Re-Imagining Global Britain: Vicarious Identity, Humour, and the Anglosphere
Overview
Following Brexit, a significant reorientation of British foreign policy has been underway and that has been located around the activating imaginary of ‘Global Britain’. Media commentators have been swift to characterise ‘Global Britain’ as a soundbite camouflaging the rollout of ever more neoliberalism (i.e. Singapore-on-Thames) or more critically, as the manifestation of nostalgic fantasies of colonial power.
By contrast, this project aims to do two things. First, to unpack and examine the constitutive ideas and identities that permeate narratives of Global Britain in a context in which a renewed emphasis on foreign policy is being invested with a number of key hopes and expectations. At a socio-psychological level these include hopes that Global Britain may re-bind the fractured sense of self-identity, security and national community wrought by Brexit. In that process the aim is to replace the sense of loss, anxiety and declining status experienced by many following Brexit with a can-do spirit and confidence.
Doctors Wellings and Browning indicate “the project starts from the premise that the investment here is not simply a result of rational strategic or economic calculation, but also plays upon, mobilises and seeks to embolden specific affective and psycho-social dynamics”
Principle applicants
 Faculty of Arts - Monash University |  Faculty of Social Sciences - University of Warwick |
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Co-applicants
Dr Matteo Bonotti - Monash University
Dr James Brassett - University of Warwick