The politics of a ‘Poncy Pillowcase’: Migration and borders in Coronation Street’

Abstract

The Global Politics of a 'Poncy Pillowcase': Coronation Street at the border.In a 2007 episode of Coronation Street, Janice Battersby, Sally Webster and Sean Tully discuss how they might be able to help their friend, Joanne Jackson, who had been identified as an irregular migrant, detained, and was facing deportation to Liberia. Janice suggests 'we could write to our MP', but this suggestion is quickly side-lined in favour of sending her a scented lavender pillow for comfort and stress relief -an idea upon which Janice heaps derision. This focus on the mundane, the We construct our argument around a 2007 storyline from Coronation Street concerning the politics of irregular migration and globalisation. We argue that soaps can offer insight into everyday agencies of migration and bordering while mitigating the problem of isolating migrant experiences from local experiences in migrant-receiving areas. In the narrative style of the soap a community of characters interacts with each other to comment on and to construct a commentary on social issues. Thus, the soap audience are drawn into on-going political contestation within the fictional world of the soap and the broader world from which storylines are drawn.We proceed by contextualising this discussion in international relations and critical border studies literature. We then draw on cultural studies in its institutional form in the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, focusing both on early discussions of the integration of the British working class into hegemonic ideologies and later discussions of the globalisation of

Everyday Ontological Security: Emotion and Migration in British Soaps

“…For example, soaps regularly take storylines and thematic issues directly from the headlines: a variety of characters take a stance on a variety of socio-political issues, often getting into heated arguments such is the melodramatic nature of the genre. In this way, soaps invite the audience to consider the issues, through both exposure to the storyline which might put a particular issue in the context of a well-loved character, and also through judgement of the characters (Innes and Topinka, 2016). The anxieties of the characters are a reflection of and an outlet for social anxieties.…”