Brexit – media coverage in Spain and what it means

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Presentation by Dr Fernando León Solís, Head of Languages at the University of the West of Scotland and Senior Lecturer in Spanish.

In this presentation, Dr León Solís shows how the 2016 referendum resulting in the UK’s departure from the EU was covered by the Spanish media and how it is related to the internal political life of the country, and resulted in a range of ideologically-grounded interpretations in which the independence of Catalonia featured as highly as the future of the EU.

For the Madrid-based press and part of the Catalan media, the UK’s pro-Brexit camp were ‘nationalist populists’, influenced by lies and propaganda. This reaction against nationalistic populism should be seen as a reaction against the newly formed left-wing coalition Podemos and Catalan nationalism, both of which were denounced for their defence of a referendum as a means to solve the independence question in Catalonia. This position was accompanied by a defence of Representative Democracy.

The pro-independence and pro-referendum Catalan press maintained a firm defence of referenda as a legitimate mechanism of expression of the democratic convictions of the people. Important as the referendum was for the future of the EU and its implications for Spain, this presentation shows how this event was used as a proxy for a national debate on an unresolved constitutional issue.

Lunch

Scottish Society committee members will be meeting for lunch at Pizza Express before the talk and attendees are welcome to join (at your own expense).

Attendees who wish to join for lunch must pre-order their meal by sending in their menu options to scottishsociety@ciol.org.uk by Monday 13 May 2019, 8pm BST. (Please note, if you fail to attend the lunch you will still be required to pay for your pre-order since these will have been sent to the restaurant in advance.)

Click here to view the menu.

Address:
Pizza Express
23 North Bridge
Edinburgh EH1 1SB

Programme

12:15    Lunch at Pizza Express
14:00    Presentation followed by Q&A session

CPD: 1 hour
This event is credited with 1 CPD hour. The CIOL Scottish Society is able to provide a proof of attendance note for CPD purposes. Anyone wishing this should make contact with a member of the Committee at the meeting; requests made after the event cannot be fulfilled.

Once the event has concluded, Scottish Society committee members usually go for a drink at a nearby café or pub. Please feel free to join us if you have some time available as this is a great opportunity for networking with students and fellow linguists.

Speaker bio

Dr Fernando León Solís is Head of Languages at the University of the West of Scotland and Senior Lecturer in Spanish. He graduated in English Language and Literature at Granada University in Spain and was later awarded a PhD at Glasgow Caledonian University in 2001. His research expertise falls in the field of Cultural Studies, with a special focus on the construction of Spanish and Catalan identities in the Spanish media. He has presented a number of papers in international conferences dealing with those issues and has published extensively in peer-reviewed academic journals, and is a regular contributor to the travel sections of the Spanish paper El País.