Confronting the EU referendum as immigrants

Abstract

This paper focuses on how immigrant Japanese women living in London categorise themselves in interviews conducted yearly from 2016 to 2019. Through analyses of participants’ personal narratives as immigrants and their relationships with their husbands’ relatives, I investigate (a) how they position themselves in the post-referendum social order; (b) how their positioning has changed over the three-year period; and (c) how their positioning is negotiated with other participants during the course of a group interview. My analysis shows how two kinds of bonding phenomena emerge during interactions. The first, social bonding, is a discursive, ideological practice to connect the self to social groups, whereas the second, interactional bonding, refers to communicative developments participants create.