Geographies of (un)ease: Embodying racial stigma and social navigation in public spaces in a reluctantly super-diverse city

ABSTRACT

Combining insights from sociology, geography, and race-ethnicity studies, this exploratory study examines how young middle-class Moroccan-Dutch men navigate geographies of (un)ease and the subsequent coping strategies they employ in public spaces of Rotterdam. Drawing on 12 semi-structured walking interviews in Rotterdam, our findings reveal that (un)ease is not only affected by the types of surrounding bodies and the amount of attention directed at these bodies, but also by spatial and temporal factors, such as day-night, quietness-liveliness, whiteness-racialization, immobility-mobility and familiarity-unfamiliarity. Furthermore, we mapped the men’s geography of (un)ease, showing how stigma is spatially situated in relation to different neighborhoods. In contrast to previous studies, respondents did not seem to only opt for conflict avoidant strategies as their main coping strategies utilized were ignoring, avoiding, reforming and contesting.

KEYWORDS:

• Racial stigma
• (inter)embodiment
• spatialization of stigma
• coping strategies

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the interviewees for walking with us, the anonymous reviewers and editors for their constructive feedback (and patience), and Femke Vandenberg for proofreading.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Until 2022, the Dutch statistical agency (CBS) used as a main category “people with a migration background.” We however follow as much as possible the approach of Gunaratnum (2003) which acknowledges power, i.e., that people are actively minoritized by others rather than naturally part of a minority.

2. We looked at the relative numbers of white people and racially minoritized people in the neighborhoods near the meeting locations with the Rotterdam Buurtmonitor of 2018, while being aware this is an indicator with limitations.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joia Esmée de Jong

Joia Esmée de Jong is Creative Director for academia at Creative Desk. She graduated summa cum laude from her bachelor’s degree in Liberal Arts and Sciences and cum laude from her research master’s degree in Sociology of Culture, Media and the Arts at Erasmus University Rotterdam. From these experiences, she learned how to research phenomena interdisciplinary by connecting different domains. In her work, the focus always lays upon power dynamics and how social inequality is (re)produced in the public sphere. These interests have led her to one of her current position in which she makes academic work more accessible to the general public with visual design and storytelling.

Pauwke Berkers

Pauwke Berkers is Full Professor Sociology of Popular Music and Head of Department at the Department of Arts and Culture Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam. His main research interests include social inequalities in Arts and Culture. His work has been published in Poetics, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, Gender & Society and other outlets.