I have been meaning to finish this post for at least a year and it has sat on my drafts page for all that time. Warning - there is some language that is not suitable for work and may offend the very easily offended. Don't read on if you think that might be you....
Some years ago in Wakefield, I attended a teacher conference organised by the local network lead for teachers, and did a little input on my work at the time. I've been delighted to be invited to speak to this group several times, and attended their conference for several years. when I was working as a freelance geographer. I hope they are all doing well during the lockdown and the return since.
This event was at the Hepworth Museum in Wakefield which is a lovely venue too. We had a chance to look round the exhibits and shop in the break during the day. I hope to go back for further sessions.
Alex Schafran was one of the speakers, from the University of Leeds. He is an urban geographer, and writes about cities and urban issues. He also advised me when I was writing the cities chapters for the Hodder Geography OCR 'A' and 'B' GCSE Textbooks.
Alex had recently had a paper published with the results of his research into the use of denigration by some places against others. He referred to this as the shithole theory and it struck a chord with me. The idea is that no matter where you are, there will always be somewhere that is worse that you can compare yourselves to and make you feel better about yourself. Another way to describe this is territorial stigmatization.
He kindly sent me a PDF of the paper which is worth seeking out and can be downloaded as a PDF here.
The methodology that was used is interesting and also potentially usable for other purposes:
As explained in the methodology section below, we examined a
sample of 2,076 individual tweets emanating from the UK and Ireland between December 2015
and May 2016 which contained the word “shithole” or used the hashtag ‘#shithole’. User data
enabled us to identify from where the Twitter user tweeted, the Twitter user’s own location,
the geography to which the tweet was referring, and the gender of the user. Using a process
developed through rounds of discourse analysis developed from popular literature and online
forums, we developed a set of codes which get at the meaning of each use of “shithole”. Further,
and more fundamentally geographic, we coded each tweet according to the relational
geography of each tweet.
Jo Brand got into a bit of trouble back in 2012, for making disparaging remarks about places such as Streatham. This was described as causing "reputational damage". David Harewood wrote a piece defending Streatham.
Jo Brand got into a bit of trouble back in 2012, for making disparaging remarks about places such as Streatham. This was described as causing "reputational damage". David Harewood wrote a piece defending Streatham.
In 2018, we had some disparaging comments about entire countries from President Trump, who referred to them as 'sh**holes'.
This sort of language of denigration can lead to issues, but is also something we need to be mindful of as geographers.
Some years ago, I had a module that I taught called "Is Hull really crap?" which explored the town's ranking in the first 'Crap Towns' book as #1. As I had lived there while training as a teacher, I shared my own thoughts, and also used a range of sources to show that there were other places that 'scored worse' than Hull, and that Hull as a city had a great many positives. My last extended visit was during its period as the City of Culture, for a special parade and a Pat Metheny concert - his only one outside of London - on his last UK visit.
What are your local places that would be subject to being labelled in this way?
What is it about them that might make people say that?
How helpful is this sort of language?
Image: Alan Parkinson, shared under CC license
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