Fuzzy Identities in (Dis)Integrating Europe: Discursive Identifications of Poles in Britain Following Brexit

Abstract

This study explores the fuzzy discursive identifications of Polish residents in Britain following the Brexit referendum by using a corpus of Polish-language glocal media materials (Moja.Wyspa.co.uk). Fuzziness is defined and operationalized on three levels: with respect to (1) online media technologies (global/local; above-/below-the-line) that allow diverse voices; (2) identity positions of non-native residents (Polish migrants as EU citizens at a destabilizing moment) who are left with the sense of anomie and “in-betweenness”; (3) discursive strategies of self-presentation mobilized in the ongoing processes of identification, whose analysis sometimes transcends classificatory grids offered by (critical) discourse frameworks. Given such theoretical conceptualization and methodological operationalization of fuzziness, this study reports on the empirical analysis of 104 articles and ten commentary threads. It discusses the results of a thematic analysis that reveals the dominant, yet discrepant, foci of official and personal narratives of Poles in the UK. It traces the main ways of self-naming, attribution and self-evaluation of the Polish diaspora, also vis-a-vis other significant actors (based in Poland or Britain). It also uses corpus-linguistic tools to capture frequency and keyness parameters, collocational strength and sentiment analysis to reveal the linguistic patterning behind the studied discursive identifications. The analysis shows how a destabilizing political event (Brexit referendum) has influenced glocal ethnic media in their becoming even more intense “sites of identity struggle.” It concludes that the gradual acculturation of Polish diaspora prior to Brexit was disrupted and that retroactive ethnic identifications are hardly conducive to integration in a multicultural society.