Abstract
How do citizens respond to and engage with the performance of political power in the context of mainstream media? Through an analysis of two television programmes aired during the UK Brexit referendum campaign of 2016, a picture emerges of citizenship as the performative disruption of the performance of power. In the programmes the then UK prime minister, David Cameron, met members of the public for a mediated discussion of key issues in the Brexit referendum. Their interactions are analysed here as a confrontation between the performance of citizenship and power reflecting activist modalities of disruptive citizenship played out in the television studio. The article ends with reflections on questions about political agency as individualistic forms of disruptive political autonomy.
Highlights
In this article I examine the mediated juxtaposition and interrelation of the performance of power and citizenship in the context of two television programmes aired during the UK Brexit referendum campaign of 2016
The analysis illustrates that the performance of power by the Prime Minister was a construction of personal authenticity and political authority, and that the performance of citizenship by lay participants was as a disruption of the performance of power in the form of individualized dissent (Ruiz, 2014; 2016)
Placing Cameron in the place of the panel made the Prime Minister the single recipient of questions, transforming the programme into a popular version of the press conference in comparison to the panel format adopted in Question Time, which constituted a debate between different political positions
Summary
In this article I examine the mediated juxtaposition and interrelation of the performance of power and citizenship in the context of two television programmes aired during the UK Brexit referendum campaign of 2016. The Brexit referendum was a major political event that stood in a complex relation to traditional party political affiliation and engaged the public in a relatively open debate between sides representing the answer to a single question: whether to remain in the EU or to leave.
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