Rebordering Britain and Britons after Brexit (MIGZEN) explores the long-term impacts of Brexit and Britain’s shifting position on the world stage on migration to and from the UK.
A collaborative research project involving academics, policy makers, civil society and migrant-led organisations it aims to produce new and timely knowledge on how the changing legal and political relationship between the UK and EU in consequence of Brexit shapes migration and migrant experience - including settlement, questions of identity, citizenship and belonging. It adopts a unique approach to understanding Britain’s migration story, that brings together emigration with immigration, and that considers British citizens, EU citizens and Third Country Nationals alongside one another.
Co-led by Professor Nando Sigona and Professor Michaela Benson, the project examines the following questions:
- How, and in what ways, have volume, geography and direction of migration flows between the UK and EU changed since the Brexit Referendum? And how does this relate to global migrations to and from the UK?
- In what ways do settled populations – British citizens resident in EU member states before Brexit and EU citizens living in the UK — assess their mobile and residential futures in light of their changing legal status, personal circumstances, political and economic crises, and the COVID-19 pandemic? How does this then inform, for example, decisions to stay put, to move on or repatriate?
- How do transformations to migration governance regimes intervene in decisions to migrate and repatriate and subsequent experiences of settlement for those newly migrating between the UK to the EU following Brexit—British migrants, EU migrants and non-EU migrants?
The Project Team
Michaela Benson is Professor of Public Sociology at Lancaster University. She previously led the ERSC-funded project BrExpats, which uniquely examined the impact and consequences of the Brexit negotiations for British citizens living across the EU, and was a recent recipient of the British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship for her research Britain and its overseas citizens: from decolonisation to Brexit.
Professor Michaela Benson
Professor Nando Sigona is Chair of International Migration and Forced Displacement at the University of Birmingham and Director of the Institute for Research into International Migration and Superdiversity (IRiS) He is also Research Associate at the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford and Senior Research Associate at ODI.
Professor Nando Sigona
Catherine Ruth Craven is a Research Fellow in the Institute for Research into Superdiversity at the University of Birmingham. She completed her PhD at SOAS University of London on the global-local politics of governing diaspora populations. Prior, she was a researcher on the EU H2020 funded project MAGYC and has been a visiting scholar at the Free University of Berlin, George Washington University, and York University, Ontario.
Dr Catherine Craven
Elena Zambelli is Senior Research Associate at Lancaster University. For her PhD (Gender Studies, SOAS), she explored women’s subjectivation processes in Italy across spaces of sexual consumption and sex work. As a postdoctoral researcher (VU Amsterdam), she investigated interracial couples’ experiences of racism and discrimination in Europe, as part of the ERC-funded EUROMIX project. In the past, she worked in international development programmes in the MENA region.
