Examining the role of meso-level storytelling agents in stigmatized neighborhoods


Sanaz Labaff, Memorial University

All communities are discursively imagined, and as a corollary, all communities can be discursively reimagined. Local storytelling is essential in the collective redefinition of local traditions and norms that can lead to structural image and reputation change. The image of a neighborhood is shaped through 1) residents as micro-level storytellers who share local news, information, stories, or even gossip with one another. 2) macro-level storytelling agents who often spark interpersonal discussions and enable community imagination and opinion formation on a large scale. 3) Meso-level storytelling agents, including local media and community organizations that given their organizational focus on a particular place have the greatest interest and potential in sharing local information and stories based on recent studies. The power of stories to bring communities together for a common purpose, to facilitate a shared understanding of their history, and to form their future is widely discussed in both urban development and communication literature. But this discursive power should be considered a dynamic phenomenon that takes “different forms in different community contexts, or from different perspectives, or on different issues.” In neighborhoods grappling with territorial stigmatization, storytelling can be a double-edged sword. It can play a crucial role either in initiating destigmatization discourses or in provoking bottom-up territorial stigmatization discourses which are likely to be directed and manipulated by meso and macro-level agents of storytelling like local news and social media. Place-based narratives in labeled areas, therefore, can be redirected to be served to revalue the place and reinsert it into the real-estate market or even to justify the state-driven gentrification projects. Although nowadays, all over the St. Johns downtown area can be considered a stigmatized region due to the dominance of the discourse of danger in the area and the growing number of homeless people, through initial interviews with residents of the area and scholars, I realized the significance of studying a particular part of this area called Livingstone Street and longs hill as a highly notorious neighborhood grappling with drug abuse, sex work, and violence. After an archival study on the social media groups and press news about this area as well as interviews with local journalists who have worked on this area, I realized the importance and power of place-based narratives on this site. The number of articles about these particular places in St John’s and how it is pictured as a dangerous abandoned area did not match my firsthand experience in the area. In this study, through an ethnographic study and working on bodies of literature on place-based narratives and territorial stigmatization, I aim to answer 1) How do Meso-level narratives of place contribute to image-making and reputation management in stigmatized neighborhoods? And 2) Is there any meaningful connection between place narratives told by local news and media and urban development plans? 3) Is there any other meso-level story based on history and literature that can shape an alternative narrative about this neighborhood?

This paper will be presented at the following session: