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On 1 January 2014 the transitional controls on free movement adopted by the UK when Bulgaria and Romania joined the EU in 2007, ended. This paper demonstrates how the discourses of politicians relating to their removal, amplified via news media contributed to the extension of state bordering practices further into everyday life. Based on ethnographic research into everyday bordering during 2013–15 the paper uses an intersectional framework to explore how this homogenizing, bordering discourse was experienced and contested from differently situated perspectives of Roma and non-Roma social actors from established communities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Public discourses on citizenship, identity and nationality, which link geographical borders and the political boundaries of a community, are infused with tensions and contradictions. This paper illustrates how these tensions are interwoven with multilayered notions of home, belonging, migration, citizenship and individual's ‘longing just to be’, focusing on the Dutch and the British context. The narratives of a number of Dutch and British women, who either immigrated to the respective countries or were born to immigrants, illustrate how the growing rigid integration and assimilative discourses in Europe contradict an individual anchoring in national and local communities. The narratives of women participating in these studies show multilayered angles of belonging presenting an alternative to the increasing strong argument for a fixed notion of positioning and national belonging. The female ‘new’ citizens in our study tell stories of individual choices, social mobility and a sense of multiple belonging in and across different communities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]