Rebordering Britain & Britons after Brexit
‘Scotland's different’: Narratives of Scotland's distinctiveness in the post-Brexit-vote era
Abstract
While Scotland has been portrayed as an outlier in the context of Brexit, we know relatively little about how ordinary people in Scotland, including a growing migrant population, make sense of this (political and media) narrative. In order to address this gap, in this article I look at everyday narratives of Scotland's distinctiveness in the post-Brexit-vote era among the long-settled population and Polish - and to a lesser degree other European Union - migrants in the East End of Glasgow. By drawing upon scholarship on everyday nationalism and imagined communities, I explore discursive claims which romanticise Scotland as different and `welcoming' of immigration and position it in binary opposition to England. How is Scotland produced as different in the context of Brexit? How are these stories used to re-imagine increasingly diverse Scottish society? In what ways are they being employed by migrant communities?
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