What does it mean when people call a place a shithole? Understanding a discourse of denigration in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland

Abstract

This paper investigates what people mean when they engage in the discourse of denigration. Building on existing literature on territorial stigmatisation that either focuses on macro-scale uses and effects of territorial stigmatisation or micro-scale ethnographic studies of effects, we develop a novel approach that captures the diverse voices that engage in the discourse of denigration by tracing the use of the word and hashtag "shithole" on the social media platform Twitter in order to examine who is engaged in the stigmatising discourse, the types of place that are stigmatised and the responses to stigmatised places. Using a robust data set, we highlight two key findings. First, the majority of tweets were aimed at places where the tweeter was not from, a form of othering consistent with how territories are stigmatised by those in positions of power such as policymakers, politicians and journalists. Second, we note that an important and gendered minority of tweets can be characterised by a "cry for help" and powerlessness, where the stigma is aimed at their own places. We offer an interpretive lens through which to understand and frame these minoritarian voices by engaging with theories of abjection that allow us to see how minoritarian voices relate to place.

On the Stickiness of Territorial Stigma: Diverging Experiences in Amsterdam’s Most Notorious Neighbourhood

“…In this respect, the often‐made distinction between the production of stigma by the outside world and residents who “live through” stigmatisation is far less clear than generally assumed (Tyler and Slater ). As Butler et al () also find in their study on spatial denigration in social media, local residents—in their desire to create distance between self and place—often reinforce stigmatising labels. We suggest that this, more than anything else, exposes the fundamentally unequal power relations, both outside and within the neighbourhood, that lie at the core of processes of territorial stigmatisation.…”

“…This includes a shortlist of notorious neighbourhoods, whose names are nationally—and in some cases internationally—known, and which are imagined as different and disconnected from the rest of the city (Dikec ). Residents in these iconic neighbourhoods are confronted with stigmatising labels and negative narratives in their everyday lives (De Koning and Vollebergh ), in newspapers (Glasze et al ), social media (Butler et al ), popular culture (Arthurson et al ; Van Gent and Jaffe ) and urban policies (Kipfer ; Tyler and Slater ). Representations of these neighbourhoods reproduce an imagined moral geography of the city, drawing boundaries between “here” and “there”, “us” and “them”, and “good” and “bad”.…”

#WeAreBeneficiaries: Contesting Poverty Stigma Through Social Media

“…(e.g. Allen et al ; Arthurson et al ; Butler et al ; Jensen ; Jensen and Tyler ; Kallin and Slater ; Tyler ). The (re)production of stigma through media is not, of itself, novel to neoliberalism; “slum journalism”, for instance, has been practiced for as long as places have been labelled slums.…”

South Los Angeles Since the 1960s: Race, Place, and Class

“…The research on the topic identifies a number of channels through which a place can exert effects beyond individuals’ characteristics (see Galster, 2012, for a review). An important causal mechanism underlying our analysis is that a neighborhood’s perceived history transforms to stigma (e.g., Butler, Schafran, & Carpenter, 2018; Slater, 2017; Wacquant, 2010). In effect, people, employers, and real estate agents living outside the neighborhood can use residence within its borders as a means of exclusion that does not rely on discrimination based on individual traits.…”