“Slaughterhouse cattle are treated better than this”: exploring the salience of everyday nationhood at British airports

Abstract

Questions remain about nationhood’s everyday salience–that is, whether and how nationhood is engaged with by “ordinary people” undertaking routine activities. We present an innovative methodology for investigating everyday nationhood at the international border. We created a social media dataset of 1,083 “tweets” made during British airport border crossings, where nationhood might be expected to be particularly salient–especially during a period corresponding to post-referendum Brexit negotiations. We used content analysis to generate descriptive frequencies, before analysing these broad patterns in further detail via qualitative analysis. Nationhood is found to be largely absent, at least explicitly. A large majority focus on the contingencies of everyday life in highly individualist and consumer-oriented ways. The most common identification–“non-EU”–indicates border-crossing experiences framed by geopolitical inequalities, but only rarely by nationhood. One possible exception to the dominant patterns is a highly individualist, tacit manifestation of Britishness.