Shades of Whiteness: 'Race', Migration and the Balkan Experience in the UK
Duration: 1 April – 31 July 2025
Funder: University of Nottingham ‘Return to Research Scheme’
Project team
Project summary
Whiteness has long been a focus of scholarship in Britain, particularly in relation to Empire, where the arrival of non-white bodies after the Second World War cemented racial hierarchies with whiteness at the apex, signifying privilege, power, and cultural belonging. However, since 2004, large-scale migration from Central and Eastern Europe has disrupted conventional understandings of whiteness and its entanglement with migration. Migrants from Poland and Romania, often employed in low-paid, precarious work, were racialised as 'other white' and marked as white yet denied the full privileges of hegemonic whiteness.
Existing research has richly explored this through studies of these migrants, shaping key concepts like peripheral or differential whiteness. Yet this focus has inadvertently marginalised how whiteness is constructed for migrants from the Balkans. Despite being racialised as white, Balkan migrants often carry distinct histories of conflict (eg Bosnia, Kosovo), stigmatisation, and geopolitical exclusion that shape their racial positioning in Britain in complex and underexplored ways. To fully grasp whiteness in post-2004, Brexit and Covid-19 Britain, this project examines how Balkan migrants navigate, resist, or are denied access to whiteness, revealing how racial hierarchies among white migrants are far from uniform.
Through in-depth qualitative interviews with migrants who self-identify as Balkan the project aims to explore the following research questions:
This pilot study aims to explore the following questions:
- How is whiteness constructed and negotiated by migrants from the Balkans living in Britain?
- To what extent do Balkan migrants experience racialisation despite being categorised as white?
- How do Balkan migrants perceive their position within British racial and social hierarchies?
- What strategies do Balkan migrants use to navigate inclusion, exclusion, and belonging in relation to whiteness in the UK?