Feeling Unwanted: Understanding Digital Place-Making and Uncertainty in EU Settlement Scheme Digital Communities

The EU Settlement Scheme has sought to provide a legal framework for the residence of European Union citizens in post-Brexit Britain. In the meantime, digital communities have emerged, seeking to mitigate the errors, delays, and communication gaps that have plagued the scheme since its inception. Engaging with scholarship on digital place-making, this paper discusses a yearlong digital ethnography conducted in four Facebook communities and a visual analysis of the content shared by applicants. We deployed a mixed-method strategy to map group membership while analysing the language of uncertainty in posts. Results indicate a complex space of advice-seeking, reproducing much of the scheme’s bureaucratic nature and weakening these spaces’ potential for demonstrating alternative forms of solidarity.