The Point of View of Stigmatised Young Girls: Managing Class - Race and Place in Polarising Copenhagen

Oct 17, 2026

Uploaded by Connor

Explores how territorial stigmatisation shapes the everyday life of racialised young girls in a deprived Copenhagen neighbourhood. Building on the concept of stigma attached to place, it examines how Danish public discourses merge images of crime, radicalisation and delinquency with welfare and unemployment, while voices from inside such labelled areas remain harder to hear. The article outlines territorial stigma production and management across institutions and everyday interactions, connecting biographical experiences to broader inequalities.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages17

Reading Time43 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Territorial stigmatisation and young femininities

The Point of View of Stigmatised Young Girls: Managing Class, “Race”and Place in Polarising Copenhagen EditaAdemi, Maia Hauch & Christian Sandbjerg Hansen, Aarhus University “Because even though I come from Tingbjerg, that doesn’t mean that I’ll pull a knife and stab you. Come on, talk to me like a normal person, which is what I am.”(Donika) 1 Introduction For the past thirty years, Danish media, politicians and (to some extent) social scientists have deployed the term “ghetto” as a core symbol of urban decay and as a threat to national coherence and security. With furious rhetoric and stern emotions, various governments have launched political programmes to combat so-called “parallel societies” and “ghettoisation”, and various bureaucracies have forged tools to “tear down the walls”,“give these areas a lift”,“create security” and “integrate” these designated areas into “mainstream society”(Simonsen 2016) . Journalists have flocked to extraordinary events of car burnings, portraying images of veiled women and young gang members fleeing from the police (Stender 2018) . And scholars have exposed the mechanisms of “ethnic” segregation (Andersen 2002) . Taken together, these discourses focus on residential areas within the non-profit housing sector, merging imaginaries of crime, radicalisation, terrorism, youth delinquency, immigrant gangs and welfare beneficiaries with unemployment and immigration (Hansen 2021) . In other words,“the ghetto” has become a territorial stigma fusing poverty and dishonour, a term which is attached to a specific place (Wacquant 2007) . However, whereas public debate has painted dramatic pictures from the outside, voices from inside the residential neighbourhoods designated as ghettos have been harder to hear (Johansen & Jensen 2017) . In La misère du monde (1999 [1993]), Pierre Bourdieu and his colleagues strove to publish the voices of people in French society who had little or no public voice, and who attracted little or no political attention. Based on life history interviews focusing on recollections of past experiences and perspectives of uncertain futures, the authors analytically reconstructed the trajectories of people from vastly dominated positions who had been struck by the precarities of a changing contemporary French society. Thus, while focusing on the “small miseries” of individuals, Bourdieu and his co-workers highlighted the social conditions that affected entire collectives, showing how the root causes of individual misfortune were to be found in the overall transformation of work, housing, the school and the state. Inspired by The Weight of the World, Auyero et al. (2015) use individual life histories to investigate the precarities of the high-tech, service and increasingly unequal city of Austin, Texas. Arguing that the social sciences “are on less certain terrain when it comes to understanding the many ways in which individuals, alone or in groups, make sense of and cope with” inequalities of class, race and gender (Auyero et al. 2015: 5), they focus on the intersection of biography and history to understand how people engage with major economic, social and political forces. In this article, we address the inequalities forming in the resurgent city of Copenhagen by presenting the point of view of racialised young girls living in a deprived neighbourhood in Copenhagen. We draw on the notion of territorial stigmatisation to explore and expose the everyday difficulties and social conditions of suffering that form individual lives at the bottom of social, symbolic and physical hierarchies. 2 Territorial stigmatisation and young femininities Research on territorial stigmatisation has grown considerably, especially since Loïc Wacquant’s (2007) explication of the term (although he used the phrase from the early 1990s, see Wacquant 1993) . Wacquant (2008) analyses residential stigma as a core symbolic feature of a new regime of poverty (called advanced marginality) fost

FAQs

What does the article focus on regarding racialised young girls in Copenhagen?

It presents the point of view of racialised young girls living in a deprived Copenhagen neighbourhood, examining the everyday difficulties and social conditions tied to territorial stigmatisation.

How is “the ghetto” described in Danish public debate?

The article describes it as a territorial stigma that fuses poverty with dishonour, where discourses portray images of crime, radicalisation and youth delinquency while linking them to unemployment and immigration.

What is “territorial stigmatisation” and how does the article frame it?

It frames territorial stigmatisation as the social effects of spatial taint across institutions and daily life, addressing both stigma production from outside and stigma management from within.

Oct 17, 2026

Uploaded by Connor