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A Place To Call Home Exhibition - EUROCHILDREN

Following the EU-referendum, the Eurochildren project looks at how mixed-nationality EU families living in the UK express their sense of belonging in relation to the UK and EU. The project explores the human and emotional costs of this sudden political shift when ‘us’ and ‘them’ are one and the same.

Introducing EUROCHILDREN

Transcript

What is the EUROCHILDREN project?

My project looks at the impact of Brexit on European families. We look at how parents and children understand Brexit, what they do as a consequence, and how they think about the future. Some of them decide to go away to move back home. The problem is that for some of them, home is actually here. If you think that a lot of the children actually born in United Kingdom. So returning home means simply to stay here.

Why is your work important?

I feel my work is important because understanding the impact of Brexit on European family Britons also means understand the impact of Brexit on British society more broadly. After 40 years of membership of the European Union, there are hundreds of thousands of families that are mixed with British and European national, with children born from these couples that have grown up in this country. So after Brexit, all of them have to ask themselves, what next? What about our future? So this is why research is important and needs to be done.

What does home mean to the people in your project?

For all the people I work with, every migrant, every refugee has as a home in their mind. For some people, this home is not too far away. They can go there, they can visit, people can come to visit them. For others, home becomes a place where they are going to long for it, for all their life because of war, persecution, and because they are not allowed to travel. So something that we always talk about in interviews with people, they always mention it and you really need to unpack it. You really to understand to them, what does it mean? I'll do it. Some people will attach it to their families scattered around the world. So it's not a place is a friend, a brother, a sister and move with them. For the people, is that an attachment to a specific place, a square, a landscape, a view of the sea, a vista, etc. There’s always something that people see as important in their life is a very good way of starting a conversation, asking about home.

About EUROCHILDREN

Through the study of Eurochildren, their families, their experience and responses to Brexit, this project  – funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) as part of The UK in Changing Europe initiative – aims to portrait the emergence of a new politics of belonging which reconfigures discursively and legally who belong to a post-EU Britain and establish a baseline for future research on migration and settlement decision making in families with EU27 nationals following the formal exit of the European Union. 

Learn more about the aims of the EUROCHILDREN Project

EUROCHILDREN Project research in the news

Read a recent summary of the some of the findings of the EUROCHILDREN Project

View the summary news article