Homing infrastructures: Central and Eastern European families between precarity and cosmopolitan identity in post-Brexit Britain

This article examines how young people and their families from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) narrate experiences of home and belonging in post-Brexit Britain. While Brexit debates have largely centred on the macro-politics of belonging – who is considered deserving of the right to remain and under what conditions – less attention has been paid to how such discourses of ‘conditional citizenship’ shape the everyday lives of migrant families. Drawing on qualitative data from twenty family case studies in urban and rural areas across England and Scotland, the article explores how young CEE migrants negotiated conditional citizenship and ‘deservingness’, engaged with national, local and cosmopolitan identities, and navigated intersections of race, class and generation within a shifting socio-political landscape. Using ‘home’ as an analytical lens, it shows how these narratives are rooted in particular histories and geographies of migration yet shaped by Britain’s changing political context. For these young people, home is not a singular origin or seamless destination, but a set of relational, multi-sited and contingent practices. Schools, family networks, neighbourhoods and transnational ties offer homing infrastructures, yet these are shaped by political discourses and social encounters that can both include and exclude.