Brexit’s Afterlife: Rural Superdiversity, New International Mobilities and the Micro Social Management of Brexit Talk in the British Countryside

'[P]eople are coming more from like South Africa, Zimbabwe, Philippines because they are coming for 2 years (…) and they pay quite a lot of money where say, Poland or Romania, they don't need to pay that much because they can go to a different country in Europe'. This extract comes from an interview with a Polish shop owner in a rural market town in West Wales. The interview was conducted as part of a two-year project investigating the social consequences of Brexit and its dynamic transformation of rural lives and rural places. Rural areas, where the economies and services have been heavily reliant on EU migrant labour, have particularly felt Brexit’s impacts. Using cross-national (England, Scotland and Wales) rural place-based fieldwork the paper examines three key themes: first, the new mobilities of rural international migration in which earlier EU migrants are leaving rural areas and being replaced by international migrants (often from outside Europe) on highly managed seasonal worker schemes; second, the emergence of concomitant narratives of rural superdiversity in which earlier Eastern and Central European migrants are nostalgically repositioned in new migrant hierarchies and third, the ways in which quotidian Brexit sensibilities and sensitivities continue to be sutured into everyday social interactions of rural residents. We align these themes to illuminate rural places as unsettled, relational sites, condensing complex mobilities and rapid social, economic, cultural and ethnic transformation. The paper draws on the Leverhulme Trust-funded project 'Living Brexit in rural Britain: migration and rural communities' (2023-25).