Managing identities after Brexit

Blog post by Simone Haarbosch, Radboud University, Netherlands and Claire Wallace, University of Aberdeen, UK

Increased mobility within the European Union means that many people have learned to live in new places. However, improved communications meant they no longer had to choose one place or another – they can live in both places simultaneously using what we have analysed as ‘hybrid habitus’ (drawing on Bourdieu’s ideas). Brexit added a further complication by forcing them to adapt to a new situation whereby the UK was no longer part of the facilitated EU migration policy, thus adding new levels of uncertainty to the situation. However, for professional people, the choice is not so much an economic one (can I afford this?) as an existential one leading them to reconsider: Who am I?  Where do I belong?

Our Identities article, ‘Renegotiating female transnational identities after Brexit: the importance of hybrid habitus’, looked at the experiences of 58 middle class women, who were either Dutch people living long term in the UK (Scotland in this case) or British people living in the Netherlands. We looked at how they established a new sense of ‘home’ in another country on the one hand, and how they retained links with their motherlands on the other, as aspects of this hybrid habitus.  

​We focused on food and pets as aspects of how this hybrid habitus was established and negotiated because these are things that respondents flagged as important. Food was often the way in which they retained and shared aspects of their home identities in a new context with treasured associations of belonging. For example, a Dutch family in the UK ensured they had a supply of ‘sprinkles’ on their food imported from the Netherlands for them and their children. The photo below illustrates one woman’s Dutch food parcel. 

Dutch food parcel.

On the other hand, in the Netherlands, British women endeavoured to create British meals for their friends, even when ingredients were hard to come by.
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Pets often created an idea of ‘home’ as they were less transportable, anchored a person in a place through an ongoing commitment, and helped create a community of fellow pet owners to which they could belong. These emotional connections were difficult to sacrifice once the political landscape changed after Brexit and helped to provide a sense of continuity.

The importance of food and pets emerged from our research methods, which involved trying to understand as far as possible the women’s own perspectives. This involved asking them to take photos of what was important to them (both before and after Brexit), providing story narratives and timelines of their lives, often with the help of drawings, depicting how they connected the past, the present and the future. These methods meant that we could capture hybrid habitus by enlisting the help of the respondents themselves as intelligent and reflective peers and we focused upon two respondents to better illustrate the connections experienced across the sample. 

Hence, although Brexit jolted people living in different countries out of their established and familiar habitus, the hybrid habitus they had developed over the years, with multiple strategies of finding a sense of belonging through home-making, meant that they could cope with this additional disruption.

The debates about migration and integration across Europe would benefit from understanding how people negotiate these transitions between cultures. Although this study was limited to professional middle class migrants in two relatively similar cultures, it provides insights into how to better understand the home-making strategies that migrants adopt under stable and destabilizing circumstances.  It reminds us that the broader political debates also affect people’s personal lives and sense of identity.

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Image credit: Participants’ contributions. Used with permission.

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Read the Identities article:
​Haarbosch, S.W. & Wallace, C. (2025). Renegotiating female transnational identities after Brexit: the importance of hybrid habitus. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2024.2424699   OPEN ACCESS

Read further in Identities:

Indifference or hostility? Anti-Scottishness in a post-Brexit England   OPEN ACCESS

The vulnerability of in-between statuses: ID and migration controls in the cases of the ‘Windrush generation’ scandal and Brexit

Fragile belonging: professional Polish women’s belonging at work   OPEN ACCESS