UB anthropologist explores ‘sideways migration’ in new book

European map showing migration from France to the United Kingdom.

Release Date: January 29, 2025

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Deborah Reed-Danahay, PhD.
“Most of the work in migration studies has, historically, and rightly so, been on people who are motivated to move because of desperate circumstances. ”
Deborah Reed-Danahay, PhD, professor and Jean Monnet Chair of anthropology
University at Buffalo

BUFFALO, N.Y. – It’s estimated that by 2016 as many as 400,000 French citizens had relocated to London. 

And though there have always been French people living in London, the migration trend greatly accelerated in the early 21st century.

Migration studies look mostly into the experiences of people who move searching for a better life in a more prosperous country. But moving from one socially and economically well-off country to a similar one is a population shift that didn’t even have a name until the publication of a recent book by a University at Buffalo researcher that broadens previous conceptions of emigration and transnationalism.

“I’m calling this ‘sideways migration,’” says Deborah Reed-Danahay, PhD, professor and Jean Monnet Chair of the Department of Anthropology in the UB College of Arts and Sciences. Her book “Sideways Migration: Being French in London” (Routledge) explores the personal narratives and other factors that lead middle-class people to move to a country geographically close to and much like the one they left.

Why do middle-class French people make a sideways move to London? What led people to leave the familiarity of home to settle in a nearby, comparable location? The book pays particular attention to emplacement, a recent research trend that refers to “a sense of belonging.”

Emplacement implies feeling at home, a social as well as a physical anchor. French citizens in the UK haven’t simply moved there but “seek emplacement” both in London and back home in France. By studying this under-researched area of migration, Reed-Danahay provides novel ideas and insights into relocation, settling and belonging that are distinct from research investigating the experiences of refugees and poor economic migrants.

“Most of the work in migration studies has, historically, and rightly so, been on people who are motivated to move because of desperate circumstances,” says Reed-Danahay. “But more and more, these issues of the relative privileges related to the middle-class demand that we look at different types of migration.”

That meant first finding people to interview and hear their stories. 

Reed-Danahay contacted three organizations in London that served diverse segments of the French population, including those assisting individuals who followed spouses working in the UK. Another organization, which dates from the 19th century, serves those who can’t afford medical care, which introduced Reed-Danahay to people struggling, yet who chose not to return to France. The third and most surprising organization was an employment service based in London and partially funded by the French government and designed to help young people find employment in their new home.

“I had never heard of anything like this third organization, but through it, I got to know a lot of young people who arrived as I was starting my work and was able to follow over 10 years of research.”

And it was an eventful 10 years, accompanied by Brexit — the UK’s departure from the European Union (EU) following a 2016 referendum — and the COVID-19 pandemic, unforeseen events that brought a sea change to Reed-Danahay’s original objective.

Brexit rocked what started as a project centered on the freedom of mobility in Europe, as people who previously had rights to live in London were suddenly subject to new laws.

“It was a cataclysmic shift for the French in the UK who had lived there a long time and hadn’t needed to obtain UK citizenship,” says Reed-Danahay. “The vagaries of the Brexit process, and especially its delays, led me to prolong my research to see Brexit through to the end. But it also prompted me to understand that change would be a constant in my fieldwork, including the restricted mobility that accompanied the pandemic.”

For four years, people weren’t sure what would happen in the settlement between the UK and EU, an uncertainty that would meet the leading edge of the pandemic.

“I studied people who came after Brexit, who knew it was happening, while also interviewing people who had been in the UK and been affected emotionally by Brexit as their historical welcome turned into rejection,” she says.

Reed-Danahay sees her book as bringing together strands of earlier scholarship in France, and later among former Vietnamese refugees in Texas.

“My first fieldwork project was among farmers in rural France,” she says. “I can see that it was perhaps somewhat inevitable that I would eventually become engaged with studies of mobility and migration and connected issues of home, emplacement and dislocation. 

“A thread woven through all my research projects, however, has also been that of power and social hierarchy, and this book reflects that long-standing interest.”

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