Skip to main content
Rebordering Britain & Britons after Brexit

Bringing anchoring and embedding together: theorising migrants' lives over-time

Abstract

In this paper, we bring together two concepts that we have been developing separately over recent years, to challenge linear and simplistic notions of migrant integration, depict multi-dimensional processes of settling and changeability over time. The concept of embedding has been proposed to capture dynamism beyond the more static notion of Granovetter's embeddedness. The concept explores the contexts and contingencies of where and how migrants establish different degrees of attachment in different places and through different social relationships. Also the concept of anchoring has been developed to offer an antireductionist processual and multi-dimensional understanding of migrant adaptation and settling, highlighting the issues of security and stability. In this paper, using longitudinal research, we explore for the first time how bringing our two concepts together may offer additional insights and understandings of migrants' experiences of and responses to the uncertainties and complexities of contemporary society, exacerbated by Brexit.

You might also be interested in :

Migration uncertainty in the context of Brexit: resource conservation tactics
The Brexit referendum has led to uncertainty, which has threatened EU migrants' resources, including their rights to reside, to run a business or access welfare. Cross-national political and legal resources that include citizenship rights can enable migrants' access to health care, pensions…
Exploring the trajectories of highly skilled migration law and policy in Japan and the UK
Japan and the UK appear to have few commonalities in terms of their history of and approach to migration law and policy. However, strong similarities in their contemporary approaches can be detected.
Decision-making and the trajectories of young Europeans in the London region: the planners, the dreamers, and the accidental migrants
This paper focuses on the intra-EU movement of young adults from Finland, Poland, and Spain who have settled, short- or long-term, in London and its wider region. In our comparative analysis…
Return migration and embedding: through the lens of Brexit as an unsettling event
This introductory paper, reflecting the Thematic Cluster of four papers, brings together two themes that are important for migration studies: return migration and embedding. Beyond any simplistic assumptions of settlement and permanent integration back into the origin country, following return…

Journal

COMPARATIVE MIGRATION STUDIES

Authors

Aleksandra Grzymala-Kazlowska (United Kingdom and Poland)
Louise Ryan (United Kingdom)

Article meta

Country / region covered

Population studied

Year of Publication

Source type