LAUSR

Abstract This article investigates the military ‘reunion’ videos that proliferated in the United States throughout the late 2000s and early 2010s. The typical video entails a returning soldier who surprises a family member, usually a child or female spouse, at a public event. I articulate the reunion video as a key feature of populism in contemporary US society. The videos can be considered examples of the ‘encounters’ theorized by both Anthony Giddens and Erving Goffman. Both private and public ‘social occasions’ with performative qualities of ‘day-to-day life’, the videos disclose the institutional and societal routines of not only a family but broader layers and circles of the US political community. They relate not only to loss but also to redemption. The article therefore investigates when and how, and provides a provisional argument for why, these videos have proliferated by consulting the everyday features of ontological security. It focuses on both the local and the international contexts within which they attend to, but also generate, US ontological insecurity.