The experiences of German migrants to Wales

The Association for German Studies in Great Britain and Ireland (AGS), is the biggest professional association for university-level German Studies in Great Britain and Ireland. The AGS seeks to support, foster, and increase the visibility and vitality of German Studies in Great Britain and Ireland.

IMAJINE researchers Bryonny Goodwin-Hawkins and Rhys Dafydd Jones are presenting at the annual conference of the Association for Germany Studies in Bristol. The theme for this year’s conference is ‘citizenship’, and Bryonny and Rhys will be presenting directly on the topic at part of the conference’s keynote panel.

They will be sharing preliminary findings from the Wales case study for IMAJINE’s work package 5, on migration and spatial justice. Specifically, they will discuss the experiences of German migrants to Wales, in the context of current uncertainties around citizenship, mobility and rights after Brexit. As they will argue, Brexit shows the limits to the concept of ‘denizenship’, in which citizens of one country are held to have rights in another. The data for the paper comes from qualitative interviews with German nationals in rural Wales.

The title of the paper presentation is “Negotiating citizenships: German citizens, European Union citizenship, and the limits of denizenship”.