‘Borderless’ Europe and Brexit: Young European migrant accounts of media uses and moralities

In this chapter, the author examines the experience of several young Europeans who were born in Latvia and moved to the UK, or continued moving back and forth between these two countries. She explores the accounts of young migrants living through a highly pertinent political event the UK-the EU referendum in 2016, when the UK voted to leave the European bloc. The author provides a concise overview of the methods used, followed by some context for Brexit in terms of geography and moralities that is relevant to her research participants. She also provides a conceptual approach to boundary-drawing and media use, which is applied in three analytical sub-sections of the reactions of her research participants: before the referendum, immediately after the referendum, and one year after the ‘leave’ vote. More than real, material mobility trajectories, the notion of a ‘borderless world’ better inhabits the information space-media, traditional and online, or a mixture of the two.