The Road to Nowhere: Reimagining the English North-South Divide

In Saskia's talk from a Royal Geographical Society conference in April (her first time speaking at an academic conference!), she looks at how Englishness, 'race' and class have played out in debates around Brexit. Taking David Goodhart's book 'The Road to Somewhere' as an influential example, she discusses how the division the British media has made between the Northern 'white working-class' and the London 'metropolitan elite' plays into racist nationalism by positioning white people as English and people of colour as 'other'. Saskia argues that we need to challenge these racialised understandings of Englishness, in part by reimagining the English North-South divide and questioning the dominance England's capital plays in national life. Warning: As it's at an academic conference, not all the jargon will be explained in the talk, but all the texts Saskia references are available on our website!