Freedom of movement at play: EU citizens’ identity and transnational discourses (FOM@PLAY) is a project funded by the European Union that sets out to facilitate the dissemination of alternative discourses on ‘migration’ within EU countries.
We are looking for EU citizens working in Spain, preferably in Murcia, Granada or Aragón. We’re seeking to interview them about their experiences and opinions on freedom of movement and internal ‘migration’ within the EU.
The interviews will be video recorded and transcribed. They will take place in three EU countries: France, Italy and Spain. They will form a corpus of great value for researchers in areas such as critical discourse analysis, sociology and migration studies. We will also use excerpts from these interviews on social media to raise awareness of freedom of movement in the EU and create educational materials aimed at raising awareness of freedom of movement in the European Union from the perspective of EU citizens.
FOM@PLAY aims to contribute to the dissemination of alternative discourses on the mobility of people that help to prevent racism and discrimination against migrants and people coming from other countries.
If you are interested in participating in Spain, please contact us at fomatplay@um.es or through our Twitter account @fomatplay and we will inform you.
Your participation is essential to enrich the democratic values of our society and to understand the perspective of EU citizens, rarely represented in the media and political discourse.
Check out our presentation “Where´s home? EU citizens as migrants” at Approaches to migration, language and identity 2020 AMLI Conference (www) University of Sussex, Wednesday 9 – Friday 11 June 2021
Pascual Pérez-Paredes & Elena Remigi Universidad de Murcia / The In Limbo Project
Abstract
Since January 2021, UK and EU citizens can no longer exercise freedom of movement between the two areas. EU, EEA or Swiss citizens living in the UK before 31 December 2020 have been forced to apply to the EU Settlement Scheme to continue living in the UK. In practical terms, EU citizens have become a new migrant community. The 2016 Brexit referendum started a period of uncertainty, agony and frustration for both EU citizens in the UK and UK citizens in the EU that ended with the trade deal that the EU and the UK made public on 24 December 2020. The anger, the sense of betrayal (Bueltmann, 2020) and various mental health issues (Reimer, 2018; Bueltmann, 2020), however, linger on. This study uses a corpus of 200 testimonies from EU citizens in the UK to explore their feelings and reactions to Brexit and the hostile environment (Leudar et al., 2008) that emerged soon after the referendum. The In Limbo corpus of testimonies contains personal accounts by EU citizens living in Britain from 2017 until 2020. It has 81,000 tokens and 7,600 types. The collection of the data was organised by volunteers on a not-for-profit basis. The testimonies in Remigi, E., Martin, V., & Sykes (2020) were chosen as the basis of our corpus.
We used keyword (Baker, 2006; Baker et al., 2008) and collocation (Baker, 2006; Pérez-Paredes, Aguado & Sánchez, 2017; Pérez-Paredes, 2020) analyses to explore the self-representation of EU citizens across four emerging areas of interest: family life, loss of identity, feeling unwelcome and representations of post-Brexit Britain, including discourses about settled status and Britishness. In order to moderate the impact of Brexit-as-a-topic in the analysis of the narratives, we used two reference corpora in our study: the Brexit corpus and the enTenTen 2015, both provided through Sketch Engine. We used Wodak’s (2001) framework of analysis of representation strategies to pin down our discussion of the discourses emerging in the testimonies. Two strategies appear to be relevant in the context of our data: predication and perspectivation. The former is used mainly when expressing feelings about the UK while the latter are crucial to deliver the narratives discursively. While our research confirms some of the conclusions in the survey conducted by Bueltmann (2020), the combination of corpus-based CDA methods and the rich data provided through these narratives open up further understanding of the discursive strategies used by EU citizens when resisting the anti-EU environment that was unleashed in the wake of Brexit. Our analysis provides an alternative representation of the consequences and impact of Brexit on EU migrants that is in contrast with the recent triumphalist discourse of the Tory government that misrepresents EU citizens as happily embracing the settled status scheme.
Keywords: Brexit, EU citizens, migrants, keyword analysis, representation strategies
The plight of thousands of migrants putting their lives in peril to cross the Mediterranean has shocked. It is clear that no EU country can or should be left alone to address huge migratory pressures. The European Commission’s agenda on migration sets out a European response, combining internal and external policies, making best use of EU agencies and tools, and involving all actors: EU countries and institutions, international organisations, civil society, local authorities and national partners outside the EU.
It’s fair to say that almost anyone who takes the risks associated with these trips is likely to be desperate and is seeking refuge. But to label all those aboard the ships as refugees may not be accurate. The word migrants, however, fits. Webster’s says that to migrate is to “move from one place to another.” A migrant, in turn, is “a person, bird, or animal that migrates.”
The word also conveys what is happening: Large numbers of people are on the move, looking for homes. They are migrating across hundreds or thousands of miles.
The word “immigrants” is not being used in most media reports. There’s a sad reason. To immigrate, Webster’s notes, is to “come into a new country, region or environment … esp. in order to settle there.”
Tragically, the hundreds who died this month did not reach their destinations.
Note: We know there are also legal definitions of the words migrant and refugee. The International Organization for Migration has posted its glossary here. This post and Saturday’s “Word Matters” conversation, however, are about the way news outlets use the words, not international agencies.
Mark Memmott is NPR’s standards and practices editor. He co-hosted The Two Way from its launch in May 2009 through April 2014.
NPR Link in case the player fails to upload below.
Taylor, C. (2014) Investigating the representation of migrants in the UK and Italian press: A cross-linguistic corpus-assisted discourse analysis.International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 19(3), 368-400.
This paper is a cross-linguistic corpus-assisted discourse study of the representation of migrants in the Italian and UK press and it adopts a two-stage methodological approach. In the first phase, the number of references to nationalities which collocate with refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants, migrants (and Italian equivalents) are calculated and this information is subsequently used to identify any ‘mismatch’ between the amount of attention that migrants from a given country receive in the media and the official population estimates. In the second, and most extensive stage, the representations of the foregrounded nationalities are analysed through the moral panic framework. Results show an extensive negative representation of some groups, but there is no evidence of a fully iterated moral panic relating to any of the nationalities investigated.
