Microaggressions and Impoliteness at the Crossroads: EU academics in the UK facing hostility in the Brexit age

Abstract

The Brexit process created a loss of rights and heightened hostility towards EU migrants within the UK, even among groups previously shielded from such animosity, notably EU academics. This paper is based on 24 clear instances of microaggressions, and two bordering hate speech involving EU academics in England and synthetises the psychology/philosophy literature on microaggressions with linguistic frameworks of “rapport management” and “impoliteness triggers” leading to a novel understanding of the phenomenon. Microaggressions are defined as a specific type of impoliteness “of the mild kind”, characterised by repetition at the individual and/or the collective level, which produces feelings of annoyance, irritation and shock. This study shows that Brexit-microaggressions usually involve social identity face and the breach of equity/association sociality rights. They mostly take the shape of formulae echoing slogans entrenched in the discourses of Brexit and arise out of a mismatch between pro-Brexit comments uttered in the presence of an EU migrant.