Rigged: understanding of the economy in Brexit Britain

Do we need to answer Laura Nader’s 2009 call for more ethnographies that ‘study up and down simultaneously’? Anna Killick researches people’s political beliefs, where there is a tendency for ethnographers to choose to focus by studying down, to give voice to the marginalised and poor. In the process, she believes we may miss the contrasts and similarities between poor and the rich. We may end up exaggerating how exotic marginalised people's beliefs are in comparison to unstudied higher income people.

In Anna’s book Rigged: understanding of the economy in Brexit Britain published 1 June in the Manchester University Press Political Ethnography series, she attempts to show how strong the divide between high and low income participants perceptions of the economy were in a city on the south coast of England. She also shows how the way high income people understand the economy is not as rational or sophisticated as some might assume.

She would like to hear from anyone researching political beliefs, what Cramer called ‘public opinion ethnography’. Should the Centre for Political Ethnography apply for funding for a ‘public opinion ethnography’ workshop? What are the most important issues to discuss and is ‘studying up and down simultaneously’ one of them?

Bye the book here .