Living with Brexit: Families, relationships and the temporalities of everyday personal life in ‘Brexit Britain’

Drawing upon ethnographic research with families as they navigate a year in ‘Brexit Britain’, this article explores how people live with Brexit, examining the effect of Brexit politics on everyday personal life, particularly relationships with family. In order to examine how macro-political events and timescapes interact with the quotidian, the article explores interactions between ‘Brexit time’ (including key political moments as well as periods of slowed political activity) and ‘personal time’ (including the day-to-day rhythms of everyday life and more special occasions). The temporal interactions between Brexit and people’s daily lives, whether through the constant low-level simmering presence of the issue, the impactful moments when Brexit ‘boils over’ into family life, or a more profound relationship with the substance of Brexit politics, offer a lens through which we can understand how politics and other socio-economic events of (inter)national significance are lived in the context of everyday personal lives. The resonance of this analysis applies beyond Brexit and contributes to political sociology more broadly as well as to sociologies of everyday personal life.