IMPACTFUL RESEARCH
EXPECTATION
Image credit: Radarsmum67 under Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)
Authority Figures, Facts and Ramifications
Our opinion of places can be heavily influenced without ever experiencing what’s there for ourselves. How the public perceive places – and the people who live there – is of major interest to Human Geographer and Sociology Lecturer Dr Alice Butler-Warke.
The media, politicians and netizens in general can all let slip the occasional stereotype into their daily routine. Sustained stereotyping like this can give a place – and its people – a bad name. However, if this core stigma suddenly comes to the fore when event stigma strikes – a tragedy or a disaster – then the stereotype suddenly becomes a lot harder to get rid of, and may have unfortunate consequences for the people who live there.
Alice says: “We all know places we consider to be desirable or less than desirable. When you’re looking to move to a new town, you may well be wondering which streets you should avoid living in. Everyone has some picture of what a particular place is like, and that’s what I find really interesting: how these stereotypes about places happen and in what ways they stretch out to affect our society.”
“In business, where you have a robbery, or a fire, or somebody in your organisation has committed fraud – that event can damage your brand, causing people to lose trust,” says Alice. “It’s the same with places. Event stigma tends to clear faster, but if you’ve got background stigma when a severe event occurs, the overall effect is really sticky and it doesn’t go away.”
Places can gain a stereotype or stigma for many reasons. Alice used indepth social media analytics to investigate the varying factors that make people talk a place down. Across 155 days, and more than 2,000 tweets with a specifically targeted derogatory keyword, netizens shared their feelings on places they thought were boring, dirty, populated by people of different races or faiths, poor, or where they simply didn’t like the football team.
As part of Alice’s research, she examined Liverpool’s Toxteth area and how the media have portrayed it over the years. There were riots in Toxteth as result of tensions between the police and the community in the 1980s: largely a result of stop-and-search laws. At the time, unemployment in Britain was at a 50-year peak and the area had one of the highest unemployment rates in the country. The community was pushed to breaking point, with even a local magistrate stating “they would be apathetic fools […] if they didn’t protest”.
The social media insults about places were notable for their gendered dimension. More than 80 per cent of the tweets targeting other places came from men. Women mostly preferred to keep their insults closer to home – their town, their house, their street or bedroom.
Alice adds: “Even 20 years later, newspapers mentioned the riots at the top of each story concerning Toxteth. It couldn’t escape its label.”
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