We gave a talk on microaggressions experienced by European academics in the UK at the Symposium on Politeness hosted by the University of Madeira in Funchal in July 2023. The talk explored how the concept of microaggression elaborated in Psychology and Philosophy can benefit from a re-definition in linguistic terms and focused on definitory matters.
Microaggressions and Impoliteness: in search of a convergence: EU academics in the UK facing hostility in the Brexit age.
The Brexit process has created a context of loss of rights and hostility towards EU migrants in the UK, including academics. This paper is based on the qualitative analysis of forty interviews collected between 2018 and 2022 in the North West of England. The discussion is twofold: (i) the definition of microaggression is questioned and problematised against the data and a new definition is proposed by integrating theoretical aspects of impoliteness; (ii) the new working definition is applied to the dataset through which six thematic experiences of Brexit are identified. These are ‘feeling of not being a valuable part of society’, ‘feeling like a second-class citizen’, ‘microaggression on the basis of language and accent’, ‘assumptions about own intelligence’, and ‘denial of individual racism’. The paper redefines microaggressions to include experiences of aggression in an emerging context of hostility as opposed a ‘mature’ setting. Crucially, politeness theory plays a vital role in expanding and refocusing definitions of microaggressions elaborated in the psychology/counselling and moral philosophy literature bringing context-sensitive linguistic analysis to the centre.
