Jim Brogden’s research while affiliated with University of Leeds and other places

This article applies a multimodal analysis to explore the potential meanings attached to the re-inscriptions of public monuments and spaces produced during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. Specific attention is given to several contentious examples: the George Floyd Memorial in Minneapolis, Winston Churchill’s statue in London, and the Queen Victoria statue in Leeds. We reflect on the ephemerality of protest re-inscriptions and how they receive a multimodal ‘second-life’ through their (re)presentations in mainstream/social media. Although institutions of power are quick to remove subversive re-inscriptions from the public sphere, we note that the portrait mural of George Floyd continues to function as a universal shrine to the injustices experienced by the wider Black community. A memorial space which is allowed to linger until its promised transubstantiation into George Perry Floyd Jr Place. In contrast, the other BLM re-inscriptions analysed in this article have now been removed from the physical public sphere, in which their transient messages of protest and public pedagogy will have in some cases been privately and publicly archived digitally on the internet; where evidence is much harder to remove than the public sphere.

This is an ethnographic chapter, inviting readers to walk through the city with the authors and observe the different ways in which election moods are expressed and manifested. People are encountered in shopping centres, workingmen’s clubs, mosques, schools and asylum centres. Mood is communicated slightly different in each site, and yet there are affective patterns. The chapter can be read of a mood tour of political disaffection, an up-close encounter with a moody electorate.

This chapter provides an account of the ‘lived emotional drama’ of an election campaign, as recorded at the time. It arises from a research decision to invite people across the city of Bradford to respond to a series of text-message questions about their recent experiences of the election. What emerges is something like a political prose poem, a flow of unedited mood expression. It does not tell all the story, but it tells a story in a way that political commentators cannot. Readers are invited to take in the text and feel a political mood.

This chapter sets a context for the study of political mood in the city of Bradford during the 2019 general election. It explores the particular characteristics of the city and of the historical moment in which this election occurred. It focuses on the ways that events are experienced ‘from the inside’ and ‘from the outside’. It raises important questions about how political experience is formed.

This chapter is based on interviews with voters, probing their feelings about the election. Through a series of personal encounters, the chapter builds a picture of something rather different from public opinion: public feeling. It explores metaphors and clichés, biographical sensitivities and headline issues. The chapter explores the ways in which political stories frame and reflect moods. At a theoretical level, the chapter examines the interpretive conditions through which personal meaning is produced.

This chapter describes a new method for capturing political mood. Ranging from lyrical form to urban ethnography to visual sociology, it explains how the authors went about conducting this study. It summarises the political mood in Bradford during the 2019 election, recognising the powerful affective currents that run through what is sometimes glibly referred to as ‘public opinion’. And it discusses why understanding political moods should be regarded as a vital feature of political analysis.

This book is about what it means to speak of a political mood. Can the electorate be in a mood? How do they express it? How can moods be captured in a meaningful way? This book attempts to answer those questions by looking at one city during the December 2019 British general election. This is not a book about campaign strategies, target voters, turnouts and poll swings. It is about how people feel. The research approach is ethnographic. The telling of the story is lyrical. It may not be hard political science but it contributes significantly to an understanding of the health of contemporary democracy. Focusing upon the ways that voters and non-voters perform their enthusiasm or indifference, the stories that they tell, and photographic images of Bradford in what is supposed to be a vital democratic moment, this book invites readers to engage with the affective texture of an election.

This final chapter situates non-place as a landscape of farewell. Brogden proposes a new critical conception of non-place, liberated from conventional signposted urban landscapes. Non-places are invaluable in their overlooked contribution to biodiversity, and the ongoing search for an ‘authentic’ sense of place. Brogden offers a much-needed reflection on the post-2008 ‘credit-crunch’ urban landscape in the UK and America. The chapter also draws attention to the redemptive possibilities of non-places for the individual and wider society. In re-visioning an urban future Brogden draws on Foucault’s ‘Heterotopia’, a critical antidote to the homogenization associated with regeneration and gentrification. This urban spatial conflict is discussed in relation to the New York High-Line project. ‘The Valedictory Landscape’ concludes with an analysis of forgetting and amnesia, as well as comparing the temporal relationship of ‘communicative’ and ‘cultural’ memory with non-place as an un-reified urban landscape, resistant to the reification effect of photographic representation?

This book presents a critical and aesthetic defence of “non-place” as an act of cultural reclamation. Through the restorative properties of photography, it re-conceptualises the cultural significance of non-place. The non-place is often referred to as “wasteland”, and is usually avoided. The sites investigated in this book are located where access and ownership are often ambiguous or in dispute; they are places of cultural forgetting. Drawing on the author’s own photographic research-led practice, as well as material from photographers such as Ed Ruscha, Joel Sternfeld and Richard Misrach, this study employs a deliberately allusive intertexuality to offer a unique insight into the contested notions surrounding landscape representation. Ultimately, it argues that the non-place has the potential to reveal a version of England that raises questions about identity, loss, memory, landscape valorisation, and, perhaps most importantly, how we are to arrive at a more meaningful place.

Brogden argues that walking provides an essential research encounter with the urban landscape, affording a vivid ‘lived experience’ for the individual. The ontological burden associated with Cartier-Bresson’s ‘the decisive moment’ is contested. There is no decisive moment, only the symbiotic performance of walking and photography, as continuous ‘moments’. Brogden offers examples where walking has enhanced creative practice and conceptual thinking: flâneurism, the iterative walks of Van Gogh, Iain Sinclair’s urban explorations, Richard Mabey’s prophetic eco-walks, Thoreau’s meditations on walking as personal salvation, and an extensive analysis of W.G. Sebald’s auto-ethnographic pilgrimages through ruined European historical narratives. Brogden also reflects on the revelatory potential of returning to the site, by drawing on the conceptual work of Jacques Lacan’s ‘The Real’, and Soren Kierkegaard’s notion of ‘Repetition’. ‘Walking as a Decisive Moment’ concludes with street movement, in which the pedestrian performs indeterminate routes through the urban landscape, eschewing maps, to embrace an improvisatory form of spatial practice.