Still Whitewashing Britain: Race, Class and the UK Citizenship Test
Identities event held in collaboration with Sociology at Lancaster University. Speaker: Dr Anna Tuckett, Brunel University of London. Chaired by: Dr Aaron Winter, Lancaster University.
School of Social and Political Sciences
College of Social Sciences Hub
Date: Wednesday 18 November 2026
Time: 15:00 - 16:30
Venue: Online
Category: Public lectures, Academic events, Staff workshops and seminars,
In this talk, Dr Anna Tuckett will examine how the UK citizenship test promotes an exclusionary vision of Britishness which is both classed and racialized. Reflecting on a longer trajectory of British nationality and citizenship policy-making since 1948, Dr Tuckett will show that the citizenship test must be situated within a broader ideological project that equates Britishness with whiteness. Drawing on ethnographic research at training centres which assist migrants in learning and memorizing the Life in the UK Handbook, Dr Tuckett will show that candidates must regurgitate this exclusionary version of Britishness in order to pass the test. However, the Handbook’s contents are not cleanly imparted, but rather messily refracted, as migrants’ and teachers’ own worldviews bleed into this idealized version of Britain and challenge its hegemony.
Speakers
Dr Anna Tuckett, Brunel University of London
Dr Anna Tuckett specialises in political and legal anthropology, with a specific focus on migration in Italy and the UK. Anna is particularly interested in how people experience and manage the state, law and bureaucracy in their everyday lives.
Her book, Rules, Paper, Status: Migrants and Precarious Bureaucracy in Contemporary Italy (2018), was awarded the 2019 William A. Douglass Prize in Europeanist Anthropology. It examines the ways in which immigration laws and policies work on the ground in one of Europe’s biggest receiving countries.
Anna's more recent research was conducted in London as part of a collaborative ESRC-funded project entitled ‘An ethnography of advice: between market, society and the declining welfare state’. Exploring the emergence of unofficial and unregulated citizenship test schools in London, Anna's study examines the lived realities of integration policies within a wider context of austerity measures and state reconfiguration.
Anna's current research project examines how ‘good’ immigration advice is defined, learned and reproduced across national contexts, and how advice practices are being reshaped by the increasing digitisation of immigration systems.