From mobile workers to fellow citizens and back again? The future status of EU citizens in the UK

Growing concerns and hostility towards continuing large-scale flows of immigrants following the two rounds of EU enlargement and high levels of net migration played a major part in the Brexit referendum result for the UK to leave the EU. So too had welfare chauvinism, or the belief that welfare benefits should be restricted to citizens, come to the fore in negative attitudes to EU immigration, reflecting a rejection of EU migrants as fellow citizens. As the article shows, proposals as of summer 2017 for the status of current EU citizens in the UK indicate a desire by the UK government to incorporate current EU citizens within the far more restrictive British immigration rules, thereby curtailing some of their basic free movement rights, especially in relation to future family members. Leaked proposals for future EU citizens post-Brexit are to bring them within a single overall immigration system covering EU and non-EU migrants and applying differential rights of residence to skilled and less skilled, thereby stratifying EU migrants according to educational level and labour market sector. This would represent a return to the status of mobile workers with conditional rights of residence and social entitlements similar to those faced by non-EU migrants

Changing times: migrants’ social network analysis and the challenges of longitudinal research

Focusing on migrant social networks, this paper draws upon the sociology of time to incorporate complex notions of temporality into the research process. In so doing, we consider firstly, the challenge of going ‘beyond the snapshot’ in data collection to capture dynamism through time. Secondly, we apply the concepts of timescapes to explore ways of addressing the wider context and the interplay between spatiality, temporality and relationality in migration research. We argue that integrating a mixed methods approach to SNA, crucially including visualisation, can provide a useful methodological and analytical framework to understand dynamics. SNA can also be helpful in bridging the personal and structural dimensions in migration research, by providing a meso level of analysis. However, it is also important to connect the investigation of local and transnational networks with an analysis of the broader social, economic and political contexts in which these take shape; in other words, connecting the micro and the meso with the wider macro level. Drawing upon reflections from our migration research studies, we argue that different combinations of quantitative, qualitative and visual methods do not just provide richer sets of data and insights, but can allow us to better connect conceptualisations – and ontologies – of social networks with specific methodological frameworks

Visualization in mixed-methods research on social networks

Introduction to edited special section of Sociological Research Onlin

Qualitative analysis of migrants' network data: using conceptual reflexivity to reveal the 'magic trick'

While in recent years, qualitative social network analysis (SNA) has advanced considerably – particularly in migration research – there is still an overall tendency to focus more on issues of network structure and on the generation of data, rather than on how data can be interpreted and analysed qualitatively in practice. In this article, we discuss how a genuinely qualitative SNA should not only apply qualitative techniques in generating visual and oral network data but also in the analytical processes. Building on our earlier work, we advance methodological debates by presenting the idea of ‘conceptual reflexivity’: an awareness of how our thinking about networks and the ways in which we interact with participants – and the wider field – inform layers of meaning making. Using two recent examples from our migration research, we explore the inter‐subjectivity of the research encounter, offering insights into the ‘craft’ of qualitative SNA and the epistemological issues underpinning it. In doing so, we aim to make analytical processes more open and visible, to reveal, so to speak, what goes on behind the curtain: the ‘magic trick’ of how qualitative SNA is performed