Brexit and the Classed Politics of Bordering: The British in France and European Belongings

Benson, Michaela

doi:10.1177/0038038519885300

Cited by 32 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 43 publications

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“…Gawlewicz and Sofkasura (2019) explore the temporalities of Finnish and Polish migrants' responses to Brexit, emphasising the 'messy and fluid' (2019: 7) ways in which practical and emotional reactions to Brexit have evolved. Benson (2020) similarly emphasises the processual nature of Brexit through her analysis of the ebbs and flows of the insecurities experienced by Britons living in France and the ways they interact with pre-existing inequalities. Benson and Lewis (2019), in their analysis of the experiences of British people of colour living in the EU, also emphasise continuity over narratives of disruption; demonstrating that Brexit is an unexceptional continuation of everyday, structural and institutional racism that, in ways similar to Mckenzie's (2017a) identification of ongoing class discrimination, was part of participants' everyday lives before Brexit.…”

Section: Brexit and Everyday Lifementioning

confidence: 99%

Sticking Together in ‘Divided Britain’: Talking Brexit in Everyday Family Relationships

Davies

2021

Sociology

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Despite media headlines depicting the UK as a nation divided over Brexit, we know very little about how Brexit has affected personal relationships. This article addresses gaps in sociological understandings of Brexit and politics more generally by exploring how Brexit is experienced in everyday family relationships, focusing on how people orientate themselves towards discussing Brexit (or not) with their family and friends. Based on qualitative interviews, the article draws upon theories of relationality to explain the tenacity of family ties and to demonstrate how and why families ‘stick together’ despite often having different opinions about politics. It is argued that a conceptualisation of politics as relational is essential to understanding how they are experienced in everyday life.

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Section: Brexit and Everyday Lifementioning

confidence: 99%

Sticking Together in ‘Divided Britain’: Talking Brexit in Everyday Family Relationships

Davies

2021

Sociology

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“…While several researchers have focused on traditional media portrayals of migrants and crime, in the context of assessments of Brexit (see Dorling, 2016;Gurminder 2017;Benson, 2019) there has been less research into its effects and practices that affect public attitudes (see Griffiths, 2017;Fox, 2018;Hutchings and Sullivan, 2019). This paper is interested in demonstrating how newspaper articles and personal comments written in response thereof, represented creative and media-driven anxieties about 'opening' borders in the EU.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This discourse became more pronounced in the UK news media, which focused its attention on 'Other migrants' who are crossing borders to find new victims. The agenda-setting raised several public voices who argued that a European society which facilitates freedom of movement of people, goods and services, offers a major opportunity for criminality (Bigo, 2002(Bigo, , 2014El-Enany, 2018;Abbas, 2019;Benson, 2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

News media representation on EU immigration before Brexit: the ‘Euro-Ripper’ case

Martins

2021

Humanit Soc Sci Commun

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A higher level of mobility of people has marked the European Union (EU), with immigrants moving from one place to another, every year, looking for a better quality of life, often fleeing from war and poverty. In the wake of enlargement of the European Union, the United Kingdom (UK) experienced high inward migration. One of the main focuses of UK media coverage was immigration from Eastern European countries. The UK referendum on Brexit on 23 June 2016, was followed by an increase in hate crimes linked to migration issues and, subsequently, a media apparatus of toxic discourse and fear of the criminal ‘Other’. This paper aims to reveal how newspaper articles and personal comments written in response to these articles, represented creative and media-driven anxieties about ‘opening’ borders in the EU. The empirical sample builds on news media coverage of the ‘Euro-Ripper’ case, published in two UK newspapers—the Daily Mail and The Independent. Based on critical surveillance studies and cultural media studies, I elaborate on the notion of moral panic, dramatised by the media, which mobilises specific compositions of ‘otherness’ by constructing suspicion and criminalising inequality by particular social and ethnic groups and nationalities. I argue that the media portrays the dramatisation of transnational narratives of risk and (in)security, which redraws territorial borders and (re)define Britain’s global identity. The analysis shows how the news media in the Brexit vote continually raised and legitimised awareness related to the migration as a vehicle that enables the ‘folk-devil’ to cross borders. This context postulates an ideology that converges on a relationship of intransigence and criminal convictions, in the context of a politics of inclusion and exclusion. I conclude by emphasising how the media intersects different social and geographical spaces in which migration takes place. Media-constructed categories of suspicion targets have been previously created and ‘suspect communities’ have already been socially accepted, thereby confirming and reshaping understandings of their identities and communities.

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“… 2. Although this trend might be changing in light of the impact that Brexit is having on European migrants in the UK (Sigona & Godin, 2019) and UK migrants in the EU (Benson, 2020). …”

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confidence: 99%

(Un)making illegality: Border control, racialized bodies and differential regimes of illegality in Morocco

Gazzotti

2021

The Sociological Review

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What role does race play in the construction of illegality in the face of pervasive border control? Sociologists and anthropologists of migration have apprehended illegality as a constructed category, produced by immigration policies and laws aimed at ‘illegalizing’ established mobility flows. ‘Illegality’ operates as an exclusionary category not only because it is constructed by law, but also because it is activated by racialized forms of prejudice which structure societies according to hierarchies of dangerousness, visibility and deservedness. Scholars, however, have tended to examine the entanglement between race and illegality by focusing mostly on the experience of black and brown people, especially those coming from poor countries in the Global South, thus overlooking how whiteness influences and alters the workings of border control. Drawing on qualitative data gathered between 2013 and 2019 in Morocco, this article questions the category of ‘illegality’ as it is policed at the street level and experienced by different groups of foreigners in Morocco. Building on Sara Ahmed’s understanding of whiteness as an ‘orientation’, in this article the author argues that illegality is a label which is racially altered and expanded by border bureaucrats, who use it to differentially police the presence of migrant bodies pre-emptively visualized as legal or illegal. Whereas black people undergo pervasive containment procedures, white privilege allows white migrants to be oblivious of the border, even when their administrative situation is not compliant with migration law.

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Brexit and the Classed Politics of Bordering: The British in France and European Belongings

Cited by 32 publications

References 43 publications

Sticking Together in ‘Divided Britain’: Talking Brexit in Everyday Family Relationships

Sticking Together in ‘Divided Britain’: Talking Brexit in Everyday Family Relationships

News media representation on EU immigration before Brexit: the ‘Euro-Ripper’ case

(Un)making illegality: Border control, racialized bodies and differential regimes of illegality in Morocco

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