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Should I Stay or Should I Go?

Posted on 5 October 2021

Latest blog post from Sara de Jong

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Sara de Jong and Tom O'Brien (Department of Sociology) are working together on a Morrell Trust funded project on Identifying Community Responses to Compounding Crises: The Case of Doncaster, South Yorkshire".

As part of this project, Sara and Tom have had a blog post:  'Should I Stay or Should I Go? Generational perceptions of geographical stigmatisation' published in The Sociological Review

Abstract:

“My entire sort of age group … if you were smart at school, you were told you had to leave. And that was coming from teachers that obviously lived here [laughs], so they had our best interests at heart. They didn’t want us to be stuck”, explained Laura, a twentysomething journalist working for the local Doncaster newspaper. The question, “should I stay or should I go” is not only answered by the pull of more attractive places, but also by the push of stigmatised places. In a 2020 poll among residents of UK towns, Doncaster occupied second place in a “Worst place to live” ranking. But beyond the familiar story of stigma and deprivation, our interviews with Doncaster residents suggested that generational effects require more attention when we are trying to understand why people decide to stay or leave.