The power of identity to manifest as a unifying and divisive force pervades social, cultural, economic and political relations. Economic crises, war and conflict, struggles over resources and equality, and questions of exclusion and belonging are premised both overtly and subtly in claims about identity. This finds expression at and between the individual and collective level. In the wake of the January 2015 terrorist attacks at the Charlie Hebdo office in Paris, people around the world readily identified with France and values such as freedom of speech with the hashtag# jesuischarlie (‘I am Charlie’), and# jesuisparis after the November attacks in the same year. The antiestablishment push-back against globalisation and mainstream politics from both the left and right of the political spectrum invokes questions of identity, to differing degrees. The Eurozone crisis has provoked discussions about the failure of the European political and economic project and identity. The push for independence in Scotland in 2014, and the rise of Syriza in Greece, and Podemos in Spain, also reflected efforts to rethink national and sub-national representation and identity against wider societal and economic crises. In the UK, the June 2016 referendum on EU membership was deeply tied to questions of identity in both the Leave and Remain campaigns. For those supporting ‘Brexit’, the referendum was an opportunity to ‘reclaim’national identity and ‘control’over economic and immigration policy and borders. The Leave campaign’s saturation of images and rhetoric imagined a restored national sovereignty and identity that proved to be a powerful, if contentious and divisive, discourse. For many who supported staying in the EU, the loss of the referendum was experienced as an ‘existential’–or ‘Brexistential’–crisis (Spicer 2016), an undoing of an identity that was attached not only to the nation-state (which now appeared different) but also to Europe. Questions of ‘who we are’shape our subjectivities and the world we inhabit,