Bulgarian migrants and university students in particular, have recently fallen into the spotlight of British media (Kirkup 2013), firmly positioned within fervent immigration debates. Drawing on Brewer's (1999) concept of nested identities, this paper explores how Bulgarian university students in the UK manage four different identifications: national, European, migrant and student. Thus, the process of establishing nested identities is investigated on three different contextual levels: the transnational, regional and the everyday (at university and at the workplace). Paying particular attention to the factors that influence the process, this article also scrutinises its implications for Bulgarian students' values and perceptions. Utilising semi-structured interviews and participant observation with Bulgarian students, this paper will argue that the four identifications emerge as highly dynamic, context-specific and constantly negotiated relationships. Retrospectively, this article aims to contribute not only to current literature on Bulgarian migration but also to wider debates on transnational youth identities.
The intensification of intra-European migration has more recently coincided with the negative socio-economic consequences of the European economic crisis. The latter has revitalised dormant national stereotypes, employed into the scapegoating of migrants across Europe. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic research, this article focuses on young, highly skilled Bulgarian migrants in the UK. Their experiences of internal and external national stereotypes are examined in detail. This article argues that this results in a process of double-sided othering, which has implications upon the identities of young skilled Bulgarians as they employ various strategies to make sense of their migratory choices.
Drawing on empirical data from 37 Bulgarian students and young professionals in the UK, this article explores the intersection of the discourses produced by the European crises and migrants' national identity. In Bulgaria, the crisis narrative is embedded in the arguably never‐ending democratic transition, manifested in socio‐economic instability and political volatility. Simultaneously, “Brexit Britain” is enveloped in strong Eurosceptic sentiments, propelled by a combination of austerity measures and intensified Eastern European migratory flows. Both contexts subject Bulgarian migrants to stigmatizing representations. Looking at migrants' everyday practices, the data reveals that young Bulgarians draw on the related ideas of the “new” Enlightener and Ambassador to counterbalance negative discourses. Thus, the article explores the meanings and significance attributed to the Enlighteners and the Ambassadors, arguing that the participants engage in “social creativity” and “individual mobility” strategies that lead to reinvention of national identity.
Events such as Brexit have drawn attention to the precarity of contemporary migrants’ settlement rights and reopened the debate on the nature of integration and assimilation processes. Drawing on participant observation and interviews with Italian and Bulgarian migrants in Brexit Britain, this article develops a novel approach for understanding migrants’ changing relationships with their countries of settlement and their current and future practices. This approach builds on the sociology of emotions, which it extends to migration and diversity with a transnational sensibility. The approach is then applied to explain the different displays of emotion undertaken by our participants and their consequences. Overall, the article develops a new way to examine the subjective experiences of integration at times of change that is capable of offering important insights into the emotional costs of the neo-assimilationist climate characterising several western societies.
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