Spaces of the local, spaces of the nation: Intersectional bordering practices in post-Brexit Berlin

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between bordering practices and processes of situated intersectionality by exploring how British migrants encounter and erect borders as they move through Berlin. Through exploring how research participants conceptualise and orientate themselves towards Berlin’s city spaces and how this relates to transnational and translocal processes of classification, I interrogate how processes of racialisation and classification move across European contexts to manifest within localised spaces. The research explores how these intersections work to minimise, accentuate or transfigure one another as inequalities come into being through urban space by placing feminist intersectional approaches in conversation with border studies. By uniquely focusing on a migrant group infrequently considered in European migration literatures, and often regarded as invisible or unproblematic, we can examine how race, class and gender intersect with nationality and how racialised exclusions from European belonging function through everyday processes. I highlight how classification processes have transnational portability and carry intra-European similarities, yet also assuming context-specific features.