No abstract

The result of the Brexit referendum and subsequent uncertainty regarding its actual consequences, particularly for the EU citizens living in the UK, constitutes a major point of reference and a social risk for many Polish migrants. Drawing on two qualitative research projects with a data set of 71 semi-structured interviews, this paper aims at analysing post-Brexit strategies of Polish migrants in Britain, taking into account their anchoring and embedding, their attitudes towards mobility, and the specificity of perceived risks. The main objective is to offer a data-driven and temporally agile typology of the orientations migrants adopt in the face of uncertainty. With four ideal types of bumblebees, honeybees, butterflies and cocoons, we capture both the diversification of people's reactions and strategies, and possible directionalities of the changes in their mobility and social anchoring over time.

This article offers a twofold contribution. On the one hand, it includes a review of the key junctions in the research landscape related to migrant children and youth by bringing together youth studies, migration studies and a child-centered paradigm with the focus on the meso-level and the concept of belonging. On the other hand, by seeing belonging as a valuable analytical framework for the integration of approaches at the tripartite analysis favoring the meso-level, the paper encourages studies to dynamically overcome the dichotomy, incompleteness and a static nature of the research conducted separately on either macro or micro levels.

This article addresses methodological issues related to the consequences of researchers’ range of insider identities that emerge over the course of completing subsequent stages of qualitative migration research projects. Taking on a temporal approach to the insider status evolving over the course of field entry, data collection, data analysis, and dissemination, this article engages with nuanced insider positionalities. These range from apparent, to trespassing, to distanced, and to ambassadorial insiderness. Exploring a specific case of Polish mobility, this article assumes a methodological focus and argues that being “on the inside” of the migration research field may go beyond gender, ethnicity, and social status when it is linked to a project’s life cycle.

The notion of belonging, prominent in social sciences, has been recently used extensively in relation to Central Eastern European migrants in the UK. Whereas the Brexit debates on migration have spotlighted the macro-politics of belonging and the judgments on who deserves to stay and under which conditions, the question of how these discourses of 'deservingness' surrounding Brexit may influence the everyday and intimate aspects of belonging among migrants warrants further exploration. Drawing on the interviews with 77 young Polish and Lithuanian migrants in the UK conducted from 2019 to 2020, this article examines how migrants position themselves in relation to the discourses of deservingness and hierarchies of desirability. The focus is also placed on how they negotiate their strategies of (un)belonging to the British society. We argue that the prominence of the deservingness discoursewhich has gained momentum in Brexit Britain -entraps migrants in the constant process of boundary making and may prevent them from ever feeling part of the 'community of value'.