From Grexit to Brexit: interrogating notions of belonging and identity in Greece and the UK (MOBEL)

The project aims to interrogate understandings of human mobility and belonging in the UK and Greece and the categories that are made relevant and implicated in this process, inspired by two crucial and topical questions: who belongs where within the national and EU contexts; who benefits and who is left out from the EU integration regime. These are important for many reasons: for the integration regimes employed top-down within the UK and Greece; for the implications they may bear for the freedom of movement and the welfare state, e.g. in view of the recent referendum outcome in the UK; for the welfare of movers and non-movers; and for the EU project as a whole. As taken for granted assumptions may fail to capture the uptake of notions such as migration, mobility, identity and belonging ‘on the ground’, or reify distinctions between core and periphery inter alia, we embark with an uptake of mobility that treats it as forced or voluntary migration including re-location. We use the term ‘mobility’ to capture all possible types including migration, expatriation, etc. In that sense, and as we are concerned with movers and non-movers and the uptake of the notion of mobility by them, our approach to mobility takes into account four interrelated notions: movement, place, identities and politicization. We use these notions to deconstruct mobility in a way that critically assesses what it means to different people including lay actors, the media and political elites. This is because in considering who belongs where and who benefits from and who is left out from an integrating Europe, policies and laws provide the institutional framework for membership and integration (and by implication non-membership and exclusion respectively) but these are also matters of everyday social relations and public debate.