ABOUT THE PROJECT

This research project sought to explore “sounds of dissent” surrounding the Brexit crisis, i.e. Britain’s decision in 2016 to leave the European Union. It looked specifically into the liberal and conservative poles of the Brexit debate across a variety of Britain’s popular music discourses and practices.

Using a wide range of conceptual frameworks and methodological approaches, the Sounds of Dissent (SoD) project made four main contributions to the music-cultural study of Brexit and associated political phenomena.

CONTRIBUTION No. 1

The first scholarly achievement amounts to an effort to map out the discursive field of popular music and Brexit in its totality. To this end, I identified two major contexts within which the discourse of music and Brexit figured most prominently: a new reality for the UK popular music industry, and a growing politicization of the country’s entire popular music field. Within the latter context, I also analysed the overall Brexit-inspired popular music production in Britain, provided a tentative table for it, and interpreted it in relation to the geographic, demographic and cultural analysis of the EU referendum vote results, in relation to the UK existing political landscape and actors, and in relation to the wider political phenomena in which Brexit has been embedded, such as the rise of populism and post-truth politics. Even though academic writing about Brexit and popular music-culture has increased since the submission of this proposal, SoD is still the only scholarly work which, first, provides a synthetic view of the British media discourses on Brexit and popular music, and then, seeks to link it to the wider political events and trends in society at large.

CONTRIBUTION No. 2

SoD’s second scholarly achievement emanates from ethnographic research undertaken at Birmingham’s “PoliNations” (PNs) within “UNBOXED: Creativity in the UK” aka “Festival of Brexit” in September 2022. When faced with the reluctance of PNs producers to cooperate on this research because the subject of Brexit that underpins the festival’s origin and sponsorship did not sit well with them, I had no other option but to conduct festival fieldwork solely as a member of public and to focus on the PNs visitors’ perspective. This, together with the cancellation of a substantial part of the PNs program due to the Queen Elisabeth’s passing, gave rise to a new thematic focus and to an unanticipated theoretical framework for the study – that of censorship. Within such perspective, ethnographic research of Brexit at PNs deals with a unique set of themes on the ground (such as constraints in the field and the Queen’s death), while throwing in sharp relief many limitations and challenges that today’s Britain (and the world at large) grapples with – democracy deficit, political polarization, echo chambers and the impossibility of dialogue across the board.

CONTRIBUTION No. 3

The third SoD scholarly achievement refers to an art-based research work that depicts the Brexit experience by 15 British residents according to their visual, sonic and verbal association with this political crisis. To collect such material, I conducted a series of creative workshops on Brexit in Liverpool in 2023 and 2024. The ensuing artwork is thus an outcome of creative collaboration with selected members of the British public as well as with a DCU MA student Ethan Soost who was involved in its audio-video production. Using artistic means as a less conventional research method, this project captures vividly the discontent and disenchantment of British people with the country’s official political life and discourse. The prevalence of negative emotions points to a much larger issue of a growing detachment between political leaders and populations, exacerbated by the shortcomings of the country’s two-party system, media capture, and longstanding neoliberal policies of austerity, deregulation and privatization. Arguably, all this in turn creates an ideal breeding ground for the rise of neo-fascist populism.

CONTRIBUTION No. 4

An ethnographic documentary represents the fourth scholarly achievement of PoPoliBB. With the assistance of DCU colleague Tamara Kolarić, I pursued ethnographic filmmaking at Blackpool’s The British Country Music Festival in September 2023. The film mainly explores the ways in which the contemporary British national identity is articulated through the genre of country music and the specificities of the festival conceptualization, programming and overall organization. Thus, even though the film does not always address the Brexit theme directly, the latter still serves as a backdrop against which the viewers will be able to grasp how one segment of the British public perceives itself in the context of post-Brexit Britain and vis-à-vis many important questions that the Brexit debate pushed to the fore (e.g., the liberal -conservative clash on a variety of sociocultural and moral issues).