Placing Townies: The Symbolic Work of Naming

Abstract

This article explores how students in one college town use the name “townies” to describe some local residents who are not affiliated with the university. Embedded within this name are unspoken connections that link townies (and the students who use the name) to discourses of socioeconomic class. In addition, the naming of particular bodies as townies symbolically works to stretch the social space of the university well beyond its physical boundaries, which reshapes the conceptual map of the local sociocultural terrain to, ironically, position townies as “out of place” within many portions of the town.

Keywords:

• Class
• Irony
• Naming
• Place
• Townies

Notes

Akin to the debates over the name of the National Communication Association over the years, Sharer (2001) explored how members of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom struggled with how to name the organization.

See Condit (2006) for an excellent discussion of the relationality of communication processes.

We used pseudonyms for our university and community during the review process, but depart from that practice in this article because readers would undoubtedly be able to identify the university from our affiliations.

See http://www.ohio.edu/instres/factbook.pdf (p. 3).

According to the Athens city code office, between 72% and 75% of houses in Athens are renter-occupied. Although the office does not track the number of student renters, a staff member indicated that student renters constitute a significant portion of the town's renters (personal communication, April 4, 2007).

Ohio University's institutional review board approval was granted on April 3, 2006, in document 06E063.

We gratefully acknowledge the guidance of Christina S. Beck as we developed questions and question wording for the interview protocol.

We thank Tim Pollock for his time-consuming efforts in transcribing the interviews.

Initial drafts of this article relied solely on the interview transcriptions, as they provided more detailed responses than the questionnaires. We then went back to the questionnaires to reflexively ascertain whether our analysis was consistent with the descriptions provided by undergraduate students on the questionnaires. Specifically, we counted the number of questionnaires in which primary interview themes appeared. Overall, our analysis reflects a multifaceted process designed to ensure qualitative reliability and validity: (a) Interview themes were compared with questionnaire themes; (b) independent analyses of the interview data were compared among each of the three co-authors; and (c) perspectives of a faculty member were compared with the perspectives of undergraduate students who conducted the interviews and, more important, interacted daily with other undergraduate students who know and use the name “townie” to suggest a particular kind of person who belongs to a particular kind of place.

These figures are found in “ACT Class Profile: A Graphic Presentation of the First-Year (Freshman) Class Entering Fall 2008, Ohio University,” compiled by the university's Office of Institutional Research (http://www.ohio.edu/instres/student/ACTClassProfile.pdf).

This is based on the latest figures available (Fall 2008; http://www.ohio.edu/instres/enrollstats/summary/enstf08_race.html).

State figures are found in the document GCT-P14 produced by the U.S. Census Bureau (http://factfinder.dads.census.gov/servlet/GCTTable?-geo_id=04000US39&-mt_name=DEC_2000_SF3_U_GCTP14_ST2&-ds_name=DEC_2000_SF3_U). The overlap among university students and county residents is reflected in the population counts by age range. According to the U.S. Census Bureau (http://censtats.census.gov/data/oh/05039009.pdf), 45% of the county's population is 20 to 24 years old; another 22.9% is 15 to 19 years old. Community data are reported in the American Community Survey, summarized by Phillips (2008), who also pointed out that Athens's median family income is slightly above the national average.

We use the phrase “at least” to indicate that the numbers for each group may be slightly higher. Our figures are developed from a university listing of the high schools that produced the largest numbers of entering students in 2005. The last school on the list sent 18 of its recent graduates to the university. The local county figure is likely not much higher than 62, however, because only five high schools are located in the county, and two of them already appear on the list.

Bhabha's (1983) argument was considerably more complex and wide-ranging than this statement. We base our synopsis on his statements that a stereotype's “predominant strategic function is the creation of a space for a ‘subject peoples’ through the production of knowledges in terms of which surveillance is exercised” and that he was “referring to a form of governmentality that in marking out a ‘subject nation’, appropriates, directs and dominates its various spheres of activity…[to produce] the colonized as a social reality which is at once an ‘other’ and yet entirely knowable and visible” (p. 23). Although Bhabha was writing about the functions of stereotypes in postcolonial situations around the globe, Cloud (1992) and Meyers (2004) argued that his idea can also explain how mainstream media representations of African American bodies work to keep them under surveillance. Such surveillance is imposed because of the belief that these bodies pose a threat when they enter into public spaces (see Fleetwood, 2004; Staples, 1998).

See Mahan-Hays and Aden (2003) and Moore (1996) for illustrations of these two types of ironies in practice.

Athens is also home to a significant number of people who dress and live in ways similar to what the students described as “hippies.” These individuals can be found in a worker-owned cooperative restaurant, a good-sized farmer's market, an alternative food store, green spaces at the university, and so forth.

A number of articles (e.g., Dickinson, 2006; Dickinson, Ott, & Aoki, 2006; Hamera, 2005; Magnet, 2006; Stormer, 2004; Wagner & Danowski, 2005) made passing references to Lefebvre's (1974/1991) work on space, typically in a note or in one or two lines as support for a subsidiary point.

Representations of space refers to conceived space—that is, how those who plan, map, and engineer the space describe physical spaces. Shields (1999) referred to these as “discourses on space,” whereas he called spaces of representation “the discourse of space” (p. 161). In Lefebvre's (1974/1991) terms, spaces of representation are “space as directly lived through its associated images and symbols. …It overlays physical space, making symbolic use of its objects” (p. 39). Spatial practices are the ways in which we use spaces as we negotiate between the spaces of representation and representations of space; they are spaces as we perceive or make sense of them.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Roger C. Aden

Roger C. Aden (Ph.D., University of Nebraska, 1989) is a professor in the School of Communication Studies at Ohio University.

Paul Pearson

Paul Pearson is a graduate of Ohio University now employed as Director, Business Development, for The SpyGlass Group in Westlake, OH.

Leah Sell

Leah Sell is a graduate of Ohio University now employed by AAA East Central in Pittsburg, PA.