Class, Place and Stigma in Teesside

What is it about?

Programmes such as Benefits Street 2 and Location Live offer heavily stigmatized portraits of post-industrial places such as Middlesbrough, Teesside UK. This paper looks at the impact of these media geographies through their constructions of people and place. The study contributes to an emerging international literature on place and stigma by extending these ideas to peripheral post-industrial landscapes. Through a case study of an ex-steel region, the analysis explores how a heavily stigmatised locality is passionately re-scripted through insider perspectives, social media, shared events and collective action. These practices serve not only to illuminate economic structural inequalities but also provide a means through which people can manage and temporarily refigure the stigma through a practice of place re-inscription.

Featured Image

Photo by Patrick Hendry on Unsplash

Photo by Patrick Hendry on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This paper is written in the aftermath of the closure of the Redcar steelworks in 2016, bringing to an end a 170 year old history of steelmaking in Teesside. While the impact is profound upon those in the local community, this ‘crisis’ is barely touched upon in academic accounts to date. International work on urban territorial stigmatization has tended to focus on the multi-ethnic metropolis and spectacular sites of urban unrest, rather than the post-industrial periphery. Moreover work on urban territorialisation has tended to expose how people in low-income neighbourhoods are complicit in the making of stigma (Wacquant, 2008). In contrast, I focus upon acts of resistance, resilience and the imaginative ‘re-scripting’ of place.

Perspectives