A Traveller’s Lodge By Natalie Dunn Seized by twofold darkness: Two stools, one fallen, an empty room. The place I live in with a lost girl from Christchurch and a bewildered beauty from Boston who is making some Chinese tea. The French lady forfeited her accent somewhere, she is not looking. The farmer from…
Author: Rachel Humphris
I'm a political anthropologist and am a Lecturer in the School of Social Policy at Birmingham University in the UK. I work primarily in the field of migration and refugee studies, with a particular focus on policy, race and cities.
Home Office in breach of law over permanent residence waiting times
The Home Office has broken the law by failing to publish the waiting times faced by EU citizens trying to get residence documents. The Information Commissioner ruled that Amber Rudd’s department is in breach of the Freedom of Information Act, having sat on the request for seven months and counting. Free Movement’s founder and editor,…
Back to school? Barriers for UK Eurochildren
Helen McCarthy, a doctoral candidate at Middlesex University and a trustee at the Indoamerican Refugee and Migrant Organisation (IRMO), writes about her experiences supporting EU families in London. Maria* thought she was doing the right thing, bringing her daughter, Laura, 8 years old, with her when she moved to the UK from Spain. Maria, originally from…
Eurochildren and the art of belonging
Shannon Damery, writes about her experience of researching European identity and belonging of Eurochildren in Brussels, highlighting the complexity and shifting nature of these terms. She is a PhD student at Université de Liège. I’m terrible at ceramics. I have not talent for it whatsoever, but I spent several months in Brussels, Belgium making malformed…
“This is a disgusting political lie”: EU parents respond to the Children’s Commissioner’s letter to Michel Barnier
by Nando Sigona [originally published in LSE Europp Blog, 14 July 2017] Unhelpful, patronising, misinformed, politically motivated, disgusting: shocked parents of EU children living in the UK took to Twitter to react angrily to the intervention of the Children’s Commissioner for England in the Brexit debate. What did the Commissioner Anne Longfield say? And why…
The Tragedy of Brexit: Pro-European Mobilisation After the Referendum
On 25th March 2017, a pro-EU march – the March for Europe – took place in London, with crowd estimates ranging from 50,000 to 100,000 participants. Similar, smaller-scale marches took place in other cities across the UK such as Edinburgh and Newcastle. The march was organised by ‘Unite for Europe’, one of a number of…
The quest for home of European Somali families in Britain
Brexit has created many challenges for EU families and their children who had made the decision to migrate to live in the UK. More importantly, it has unsettled their notions of ‘home’ for the majority of them. The questions of ‘where home is?’ and ‘where one belongs to?’ hit hardest particularly upon the secondary-migrant Somalian…
EU families & Eurochildren in Brexiting Britain 