Rethinking “community” relationally: Polish communities in Scotland before and after Brexit

Abstract

Community is a nebulous, contested concept in geography spanning research on social networks, encounters, mobilities, citizenship and belonging. However, its use as a discursive trope in public, policy and academic work points to continued relevance as an analytical category, particularly as meanings of community in Europe are being tested by Brexit. This paper combines diverse scholarship on the geographies of encounter, mobility and citizenship to revisit the concept of “community” using a relational lens. This is explored through an original empirical analysis of the community practices of Polish nationals in Scotland in the context of Brexit. Using biographical‐narrative data collected before and after the UK referendum on EU membership, the paper discusses three forms of community practised by Polish nationals: community centre, a cyber community and a community festival. I advance a relational perspective on community that overcomes spatially and temporally rigid dichotomies of communal experience, emphasising community as a dynamic, interconnected and power‐laden process involving multiple temporalities.

Hierarchies, scale, and privilege in the reproduction of national belonging

“…Although local and national scales are always embedded in one another, collapsing the two is therefore risky, especially given the limited potential for local belonging to scale up as a mode of national belonging. The limited potential of local belonging to scale up, which suggests that claims to national belonging grounded in the local may carry little weight among dominant group members, is also highly significant in the context of burgeoning research on urban belonging and conviviality (Botterill, ; Nayak, ; Rishbeth & Rogaly, ) in demonstrating the importance of considering local belonging alongside other, potentially more exclusionary, scales of belonging.…”

“…In addition to these theoretical contributions, the paper provides nuanced empirical data on dominant groups’ understandings of national belonging in the UK, data which are also situated in relation to power and privilege. Although located in the south‐east of England, these contributions have broader relevance to international debates in Geography on the potential for more inclusive nationalisms, which have often privileged analysis of boundaries over hierarchies (Antonsich, ; Erdal & Strømsø, ; Matejskova & Antonsich, ; Strømsø, ), as well as the burgeoning literature on urban belonging and conviviality in the UK and beyond (Botterill, ; Nayak, ; Rishbeth & Rogaly, ; Wessendorf, ; Wise & Noble, ).…”

Rescaling belonging in “Brexit Britain”: Spatial identities and practices of Polish nationals in Scotland after the U.K. Referendum on European Union membership

“…It is important to note, however, that the sampling routes did not produce a very diverse sample. Although the diversity of Polish communities has been widely discussed (Garapich, ; Botterill, ), many studies of Polish migration focus either on highly skilled graduates and professionals or low‐skilled “economic migrants.” As a result, studies tend to reproduce a classed binary of economic versus cultural migrants that can be seen in public discourse of intra‐EU migration and indeed through the narratives of Polish nationals themselves. Given the potential limitations of a sample skewed towards highly skilled migrants, this paper focuses in depth on just a few narratives of Polish nationals living in Edinburgh to highlight how people talk about belonging at different spatial scales and circumvent insecurities following the Brexit vote.…”

“…As discussed, the pace and scale of Polish migration to the United Kingdom make this a well‐documented phenomenon. However, Brexit is a new context within which to explore the dynamics of Polish migration and is shaping communities in differentiated ways (Botterill, ). Ryan (, p. 3) argues that for Polish nationals in the United Kingdom, integration and attachment involve “differentiated embedding,” conceptualised as a dynamic, multiscalar, and differentiated process, that is, the degree of rootedness to a particular “sector of society,” such as the labour market, can vary over time and space.…”

EU nationals in the UK after BREXIT

“…More importantly, even fewer tackle political discursive engagement and reflexivity; Bell and Domecka's 2018 work, for example, precedes Brexit and only documents Polish engagements. This article is part of a number that are beginning to emerge in relation to this topic, although the majority still only charter one community (McGhee, Moreh and Vlachantoni 2017, Botterill 2018, Fleming 2018, Duda-Mikulin 2019, Rzepnikowska 2019). An exception is Lulle, Moroşanu and King's (2018) research, which included Irish, Italian and Romanian young people in London looking at their tactics of belonging before and after the referendum.…”