Everyday Ontological Security: Emotion and Migration in British Soaps

Abstract

Work on affect has made significant contributions to how IR scholars understand high politics of international affairs, capturing political reactions to the horrific, the spectacular and the exceptional. However, the turn to affect has been less inclined to offer comprehensive insight into the importance of emotion in banal or everyday international politics. The theory of ontological security can offer such insight as it attends to experiences of the everyday, particularly through the discursive production of identity. Identity might be disrupted at moments of spectacular or exceptional events that call it to question, but is equally made and remade in the discursive production of everyday life. This research focuses on the latter, analysing the reproduction of the international in the everyday through the vehicle of British soaps Coronation Street and Emmerdale, both of which introduced storylines about migrant workers in the late 2000s. British soaps are designed to be culturally proximate and incorporate didactic messages. Analysis of soaps offers a layered and intersectional view of emotional reactions to international migration at the level of an abstracted individual and the level of the nation-as-viewer.Work on affect has made significant contributions to how IR scholars understand high politics of international affairs, capturing political reactions to the horrific, the spectacular and the exceptional (Auchter 2014, Fierke 2012, Hutchinson and Bleiker 2014. However, the turn to affect has been less inclined to offer comprehensive insight into the importance of emotion in banal or everyday international politics. Feminists in IR are of course the exception to this rule, variously focusing on the importance of emotion in encounters with international phenomena (Stern 1998, Ackerley and True 2008, MacKenzie 2011, Dauphinee 2013. Notable feminists such as Cynthia Enloe (1989) and Marysia Zalewski (1996) turned attention away from elites and patriarchal structures to attend to everybody and the everyday of international relations. Further, work in everyday experiences of security has made inroads into understanding the politics of resistance and the importance of identity Niessenbaum 2014, Parker 2012). Similarly work on vernacular security has incorporated an experiential security and seeks to learn from the everyday (Bubandt 2005, Vaughn-Williams and Croft 2017). I suggest here that the theory of ontological security can offer insight into the role of emotion in everyday international relations as it attends to the discursive production and, I argue, the performative production of identity. Identity might be disrupted at moments of spectacular

Ontological insecurities and the politics of contemporary populism

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“…Ontological security started out as an approach to understanding individuals in their own daily, social settings, coming to grips with not only the psychological struggles of the Self but also the ways in which individuals can 'cope' with the chaos of late modernity. While much of the wave of scholarship on ontological security in the context of international politics has transposed it to the state, at times even at the cost of losing its individual-level core, it has been recently appropriated in a series of works back to that 'everyday' level of analysis (Innes 2017;Kinnvall et al 2018). This special issue on 'Ontological Insecurities and the Politics of Contemporary Populism' makes a further significant step in this direction, not losing sight of contributing to the expanding deliberations over ontological security in international telations in empirical, theoretical and methodological ways.…”

Climate Change and Ontological (In)security in the Marshall Islands

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“…By casting a light on the role of identities in the state's security strategies, state-centered approaches such as Mitzen's have contributed to an explanation of what might seem to be counterintuitive security initiatives. (Innes, 2017) However, by linking security strictly with state identity and reproducing the traditional narrative on the state as the main subject of security, the state-centered approach in ontological security has been a target of criticism. (Innes, 2017: 2).…”

“…That is the reason why I argue that climate change can also endanger individual's ontological security -which refers to "to the desire and urge of a social actor to survive and surpass not only as a physical identity, but also as a certain sort of (social) being." (Innes;Steele, 2014, p. 17, italics in the original) In this sense, climate change has been posing an "existential threat" not only to the physical survival of low-lying islands and its people, but also to the preservation of individual self-identities of those who experience an extremely anxiety about their likely future away from their atolls.…”