Butler, A, Schafran, A orcid.org/0000-0003-1990-925X and Carpenter, G (2018) 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. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 43 (3). pp. 496-510. ISSN 0020-2754
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.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | This is a pre-print version of a paper accepted for publication in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. This article is protected by copyright. |
Keywords: | abjection; denigration; minoritarian voices; territorial stigmatisation; Twitter |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Environment (Leeds) > School of Geography (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 19 Jan 2018 12:21 |
Last Modified: | 15 Apr 2020 00:38 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Wiley |
Identification Number: | 10.1111/tran.12247 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:126408 |