Feeling Brexit: Digital Empathy and Imagined Communities

Jamieson, Kirstie; Grandison, Tanis

Abstract

In the transition towards triggering Article 50, the UK descended into a turmoil of bitter political division. In the fall-out of the referendum that took place on 23 June 2016 the experience of feeling Brexit took place across social media where competing senses of loss and belonging were shared through empathetic gestures. To understand the ‘sharing of feeling’ and its affective modalities (Slote 2007) this paper explores the Kübler-Ross model of grief (1969), which maintains that people experience grief through five stages: from denial to anger, to bargaining, to depression, and finally to acceptance. In an attempt to map the expression of grief that has arisen as a result of Brexit we conducted a visual and structural analysis of the memes, spaces and flows that have sustained the division of distinct digital communities. Findings suggest that these imagined communities felt and enacted Brexit in performative processes of empathetic inter-subjective understanding. By focusing upon the content of Twitter and Facebook from the 24 June when the Brexit referendum was announced, the paper’s aim is to understand how a grammar of digital empathetic gestures express emergent geopolitical identities and relationscapes. Feeling Brexit is the first stage of a wider research project that seeks to understand the shifting landscape of political identities and cosmopolitan values expressed through digital empathetic communities.

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (unpublished)
• Conference Name: Empathies: 11th Conference of the European Society for Literature, Science and the Arts
• Start Date: Jun 21, 2017
• End Date: Jun 24, 2017
• Deposit Date: Jul 19, 2023