In this edition of Street Signs podcast Les Back meets Michaela Benson and talks about her work on Brexit and the experience of UK citizens living in the EU. This offers a very different perspective on the current debate the UK’s decision to leave the EU. We see Brexit from the point of view of the plight of millions of citizens of Britain living overseas. Michaela shows how Britain is a nation of emigration that was in many respects of its imperial past.
The podcast focuses a new paper to published in the Sage journal Sociology entitled Brexit and the classed politics of bordering: the British in France and European belongings. It focuses on how British citizens living in France are trying to secure their right to stay in Europe. She argues, that Brexit is unevenly experienced, exacerbating existing vulnerabilities and generating new fault lines of belonging among the British in France as they are repositioned in relation to hierarchies of European belonging.
