This project explored how families in the UK are living with Brexit in their everyday life. The project, funded by the ESRCs Governance After Brexit initiative, followed families for a period of one year between July 2019 and December 2020. The project employed a range of ethnographic methods including biographical interviews, diaries, 'hanging out', video elicitation, networked interviews and analysis of text and social media messages. This archive contains an example of ten biographical interviews with participants in which they reflected upon the role of Brexit in their everyday lives and how this has implicated their family relationships.This research aims to explore how Brexit has been experienced within everyday personal relationships, particularly family relationships. The idea that, following Brexit, the UK is a 'divided' nation, characterised by deep divisions between 'remainers' and 'leavers' has been emphasised in the British media over the past few years. However, despite the prevalence of these ideas, we understand very little about how these so called divisions are lived and experienced in people's everyday personal relationships, particularly within families where generational divisions are likely to be keenly felt. Therefore, the research addresses questions concerning how Brexit, and the political debates and events that have surrounded it, have affected people's everyday relationships, how so called 'divisions' -for example between 'remainers' and 'leavers' and 'millenials' and 'baby boomers' - have been experienced in people's everyday relationships, how people's political orientations and attitudes are influenced by their past and present personal relationships and how seemingly mundane interactions, identities, relationships and biographies can shape people's experiences of and orientations towards Brexit. It is difficult to access detailed and in-depth understandings of mundane and everyday aspects of family life using standard interviews with participants, who may find it difficult to recall and articulate these aspects of their lives. Similarly, it is difficult to employ methods that involve 'hanging out' with families for prolonged periods of time. This project proposes to overcome these issues by drawing upon an innovative toolkit of creative methods that will be used with a group of up to ten families over the period of one year. Families will be recruited from areas in and around Manchester and Sheffield and will have a diverse range of backgrounds. A prolonged engagement with a small number of families will enable an understanding of the everyday ways in which Brexit affects people's lives and relationships over time and the recruitment of family groups, as well as other important associates, will help to understand the complexities of the role of relationships in shaping people's political orientations. Participants will choose from a range of methods. These include individual and family interviews designed to gain a sense of participants' political opinions; memory tasks to help to understand how people's early political memories impact upon their orientations towards Brexit and observations and 'hanging out' with families to access mundane, everyday interactions. Participants may also take part in an observed television watching session based on Channel Four's 'Gogglebox' programme in order to see how conversations might arise around the viewing of political programming. Some participants may also get involved in 'mapping' the networks that matter to them and keeping diaries of their interactions about politics. This will help to understand the role of other associates in shaping people's political views and experiences. In bringing together these various methods, the project will gain an in-depth, fine-grained understanding of the ways in which Brexit is experienced in everyday life. These understandings will contribute an insight into how political outlooks and orientations may manifest in families, how they may be passed on and perpetuated between generations as well as contested over time, which can help academics to understand more about the role of politics in personal relationships as well as helping practitioners working in local organisations striving to encourage civic engagement and community cohesion to understand how political orientations manifest. Furthermore, the innovatie methods employed by the project will help researchers both within and beyond academia to conduct research that is able to capture the complexities of everyday life.

This collection comprises a sample of data from a wider project. The wider project involved a year long ethnography 'following' 14 families for a year. From 14 initial contacts, 8 passed the researchers on to other members of their family resulting in a total of 26 participants. These participants took part in an initial biographical interview covering their attitudes to politics and political discussion, their family relationships and thoughts and feelings about Brexit. Emphasis was placed upon how Brexit has affected their family relationships. Interviews lasted between 1 and 2 hours. They were recorded, professionally transcribed and anonymised. Most of the 26 participants went on to partake in further interviews, 13 also kept diaries, 9 kept a single day diary of the day the UK officially left the EU and 11 kept a diary of the day of the December 2019 UK General Election. 3 videoed themselves watching television. We also analysed 188 text messages, Whats app messages, emails and Facebook messages. This deposit contains 10 of the initial biographical interviews conducted with participants. The participants were recruited through community centers, snowball sampling, advertising on local Facebook community groups and leafleting in the North of England in the summer of 2018. The initial sample includes people with different political views, men and women with various family situations and relationship statuses. Participants in the deposited data are between 34 and 70 years of age though the wider sample covered a wider age range.