“There's just too many”: The construction of immigration as a social problem

Abstract

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

“You don't go there”: Spatial Strategies of Stigma Negotiation in a Post‐Industrial Town

“…This decline mirrors the symbolic loss of coal mining communities’ status in the national imagination. Where once colliery towns were understood as “sites of national pride and identity, providing the fuel to power the industrial revolution and empire” (Pattison 2022b:275), they are now stigmatised through characterisations of worklessness, poverty, and dependency (Pattison 2022a). Hincks and Powell (2022) argue that more attention to physical space is required in analysis of territorial stigma because landscapes influence how people think, feel, and act.…”

“…The material and symbolic decline of the coalfields is etched in the landscape of deindustrialising colliery towns, through for example former colliery housing and welfare institutes, and other ruins of industrial culture which “evoke complex feelings … imbued with nostalgia and trauma” (Emery 2022:654–655). This sense of nostalgia has been mobilised in emergent right‐wing populist movements, often focusing on the so‐called “left behind”, signifying a white and English working‐class said to be marginalised by deindustrialisation, globalisation, political liberalism, and immigration (Pattison 2022b). As such, the “left behind” characterisation is a contradictory one: at times providing a basis for stigmatisation, at others used to signify a maligned and unfairly treated group deserving of justice.…”

“…In Europe, despite prevailing media and political claims to the contrary, impoverished urban locales are better understood as anti‐ghettos , characterised by “ethnic heterogeneity, porous boundaries, decreasing institutional density, and incapacity to create a shared cultural identity” (Wacquant 2008b:115). Colliery towns fit neither of these characterisations, and despite long and fluctuating histories of racialisation and migration in the coalfields (Pattison 2022b), the “left behind” frame works to erroneously construct a fixed and stable white spatial identity. Racialisation is absent from Lefebvre's production of space thesis (Byrne et al 2022), but is particularly important in this context because the idea of the “left behind” works to produce a space in which some people are seen to belong whilst others are constructed as threatening and out of place.…”

“…I think that whole area really, yer need to be being careful at night.These examples again illustrate the relationship between group and spatial stigma, and how avoidance strategies involve distancing from particular localities, groups, and times, relying on locally situated knowledge. There is a racialising discourse in these accounts which frame particular activities as inappropriate and out of place when they are associated with racialised others, particularly when they take place in space that symbolises lost forms of sociability (Pattison 2022b). Through this process, the stigma is redirected towards less powerful groups seen as responsible for the town's reputation, such as groups of young people and Polish migrants.…”

“…In contrast, the countryside symbolises white racial purity and a place of retreat and safety from corrosive urban squalor (Neal 2002). Racialised narratives about space are often contested or treated ambivalently, but they can influence how social problems are interpreted and responded to (Pattison 2022b) and therefore potentially shape stigma negotiations strategies.…”