Title of proposal The Love Migration of Britons in Europe: How love affects and is affected by mobility

Project Summary
The project will explore three related questions: (1) What is the impact of love upon decision-making in the context of British
migration? (2) How do Britons find, negotiate and maintain love relationships? and (3) How does place matter in the
negotiation of British migrants' love relationships? Fieldwork will take place in two cities with differing migrant profiles -
Barcelona and Brussels - in order access different kinds of migrant, with six months of fieldwork in each. Throughout this
time, participant observation will allow the researcher to become acquainted with the participants and their environment..
Participants will also be interviewed 5 times at intervals of approximately one month, with initial narrative interviews being
followed by semi-structured interviews

A more experimental methodology will be explored subsequently with selected and willing participants. Without the presence
of the researcher, they will record conversations with someone they know on selected themes related to the project. These
recordings will allow access to emotional spaces (Morrison 2012: 61) which more traditional methods cannot access. These
participants will be asked to make 5 recordings over the duration of the project but, following ethical guidelines, will be able
to opt out at any time. A pilot study will precede fieldwork to ensure they are viable and the researcher is prepared.

Year 1: August 2014 pilot study. September 2014 to March 2015 - Fieldwork in Brussels. April 2015 to September 2015 -
Fieldwork in Barcelona. Year 2: August to April 2016 - Data analysis. May 2016 to September 2016 - Plan and structure
draft thesis and chapter outlines. Year 3: September 2016 to April 2017 - Write draft of thesis. May 2017 - Submit final draft
to supervisors. June 2017 and July 2017 - corrections and rewriting. August 2017 - Disseminate preliminary findings at
RGS-IBG conference. September 2017 - Submit final thesis.
Introduction What is the relationship between love and migration in the lives of British migrants living within the European
Union (EU)? Drawing on work on 'emotional geographies' (Davidson, Bondi & Smith 2005), intimacy (Bell & Valentine 2012)
and migration and love (Mai & King 2009), this research would explore the question of how love can be both a catalyst for
moving and a cause of stability in migrant lives through a qualitative, phenomenological and interpretive (Gabb 2008)
approach. As such, it is love and its relationship to (im)mobility which is the focus of this project.

Rationale
Migration, emotion, love and sexuality Recently, migration scholars have urged us to incorporate emotions in
the analysis of migrant lives (e.g. Svaek 2012) and there is an emerging body of literature that considers the emotional
experience of familial migration, such as caring across borders (e.g. Baldassar 2007; Beck & Beck-Gernsheim 2014). And
yet, to date, couples have been relatively ignored in this literature. This project will address this gap by focusing on adult
love relationships, exploring what happens when (im)mobility is propelled by love. Recent literature shows that migration and
sexuality are also linked and by recruiting participants in varying forms of love relationships, such as people in the
embryonic stages of relationships, or people who are 'living-apart-together' (Levin 2004), the proposed project will resonate
with studies which have challenged the implicit hetero-normative ideas of family (e.g. Bell and Valentine 1995).
The study is located within well-established lineages of scholarship on emotions and intimacy across the social sciences
(Denzin 1984; Smart 2007; Crossley 2010) and humanities (Satre 1993 [1948]; Ahmed 2004) and contributes to
geographical enquiry into intimate relationships (Valentine 2008; Walsh 2007 2009 2011) and love (Morrison, Johnston and
Longhurst 2012). However, love has been rather taken for granted conceptually. This project seeks to address this by
departing from the idea that love is embodied, relational and socio-spatial (Davidson, Bondi & Smith 2005: 3) so as to
interrogate past and present conceptualizations of love.

Privileged Migration Research on migration and emotion has mainly focused on low-skilled migrants, such as
domestic workers (Hochschild 2005). In contrast, this research considers a relatively privileged migrant group: British
migrants. One well-known flow of British migration is lifestyle migration to southern Spain (e.g. O'Reilly 2000), but this body
of work pays little heed to the emotional lives of the migrants. The proposed project will bring together the strands of British
migration, emotional life, and love migration. As such, it is most closely aligned with Walsh's (2007, 2009, 2011) work which
has focused on British migration and emotion, and has engaged with migration and intimacy in couple relationships. This
project responds directly to a call for more attention to be paid to libidinal migration (King 2002). Focusing on migration
within the EU it will speak to the question of how migration is motivated by love and how migrants find, negotiate and
maintain love relationships within this '"new" mobility' (Mueller 2012) taking place within the EU.

Summary This project is distinctive because it explores mobility and love in a 'borderless' Europe (Mueller 2012). Love is
seen within the context of this freedom to move and emotional attachments (or lack of them) are highlighted as contributing
to migrants' decisions about whether to leave or to stay in a particular place, about which places count as home or away,
and how this changes over time. If 'new' mobility reduces institutional limitations, then love relationships might become more
salient as the basis for decisions about migration (Mai & King 2009). The research will foreground love relationships and
frame migration through a lens of emotional life, thus presenting mobile people as emotional, desiring subjects.

My suitability for the project This project builds on my previous research experience exploring the role that language
played in Anglo-Mexican marriages. This was a multiple case study using focus groups and interviews. The findings were
presented at an International conference in Latin America. I further developed my position on the social discourses of love in
my thesis for my MSc in social anthropology.

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