'Stigma and the City: a sociological exploration of the political economy of stigmatisation through a case study of Liverpool'

This research seeks to understand how processes of stigmatisation shape and are shaped by the urban political economy. It proposes a place-based study to explore the relationship between stigmatisation, place and political economy in the context of Liverpool. The relationship between poverty and place is a consistent theme in sociological research, including studies of territorial stigmatisation which focus on how this relationship operates at neighbourhood level (Wacquant, 2008). Here, stigma operates as a strategy of governance which maintains oppression through de-legitimising certain places and populations (see Tyler and Slater eds, 2018, forthcoming). Territorial stigmatisation, from this perspective, devalues people and place through neighbourhood taint (Wacquant, 2008) as a means of creating value - often through gentrification (Paton et al, 2017). However, with the exception of Detroit (Kornberg, 2016), no research has been undertaken to explore how territorial stigmatisation operates on a wider scale - at the city level. Liverpool is a rich case study of the proposed research precisely because of the sustained level of stigmatisation its people have faced for decades. It constitutes a place in which urban gentrification projects have promised to recover, rescue or regenerate the city in a revanchist sense (following the Toxteth 'riots', in aftermath of the Hillsborough Disaster, facing extreme levels of deprivation over the past 4 decades, and a range of vilified cultural representations of 'Scousers').

Today Liverpool has some of the most neoliberal urban policies which sell off swathes of land and neighbourhoods - such as the controversial Housing Market Renewal ('Homes for £1') and large-scale speculative global property investment. The city is acutely affected by austerity measures and welfare cuts, consequently stigmatising, harassing and shaming specific populations (Cooper and Whyte, 2017). This suggests that there are important historical, temporal and spatial scales through which stigmatisation can be explored as part of the political economy with a case study of Liverpool. This research will therefore examine these various articulations of social control through the stigmatisation of people and place over time in the city. A place-based study allows a unique exploration of stigma, place and class to be understood through political campaigns of violence, going beyond traditional stigmatisation studies seeking to advance reconceptualisations of stigma. By taking a broader view of the political economy of revanchism (Smith, 1996), the ways in which state-led violence is produced, mediated and/or resisted over time through discourses, policy and governance, will be explored.