Neighborhood stigma and the sporting lives of young people in public housing

Abstract

This paper spotlights the sporting lives of young people who live in ‘Redcrest’, a public housing community in the Niagara region of Canada. We report on data culled from neighborhood-centric documents (municipal data, planning council reports, media coverage) and ethnographic fieldwork (interviews, community mapping, go-alongs) collected over eight months with 14 young people. This paper also offers a critique of Robert Sampson’s work on neighborhood effects and draws on the theoretical insights and urban scholarship of Henri Lefebvre, Loic Wacquant, and the work of postcolonial scholar Frantz Fanon, who further understandings of racism as a spatial relation. At the center of this research are narratives that highlight that public housing projects, negative stigma notwithstanding, can be good places to live. The results highlight the various contradictions and tensions experienced by young people living in Redcrest, specifically their experiences with neighborhood stigma, racism and Islamophobia, and how this impacts their sporting lives.