Young people’s attitudes towards Brexit and Europe during COVID-19

With Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, the UK and Europe find themselves in the midst of a profound moment of political, economic and generational uncertainty (Susen, 2017) (Oliver, 2018). Young people under 30 years of age have been members of the European Union their entire lives (Mejias & Banaji, 2017) and now experience the detachment of the UK from the EU. The process of leaving the EU is fundamentally changing the nature of their relationships with their European counterparts, and the economic, social, and political outcomes of Brexit will have the greatest consequences for the youngest and future generations (Mejias & Banaji, 2017, p. 5). In the middle of this uncertainty, young people are expected to make identity choices and reshape their sense of belonging to groups and societies (Beck, 1992; Giddens, 1990). The current research contributes to the study of European politics, sociology and cultural studies and furthers our understanding on the social construction of political identities among young people during the COVID-19 era. This research is exploring how young people in Athens and London articulate the European identity after Brexit during a global pandemic. A growing amount of literature has been produced by social scientists to try and assess the absence or existence of a European identity (Bruter, 2003). Yet it is very unclear what people tell us when answering our questions on their identities since defining, explaining, and measuring ‘’identity’’ is a challenging topic (Delanty & Rumford, 2005), especially in times of crisis. Brexit is a political decision for Britain and Europe for which terms, procedures and consequences are still unclear (Mejias & Banaji, 2017). Recent research on Brexit from different disciplines have been insightful and influential. For example, Brexit has been approached so far from psychology and behavioral science perspectives (Cassidi, Innocenti, & Burkner, 2018) (Bechhofer & McCrone, 2007), cognitive theory and political psychology (Capelos & Nielson, 2018), social policy theories (Ishkanian, 2019), international relations and politics approaches (Oliver, 2017), political science view (Corbett, 2016) (Delanty G. , 2017), sociological approaches (Outhwaite, 2017) etc. The current research aims to further our understanding on the social construction of political identities among young people during times of crisis. Since this study is focusing on Brexit and Europe during COVID-19, online focus groups were selected as a research method to emphasize on the participants interaction in the discussion (Litosseliti, 2003). The benefit of online focus groups is that facilitate group discussions of people who are geographically dispersed or at home (Han et al., 2019). Furthermore, focus groups can be used as simulations of everyday discourses and conversations or as a quasi-naturalistic method for studying the generation of social representations or social knowledge in general (Lunt & Livingstone, 1996). In this qualitative research, 20 online focus groups were conducted with British students in London and Greek students in Athens between May-October 2020 (4-8 participants per discussion). These online discussions were video recorded, transcribed and analysed using discourse analysis.