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We examine the narrative and performative aspects of immigrant and native-born residents’ neighbourhood meaning-making. Specifically, drawing from 37 in-depth interviews, we ask how immigrant and native-born Swedish people perceive immigrant neighbourhoods in two Swedish cities. We also ask how their discursive treatment of these areas maps onto their self-reported actions. We find that most respondents perceived immigrant neighbourhoods as stigmatized, and most of these respondents engaged in discursive destigmatization of immigrant neighbourhoods. For some respondents, discursive destigmatization extended to their actions (harmonizing destigmatization). For others, discursive destigmatization remained surface-level: they reported avoiding or preferring not to live in these areas (non-performative destigmatization). Finally, some respondents narratively reinscribed neighbourhood stigma and expressed a desire to leave or avoid these areas (harmonizing stigmatization). Our results point to the likely futility of changing people’s performative preferences and highlight the urgency of ameliorating material inequalities between neighbourhoods rather than assuming a goal of integration.
Korver–Glenn et al. (Sat,) studied this question.