University of Southampton

Tweet On 12-13 January, we organised a two-day workshop to report initial findings from the project and to invite comments from participants to help guide our research over the forthcoming months. The workshop revealed an interdisciplinary concern with popular understandings of politics by bringing together political scientists, geographers, pollsters and historians. In the first session, […]

Tweet Today, Nick Clarke presented findings from the project at the University of Southampton’s Centre for Citizenship, Globalization and Governance seminar series. Here is the paper abstract: This paper reports emerging findings from an ESRC-funded project on popular understandings of politics. The context for the project is current discussion of disaffected democracies and hatred of […]

Tweet Last month, we presented findings from the project at the History of Parliament: Parliament, Politics and People Seminar at the IHR. Click here for an overview of the paper.

Tweet Democratic engagement in the immediate post-war period is sometimes understood as a paradox. Record high levels of voter turn-out, party membership, and support for the two main parties mean the period can be described as a highpoint of political participation. However, evidence of cynicism, self-interest and anti-party feeling has led revisionist historians to characterise […]

Tweet We’re currently at the stage of the project where we’re analysing the material we’ve collected from the Mass Observation Archive. One of the things we’ve been doing is comparing the election diaries of volunteer writers in 1945 and 2001, to see if they can shed light on why anti-political feeling and associated action grew […]

Tweet Last Friday, we organised a session at the RGS-IBG Annual International Conference at the University of Exeter around the theme of Geographies of Politics and Anti-Politics. The call for papers coincided with a Geoforum debate between Nick Clarke, Jane Wills and David Featherstone about the discipline of Geography and the research problem of anti-politics. […]

Tweet Gerry Stoker and Will Jennings will be presenting findings from their recent research on the relationship between urban dynamic and political engagement at two conferences this month. The first paper is titled ‘The Bifurcation of Politics: The Impact of Cosmopolitan versus Shrinking Urban Dynamics’ and will be presented at the European Urban Research Association […]

Tweet Will Jennings was discussing anti-politics and political geography on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme. Click here for the link. Will speaks about the impact of urban dynamics on political engagement in Britain 50 minutes into the show. The relevant paper on this research will follow shortly.

Tweet Many politicians believe that their world is one of high accountability; after all they put themselves up for election and can find themselves unceremoniously dumped by voters. Also on a daily basis their actions and words are the focus of attention in traditional and new media. So why do 21st century citizens in contemporary […]

Tweet This Sunday marks the 70th anniversary of the 1945 General Election. The election is widely understood as a significant turning point in modern British history. Labour won their first ever majority government and introduced a wide-ranging programme of social and economic reform, including the inception of NHS exactly three years later, and establishing the […]