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Published online: 7 June 2023 This article takes the concept of spatial imaginaries to explore how the post-Brexit negotiations shifted meanings of ‘Europe’ for Polish migrants residing in Scotland. A flourishing subfield of ‘Brexit geographies’ has explored the meaning and consequences of Brexit (as an event, process and affect) for wide-ranging communities on the move and in place. Yet, the question of how ‘Europe’, and in particular ‘EUrope’, is being re-imagined and re-constituted by EU migrants residing in uncertain political spaces remains understudied. In this article, we address this lacuna through analysis of biographical narrative interviews and spatial mapping exercises. In doing so, we conduct a multi-scalar analysis of Polish migrants’ discursive and visual representations of EUrope, defined both as a geographical and institutional space. The study is spatially and temporally situated at a particular time and place in the Brexit timeline – the summer of 2019 in rural and urban Scotland. At this time, Brexit negotiations were ongoing, there was widespread uncertainty about the consequences for migrants in the United Kingdom, and, in Scotland particularly, much resistance to leaving the European Union. The article argues that while Brexit might have not affected European identity among Polish migrants in Scotland, it has prompted them to reconsider their place in Europe and to reimagine both the geographical and conceptual parameters of EUrope.

This paper discusses how the 2016 U.K. Referendum on European Union membership has shaped the spatial identities and practices of Polish nationals living in Scotland. On the basis of original qualitative data collected in Edinburgh after the referendum, we make two key arguments. First, the referendum was a catalyst for Polish nationals to rescale spatial identities and challenge normative definitions of nationalism and citizenship. We highlight the role of emotion as a key driver in this process, showing that multiscalar attachments to place and strategies for onward mobility, adaptation, and integration after Brexit are constructed through emotionality. Second, the paper argues that Polish nationals' spatial practices have been shaped by anti‐immigrant discourse and sentiment surrounding the Brexit vote. In particular, local public spaces are viewed simultaneously as sites of potential conflict and sites of meaningful intercultural engagement and everyday citizenship. A broader aim of the paper is to advance feminist theory and praxis in population geography through a focus on nonhierarchical and relational scales of experience to better understand migrant identities and practices in a changing Europe.

This paper uses a framework of ‘ontological security’ to discuss the psychosocial strategies of self-securitisation employed by ethnic and religious minority young people in Scotland. We argue that broad discourses of securitisation are present in the everyday risks and threats that young people encounter. In response and as resistance young people employ pre-emptive and pro-active strategies to preserve ontological security. Yet, these strategies are fraught with ambivalence and contradiction as young people withdraw from social worlds or revert to essentialist positions when negotiating complex fears and anxieties. Drawing on feminist geographies of security the paper presents a multi-scalar empirical analysis of young people’s everyday securities, connecting debates on youth and intimacy-geopolitics with the social and cultural geographies of young people, specifically work that focuses upon young people’s negotiations of racialised, gendered and religious landscapes.

This paper is based on research that was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) (AH/K000594/1). This paper examines the rights claims-making that young people engaged in during the 2014 Scottish independence referendum when the right to vote was extended to 16- and 17-year-olds for the first time in the UK. Understanding citizenship and rights claims-making as performative, we draw on the novel idea of ‘living rights’ to explore how young people ‘shape what these rights are – and become – in the social world’. They are co-existent and situated within the everyday lives of young people, and transcend the traditional idea that rights are merely those that are enshrined in domestic and/or international law. We explore the complex and contested nature of rights claims that were made by young people as ‘active citizens’ in the lead up to the referendum to illustrate how the rights claims-making by young people is bound up with the performativity of citizenship that entails identity construction, political subjectivity (that challenges adult-centric approaches) and social justice. Publisher PDF

This paper explores the lifestyle mobilities of British retirees in Thailand, drawing on empirical research conducted in 2012. Thailand is a host to a significant number of British retirees motivated by a search for a better lifestyle in Asia. This pursuit of mobility for lifestyle reasons, rather than economic gain or work, implies a relative privilege involving a range of choices and opportunities. For many, the lifestyle achieved in Thailand is perceived as mediating negative effects of ageing and enhancing well‐being. However, the material challenges of lifestyle mobility in Thailand, such as frozen pensions, healthcare costs and property insecurity, destabilise an initial optimism and lead to feelings of entrapment and immobility in relation to state policy and practice. The paper argues for a relational framing of lifestyle mobility as a means of understanding and analysing the differential experience of privilege and precarity in semi‐colonial or post‐colonial locations.

This chapter explores the intersection of home and transnationalism for British retirees in Thailand. I argue that by making a permanent move to Thailand retirees experience a diminished transnationalism as they commit to ageing in place and their ties to Britain weaken. Using empirical research collected in Thailand in 2012, I focus on permanent British ‘lifestyle migrants’ and the way in which they negotiate ageing and migration through diverse material and emotional ‘homemaking practices’ (Walsh, 2011). The conceptual relevance of transnationalism for older age migrants is also considered as transnational networks become unworkable and unsustainable in the context of ageing.

In diesem Artikel diskutiere ich die Erfahrungen aus der Forschung über polnische Migration nach Schottland aus der Perspektive vermeintlicher "Outsider". Ich plädiere für eine kritische Auseinandersetzung mit der Insider/Outsider-Dichotomie, weil diese nicht die Komplexität der multiplen Intersektionalitäten im Forschungsprozess widerspiegelt.Der Beitrag basiert auf biografisch-narrativen Interviews mit jungen Pol/innen, die in Edinburgh leben, zu der Erfahrung von Mobilität innerhalb der EU. Während meines Zusammentreffens mit ihnen im Laufe der Interviews wurden Migrationsnarrative offengelegt, die die Unterscheidung von "Forscher/in" und "Beforschten" verwischten. Insbesondere richtet sich der Fokus des Artikels auf die Schnittstellen von Gender, Klasse und Nationalität. Damit wird gezeigt, wie verschiedene Positionalitäten reflexiv konstruiert und konfrontiert werden: Das Interview ist ein kreativer Prozess, in dessen Verlauf im Dialog Narrative verhandelt werden, wodurch körperliche Performanzen und nicht-kognitive Assoziationen die multiplen Intersektionalitäten beider Parteien ans Tageslicht bringen. In diesem Prozess wird die Binarität von Insider/Outsider infrage gestellt. Der Beitrag analysiert die Brauchbarkeit dieser Dichotomie als Rahmen zum Verständnis der Forschungsbeziehung.URN: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs150249, This article offers a reflexive account of conducting research on Polish migration to Scotland from the perspective of the "outsider." The contribution argues for a revision to the insider/outsider dichotomy viewing it as inadequately nuanced in relation to the multiple intersectionalities performed through the research encounter. It is based on data collected from biographical-narrative interviews with Polish young people living in Edinburgh, Scotland. The article explores the interview encounter between an English researcher and Polish young people about the experience of EU mobility and argues that as migration narratives unfold the distinctions between the "researcher" and the "researched" blur. In particular, I focus on the intersections of gender, class and nationality to show how different positionalities are negotiated and confronted through reflexivity. The interview is a creative process involving co-construction of narratives through dialogue, embodied performances and non-cognitive associations that draw out the multiple intersectionalities of both parties. Through this process the binary of insider/outsider is called into question and this article examines the usefulness of this dichotomy as a framework for understanding the research relationship.URN: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs150249, Este artículo ofrece un relato reflexivo en torno a la realización de investigaciones sobre la migración polaca a Escocia desde la perspectiva del "observador externo" (outsider). La contribución aboga por una revisión a la dicotomía observador interno/observador externo (insider/outsider) al considerarla insuficientemente matizada con relación a las múltiples interseccionalidades que se producen en un encuentro de investigación. Se basa en los datos obtenidos de entrevistas biográfico-narrativas con jóvenes polacos que viven en Edimburgo, Escocia. El artículo explora el encuentro en situación de entrevista entre un investigador inglés y jóvenes polacos en torno a la experiencia de la movilidad en la Unión Europea y argumenta que cuando las narrativas en torno a la migración se despliegan, las distinciones entre "investigador" e "investigado" se vuelven borrosas. En particular, me centro en las intersecciones de género, clase y nacionalidad para mostrar cómo los diferentes posicionamientos se negocian y confrontan a través de la reflexividad. La entrevista es un proceso creativo que implica la co-construcción de narrativas a través del diálogo, las actuaciones encarnadas y las asociaciones no cognitivas que sonsacan los múltiples factores interseccionales de ambas partes. A través de este proceso, el binario observador interno/observador externo se pone en cuestión y este artículo examina la utilidad de esta dicotomía como marco para la comprensión de las relaciones de investigación.URN: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs150249

Mobility' is a zeitgeist of the European Union. European enlargement and the removal of borders in Central and Eastern Europe has reinvigorated geographical mobility in Europe while the extension of neo-liberal economic reform across the region has been said to offer opportunities for social mobility to a new demography. The right to spatial and social mobility in the EU is described as enhancing freedom, opportunity and choice for large numbers of people living in Central and Eastern Europe, yet the reality for many people living and working across borders in the EU is marked still by poverty, uncertainty and immobility. How do we conceptualise this inequality within a discourse of 'free movement' and 'equality of opportunity' in Europe? In this paper I will discuss theories of mobility that have shaped the discourse on mobility and immobility in the EU in recent times. I will explore the ways in which this discourse has contributed to an almost immutable acceptance of the EU as a ‘mobile space’. Adding to this I will present some early empirical findings from case studies in the Edinburgh, Scotland and Krakow, Poland to show that the everyday experiences of young Polish people who negotiate the invisible borders of the EU to find ‘opportunities’ has many dimensions, raising further questions about how ‘mobility’ is perceived and enacted by young Polish people living and working in the UK.