Senior lecturer in Human Geography at Swansea University. She has published on topics including nationality, citizenship, borders, imaginative geographies, security, terror, cities, cosmopolitanism and affect. She is the author of The Persistence of Nationalism (Routledge, 2013). In 2018–19 she was recipient of a Leverhulme Trust Fellowship to develop a study on the subject of ‘National affects: towards the cultural politics of atmospheres’. Her publications on affective nationalism include a study of the ‘affective atmospheres’ of the London 2012 Olympic Games, published in Cultural Geographies (2016), and an article on ‘Feeling “Brexit”’, published in GeoHumanities (2019).
Apposite though the ‘heroic failure’ analysis is, the politics of self-pity is not limited to Brexit. Writing from Wales, Angharad Closs Stephens asks whether peripheral national movements also share something of this sense of woundedness. At the emotional level, the boundaries between progressive and reactionary politics are less clear cut than we may like to think.
