Next week marks ten years since the Brexit referendum.
A few months before the vote, I started an online diary to record what was unfolding around the referendum campaign. On the morning of 24 June 2016, after a sleepless night, I wrote a post titled “Unreal, Extraordinary, Indecent” trying to make sense of a result that would reshape British politics and the lives of millions of people.
Over the past decade, Brexit has been at the centre of my research on migration, citizenship, and belonging. Through research projects such as EU families and Eurochildren in Brexiting Britain and Rebordering Britain and Britons after Brexit, part of the UK in a Changing Europe programme, I worked with amazing colleagues including Marie Godin, Rachel Humphris, Laurence Lessard-Phillips, Michaela Benson, Elena Zambelli and Catherine R. Craven, and have followed families, children and young people as they navigated uncertainty, settlement decisions, citizenship applications, departures from the UK, and changing relationships with both Britain and Europe.
We have explored how Brexit transformed migration governance, reshaped citizenship, reconfigured family lives, and generated new forms of political mobilisation among Europeans in Britain and Britons in Europe. Looking back at publications from the past decade, what stands out is how Brexit continues to evolve from a constitutional event into a lived social process whose consequences are still unfolding.
To mark the anniversary, I have written a short reflection for Steven Vertovec‘s Futures of Difference collection on what Brexit means ten years on and why its legacies continue to matter.
📖 New essay: https://lnkd.in/e7nARQ4Z
📓 Diary of an EU Citizen in the UK (2016–): https://eurochildren.info/category/brexit-diary-diary-of-an-eu-citizen-in-the-uk/
👨👩👧👦 In the Shadow of Brexit: Portraits of EU Families in London: https://eurochildren.info/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/intheshadowofbrexit.pdf
Some related publications from this collective journey:
- “Intergenerational narratives of citizenship among EU citizens in the UK after the Brexit referendum” (Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2021): https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01419870.2021.1981964
- “Infrastructuring exit migration: Social hope and migration decision-making in EU families who left the UK after the 2016 EU referendum” (The Sociological Review, 2023): https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00380261231194506
- “Brexit rebordering, sticky relationships and the production of mixed-status families” (Sociology, 2023): https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00380385231194966
- “Reimagining, Repositioning, Rebordering: Intersections of the Biopolitical and Geopolitical in the UK’s Post-Brexit Migration Regime (and Why It Matters for Migration Research)” (International Migration Review, 2024): https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01979183241275457
- “Brexit and the emergence of a transnational European community of practice” (Journal of Common Market Studies, 2025): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jcms.70023
Ten years on, Brexit remains unfinished, not only as a political project, but as a social process that continues to shape lives, identities and futures on both sides of the Channel.
Postcards from ... 