"Brexit" as a Social and Political Crisis

Discourses in Media and Politics

Franco Zappettini, Michał Krzyżanowski, Franco Zappettini, Michał Krzyżanowski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367764128
• eBook ISBN: 9781000389081
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Business

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction – The critical juncture of Brexit in media & political discourses: from national-populist imaginary to cross-national social and political crisis
• 1 Splendid isolation again? Brexit and the role of the press and online media in re-narrating the European discourse
• 2 The Brexit referendum: how trade and immigration in the discourses of the official campaigns have legitimised a toxic (inter)national logic
• 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
• 4 Populism at work: the language of the Brexiteers and the European Union
• 5 ‘Crisis’ as a discursive strategy in Brexit referendum campaigns
• 6 Brexit and the imaginary of ‘crisis’: a discourse-conceptual analysis of European news media
• Index