Michaela Benson

Biography

Michaela is currently a research leader for the project BrExpats: freedom of movement, citizenship and Brexit in the lives of Britons resident in the European Union funded by the UK in a Changing EU. This project examines the implications of Brexit for Britons resident in other European Union member states and their lived experiences as it unfolds,joined Goldsmiths in 2013 after working at the universities of York and Bristol. She is internationally renowned for her contributions to the sociology of migration, and her research on the class, home, identity and belonging.

Research Interest

Research interests: migration; home, identity and belonging; social class; rural and urban sociology Michaela started her research career studying the social phenomenon of lifestyle migration, broadly defined as the migration of the relatively affluent in search of a better way of life and have, over the past ten years, conducted ethnographic fieldwork on this topic among the British in rural France and North Americans in Panama. Her focus on both the motivations behind migration and everyday lives following migration reveals the processes by which social identities are reproduced, reinscribed and reconfigured through migration and post-migration lives, in response to new social and cultural contexts. Her publications on this topic locate lifestyle migration within wider sociological debates about the individual and society, lifestyle, class and culture.