Crisis and Chimeras; an Anthropological investigation of the stories and lives of young, Greek professional migrants living in post-referendum UK

Abstract

This PhD thesis is based on my ethnographic study of Greek professional migrants living in London, England. Based on my ethnographic fieldwork between 2018-2020, using methods of participant observation and semi-structured interviewing, my thesis explores the stories and lives of Greek migrants living in London, in the context of the UK’s decision to leave the European Union; a process known as ‘Brexit’. My thesis explores the impacts of the financial crisis and Brexit on my informants’ hopes for the future, which I explore through the lens of temporality and affect. In the context of financial crisis, some of my informants felt that life in Greece had become miseri (miserable); they felt that Greece’s potentiality for modernist success had become a chimera- illusory and impossible to achieve. In my thesis I apply theories of crypto-colonialism to explore these informants’ view of Greece as ‘behind’ the rest of Europe, and I argue that many modernists are now post-ambivalent in relation to the disemia (Eastern/Western sides) of Greek identity because they no longer consider Greece to be their home. In my thesis I explore emplacement and displacement beyond a spatial framework and contribute to anthropological understandings of the ‘abject’ and the ‘uncanny’. I reform existing approaches to xenitia (misery and hardship abroad); I view xenitia as a trope rather than a topological register. Throughout my thesis I explore the affective, (micro)material and sensory aspects of migration and belonging and I demonstrate the value of a negative methodological approach.