lives. The novel methodology for the study combined multiple semi-structured interviews with a cohort of 15 pro-Leave Facebook users, with one-month-long observations of their Facebook Wall activity. This allowed the study to take an interpretive approach that gave voice to participants' experiences, while simultaneously contextualising these in an immersive, ethnographic fashion. The findings reveal that the logic of the Facebook platform both afforded and encouraged participants to become politically engaged in ways that made them feel valuable and in control, within a socio-political context that they experienced as devaluing and disempowering. Elements of this logic found to play a role included Facebook's global connectivity, its algorithmically-driven automation, its emphasis on sharing, and its role as an alternative news provider. This combined with the crystallising issue of Brexit to mobilise existing grievances among participants. Participants accounted for their pro-Leave stances by avidly drawing on narrative templates provided by the content in their online milieus, and interpreting them in light of their lived experiences. These narratives cohered around a metanarrative that a global agenda exists that is deliberately facilitating or forcing 'left-wing' social change from above, to the detriment of 'normal' people like 'us'. This metanarrative conceived of power in similar ways to both conspiracy theories and populism, and employed frames of entitlement and demonisation that were culturally racist, nativist and Islamophobic. Finally, contrary to 'post-truth' claims that a shift towards privileging emotions over facts is behind Brexit and other contemporary mediated right-wing, right-wing populist and nativist phenomena, participants were extremely preoccupied with facts and demonstrating factful-ness. This was despite their experiences of, and narratives around, social media use also being highly emotive, reflecting the way in which emotions and rationality are not mutually exclusive. Overall, the thesis reveals that behind participants' use of social media was a desire to redefine claims to political knowledge while also reclaiming their own status as valued and empowered citizens, which was experienced as lost within an increasingly cosmopolitan and liberal society.