Mike Savage and Niall Cunningham demonstrate how a focus on inequality can deepen understanding of major political events through their analysis of the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom. Pairing the results of their Great British Class Survey with the geography of support for Brexit, and using data visualization tools, the authors show how the UK regions that voted for Brexit (and the anti-elite sentiment behind it) are also those areas most affected by growing inequalities, social and cultural, as well as economic.
Niall Cunningham
Niall Cunningham is a lecturer in human geography in the Geography Department at Durham University. Previously, he was research associate at the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC) at the University of Manchester and prior to that in the History Department at Lancaster University. He has an interest in the spatial and historical dynamics of social inequality and political conflict, specifically in the application of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) to address these topics. He used GIS to analyze the data arising out of the BBC’s Great British Class Survey and is a coauthor of the major Penguin monograph on contemporary social divisions in the UK, Social Class in the 21st Century (Pelican, 2015). He has also used GIS extensively in a historical context with a particular focus on Ireland’s economic, social, and political development in the modern period and is a coauthor of Troubled Geographies: A Spatial History of Religion and Society in Ireland (Indiana University Press, 2013; with Ian Gregory, C. D. Lloyd, Ian Shuttleworth, and Paul Ell).