Paper short abstract:

This paper explores what can be learned about intergenerational solidarity, intergenerational hostility, and affective relations via the lived experiences of Brexit Britain and the coronavirus pandemic from the perspective of interlocuters under 30 and over 60 - about each other.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the affective registers of intergenerational solidarity and intergenerational hostility via the lens of everyday experience of Brexit and of the coronavirus pandemic. This contemporary era has been the most tumultuous period in post-war British history. It has provoked deeply emotional responses linked to senses of belonging, not belonging, trust, connection, fear, hope, and division. Here, I am particularly interested in examining what my research interlocuters (during two periods of fieldwork between 2018-2020 and 2020-2021 over six field sites in England) in their late teens, twenties and early thirties had to say about ‘the old’, and what interlocuters in their sixties, seventies, and eighties had to say about ‘the young’, when reflecting on their everyday experiences of Brexit and of the covid-19 pandemic. I consider these dynamics within an existing sociocultural framework that is already predicated on a valorization of youth and a denigration of later life, and draw inspiration from Lutz who writes how “attention to the everyday emotional relations of people” (2017: 186) can be “a route to a grounded understanding of how political and economic changes affect communities of people living together” (2017: 184). What, I ask, can these two extraordinary and overlapping events help us better learn about intergenerational solidarity, intergenerational conflict, and the work of affect in how we imagine social relations through intergenerational time?