EU Freedom of Movement, Bordering and Membership: A Framework for the Analysis of EU Mobility Discourse

Research on European Union policymaking and communication discourse has long struggled with the Union’s plural, multi-voiced and institutionally complex nature, which makes its discursive strategies difficult to capture (Carta & Wodak, 2015). Freedom of Movement, however, has emerged as one of the EU’s most defining and identity-shaping principles, constructing a transnational and cosmopolitan narrative that challenges national boundaries and traditional imaginaries of belonging (Krzyżanowski, 2010; Zappettini, 2019). Yet, while often examined from institutional or policy perspectives, EU Freedom of Movement remains deeply uneven and hierarchically structured in practice, with its meanings and consequences varying across contexts, actors, and lived experiences. This chapter calls for a bottom-up exploration of EU Freedom of Movement through the everyday “small stories” of EU mobile citizens, foregrounding voices and experiences that reveal tensions, ambivalences, contradictions, and identity negotiations obscured by dominant mega-narratives (Georgakopoulou, 2015). Building on Critical Discourse Studies, Discourse Ethnography, and Narrative Analysis, the chapter proposes the FOM@Play Analytical Framework, developed within the ERASMUS+ project Freedom of Movement at Play. The framework offers a theoretically grounded and context-based tool for analysing EU citizens’ narratives of mobility, belonging, borders, and transnational identification. It underpins the annotation of the multilingual FOM@Play corpora and supports further discourse-analytical and corpus-linguistic investigations of EU FOM experiences. The chapter outlines the conceptual foundations, methodological principles, and analytical categories of the framework, culminating in an annotation scheme and coding definitions to facilitate its application in future research.