Forthcoming in Antipode Youth, Temporality, and ...

Forthcoming in Antipode Youth, Temporality, and Territorial Stigma: Finding Good in Camden, New Jersey Kate Cairns Department of Childhood Studies Rutgers University-Camden Camden, NJ, USA [email protected] Abstract The concept of “territorial stigmatization” identifies the role of symbolic denigration in the production of marginalized places. In this paper, I draw on ethnographic research with a food justice organization in Camden, New Jersey, to examine youth’s responses to territorial stigma. The analysis demonstrates how Black and Latinx youth rewrite the story of Camden in a way that locates the “good” within it, using narratives of the city’s prosperous history and possible futures to recuperate value within a stigmatized place. I argue that the perspectives of youth illuminate the temporal dimensions of territorial stigma, situating the blemish of place in relation to conceptions of individual and social change. The article contributes to a growing literature examining the strategic responses of those who dwell in pathologized places. Because youth are uniquely situated within the production of place, their perspectives offer important insights in this process. Keywords territorial stigmatization, youth, place, temporality, identity, food justice

Introduction In 2013, Rolling Stone magazine ran a cover story entitled “Apocalypse, New Jersey: A Dispatch from America’s Most Desperate Town.” Framed as if reporting from a war zone, the story paints a bleak portrait of Camden, New Jersey, a small city located across the Delaware River from Philadelphia. Here, Camden is described as a “crumbling dead-poor dopescape of barred row homes and deserted factories.” Contrasting present day Camden with the city’s prosperous industrial history, Rolling Stone declares “the place is literally dying, its population having plummeted from above 120,000 in the Fifties to less than 80,000 today.” Readers learn that 40% of Camden’s residents live in poverty, and that the 2012 homicide rate was 10 times that of New York, “officially making it the most dangerous place in America.” Throughout Rolling Stone’s grueling account, references to Iraq, Afghanistan, Honduras and Somalia work to situate this city within a racialized spatial imaginary of poverty and violence. Critiqued by one local academic as “poverty porn” (Danley 2013), the Rolling Stone feature is an especially glaring example of a familiar story that defines Camden as a space of poverty, drugs, and crime. Versions of this account appear in The Nation’s 2010 story, “City of Ruins,” as well as a 2013 NBC feature on “America’s ‘invincible’ city brought to its knees by poverty, violence.” The 2014 finale of Vice News, “Surveillance City and the Forgotten War,” features the intensive surveillance 1

Cairns - Forthcoming in Antipode regime implemented since Camden County took over the city’s police force in 2013. Alongside tales of boarded up houses and open-air drug markets, images of young people feature prominently in these media exposes, emphasizing the especially devastating effects of poverty and crime for the city’s most vulnerable members. This imagery of young people implicitly evokes the question of the future: what will become of this place, and the people within it? I spent the summer of 2016 conducting research with Camden teens, in the context of a nonprofit organization that hires youth to grow and sell food. While our everyday activities were oriented around gardening and cooking, representations of the city were a frequent topic of conversation. Young people did speak of difficult conditions shaping their lives – including issues linked to poverty, and safety concerns related to the drug trade – but they also expressed deep frustration with the singular, stigmatizing narrative that so powerfully defined their city. In the words of Jorell, a Black 18-year-old, “What we are portrayed as is not what we are.” In this article, I explore how Camden youth rework the story of their city, and thus, themselves. The analysis extends scholarship on territorial stigmatization (Wacquant 2008), furthering understanding of “how the blemish of place impacts the residents of disparaged districts” (Wacquant, Slater and Pereira 2014:1270). Drawing insight from youth geographies, I suggest the perspectives of young people, in particular, illuminate the temporal dimensions of territorial stigma, situating the “blemish of place” in relation to conceptions of individual and social change. Specifically, I demonstrate how youth rewrite the story of Camden to locate the “good” within it, using temporal narratives of the city’s prosperous history and possible futures to recuperate value within a stigmatized place. Place, stigma, and youth geographies My analysis is informed by scholarship that approaches place as socially and relationally constituted (Massey 1991; Cresswell 2013). Places are actively given meaning as ongoing constructions, and these meanings are multiple and contested. In this process, place is deeply linked to power, in terms of whose accounts gain legitimacy, and the way these accounts authorize forms of inequality and exclusion (Lefebvre 1974). These power dynamics are evident in the racialization of place (Anderson 2015; Gilmore 2002; Nayak 2010; Simmons 2015), where the symbolic and material dimensions of place-making are deeply intertwined. For example, racist ideas about the “ghetto” not only shape depictions of poor communities of color (Sung 2015), but also justify discriminatory policies and processes. These range from aggressive policing and surveillance regimes (Rios 2011), to “revitalization” projects that ultimately serve to displace poor residents (August 2014; Kipfer 2016), as well as inequitable geographies of food access that are organized around patterns of racial segregation (Ramirez 2015; Reese 2017). Wacquant’s (2008) concept of “territorial stigmatization” provides a framework for understanding the role of symbolic denigration in the production of marginalized places. Combining Bourdieu’s (1993) theory of symbolic power with Goffman’s (1963) conception of stigma, territorial stigmatization refers to the process in which representations of poor and often racialized communities contribute to the marginalization of those who live there (Wacquant, Slater and Pereira 2014:1270). In a comparative study of the Chicago ghetto and Paris banlieue, Wacquant found territorial stigmatization to be integral to neoliberal regulatory regimes. He writes that “advanced marginality tends to concentrate in isolated and bounded territories increasingly perceived by both outsiders and insiders as social purgatories, leprous badlands at the heart of the postindustrial metropolis where 2

only the refuse of society would accept to dwell” (2007:67). In addition to rationalizing a withdrawal of state services and increase in disciplinary surveillance, Wacquant suggests territorial stigma is internalized by residents, “corroding their sense of self, warping their social relations, and undercutting their capacity for collective action” (Wacquant, Slater and Pereira 2014:1275). While scholars have used the concept to examine inequality in marginalized urban spaces, some have questioned the extent to which territorial stigma is internalized by residents, calling for greater attention to poor people’s agency (Gilbert 2010), and the varied ways residents cope with and resist stigmatizing accounts of their communities (Garbin and Millington 2012; Jensen and Christensen 2012; Kirkness and Tije-Dra 2017). Rather than a straightforward process of internalization, studies reveal a mix of responses, with many residents expressing ambivalent feelings toward the place in which they live (August 2014; Jensen and Christensen 2012; Kirkness 2014). Contreras (2017) finds that residents of Compton and South Central Los Angeles do internalize elements of territorial stigma, but preserve their dignity by displacing the blemish of place onto others with less social power. Given this pattern, he calls for an intersectional analysis that examines how territorial stigma is negotiated within sociospatial relations that are not only classed but also gendered and racialized. This attention to the interplay of social and spatial location can be extended to the significance of age in experiences of place, a key insight of children’s and youth’s geographies (Holloway and Valentine 2001; Aitken 2001). While childhood is commonly imagined as a site of vulnerability and protection, youth are deemed potential troublemakers and a threat to public order – a view that justifies targeted surveillance and spatial restrictions for teenagers (Collins and Kearns 2001; Valentine 1996). These aged geographies are deeply racialized, denying children of color the protections of childhood innocence and subjecting them to the punitive force of a carceral state (Meiners 2016). In addition to generational relations of supervision and regulation, young people’s relationship to place is temporally constituted, as the child is seen to represent the future (Katz 2008; Ruddick 2003), yet the promise of futurity assumes the privileges of whiteness (Meiners 2016). As young people are figured within narratives of becoming, the question of the future is not only one of “who” but also “where” this becoming will lead them (Cairns 2013, 2014). Children’s and youth geographers have drawn attention to the interrelation of place and identity, as young people’s sense of who they are and who they can become is shaped by their geographic and social location (Cahill 2000; Nayak 2003; Winkler 2012). At a collective level, the imagined future of a place – its trajectory within processes of boom or bust, revitalization or depression – is symbolically sutured to its youngest inhabitants, who are seen to craft its destiny (Gagen 2000). Thus, youth are uniquely situated within the production of place. While not always engaging with literature on territorial stigma, youth scholars have explored how young people negotiate disparaging representations of their communities (Cairns 2013; Jones 2010; Nayak 2017; Van der Burgt 2008; Sung 2015). If place is integral to identity, how do youth construct a sense of self in a place that is deeply stigmatized? In research with children on British council estates, Reay and Lucey (2000) find ambivalent feelings toward the place they call home. Children in this study “were often caught up in dominant imaginary constructions of the urban poor at the same time as they tried to convey their own different, locally constructed realities” (415). In order to resolve this tension, children “devised tactics to preserve a sense of themselves as decent and respectable” (415). Research in children’s and youth’s geographies contributes to understandings of territorial stigma, revealing how young people enact alternative place narratives in order to preserve a sense of their own identities, even as the stigma associated with their communities powerfully shapes 3

Cairns - Forthcoming in Antipode their sense of place. Drawing upon Black feminist geographies, Nxumalo and Cedillo call for a politics of place that not only features stories of “displacement and destruction,” but also those of “survival, reciprocity, community, and refusal” (2017:106). Building on this literature, I examine how youth in Camden negotiate territorial stigma, with particular focus on spatiotemporal strategies for remaking place. Doreen Massey (1992) has critiqued the tendency to associate place with stasis and temporality with change. Instead, she views place as an ongoing achievement, always becoming; the spatial and temporal are fundamentally intertwined. In a place like Camden that is so singularly defined by a negative narrative, the issue of youth belonging is haunted by the question of the future and the possibility of becoming otherwise. I find that youth respond to territorial stigma by “re-scripting place” (Nayak 2017), invoking the city’s prosperous past and possible futures to locate goodness in the present. This re-scripting emerges in the context of a food justice organization where youth are hired to work in urban agriculture. In this context, young people interrogate the economic, racial, and environmental injustices shaping life in their community. As they work together to form a structural critique of these processes, they develop critical resources with which interrogate territorial stigma. Nevertheless, this process is rife with tension. As youth generate alternative accounts of their city, they grapple with the question of how change occurs amidst the structural violence of racial capitalism. Research Context and Methods The city of Camden is located in southern New Jersey, directly across the Delaware River from Philadelphia. Camden’s history is often told as a story of postindustrial decline. After thriving as a manufacturing hub in the 1940s and 1950s, decades of disinvestment and white flight left a landscape of abandoned factories and polluted land (Gillette 2005). In 2016, Camden’s population was just under 75,000, with 40% living below the poverty line (US Census 2016), and a thriving drug trade has emerged to fill the gap left by capital. The majority of residents are Black or Latinx, although many who come to the city to purchase drugs are white and from the suburbs. Like many low-income communities of color, Camden residents are disproportionately exposed to environmental harm (Pomar and Cole 2002). Covering just 9 square miles, the city houses two Superfund sites and 114 known contaminated sites (EPA 2017). Camden is officially designated as a “food desert” (USDA 2015), with few venues to purchase fresh fruits and vegetables.i With a regional political economy shaped by powerful suburban interests, revitalization attempts have largely failed to benefit the city’s residents (Gillette 2005). Similar histories of structural disadvantage can be found throughout the literature on territorial stigma, including processes of economic disinvestment, racial segregation, environmental racism, and concentrated poverty (see Kirkness and Tije-Dra 2017). It is these forms of structural violence that fuel the symbolic defamation of the city, depicted by the Rolling Stone as “America’s Most Desperate Town.” While Camden residents have pushed back in various ways, such as a high profile environmental justice case in 2001 (Pomar and Cole 2002), these struggles gain little attention from outsiders. As one local scholar writes, “Life in Camden has primarily been understood through crime and poverty statistics and media accounts, and not from the perspective of those who live there” (Watson 2015:3). My analysis is rooted in a summer of ethnographic research with a nonprofit organization that hires Camden teens to work in urban agriculture. This program seeks to produce an affordable source of fresh vegetables for community members, as well as employment opportunities for local youth. Each summer, Camden teens are hired to grow food in urban gardens and sell it in a weekly farmers 4

market. During this time, youth also cook collective meals and participate in workshops relating to social and environmental justice. Those who return in subsequent summers become youth leaders who co-facilitate workshops with their peers. This research was part of a broader study exploring contemporary initiatives that seek to connect young people with their food. Previous scholarship has shown how community gardens can serve as a form of place-making (Crossan et al. 2016), and as a strategic response to structural violence (Reese 2017). I was interested in how growing food in Camden might inform youth’s relationship to their community. However, I did not anticipate Camden’s reputation to become such a central focus of the research. This topic emerged during fieldwork, arising as a focal point within structured workshops, informal conversations in the garden and kitchen, and while doing outreach in the community together. I then followed up on these conversations at the end of the summer, during interviews with youth. During the summer of 2016, I conducted over 100 hours of participant observation in this program. I worked alongside youth two to three full days each week, joining them in the gardens, cooking, and at the market, and during workshops exploring issues such as food security, environmental injustice, and the history of Camden. At the end of the summer, I interviewed youth about their program experiences, the role of food in their lives, and their reflections on life in Camden. Of the 12 youth participating in the program, 11 acquired parental consent for the interview (in addition to their own assent). Interviewees were Black or Latinx, aged 14 to 18, and included 6 boys and 5 girls. All names have been replaced with pseudonyms. Semi-structured interviews were conducted on site, at a quiet picnic table set well apart from the gardens and the rest of the group. I assured youth their responses would remain confidential, and would only be shared with program staff in the form of anonymous feedback in a report about my research. I asked youth about their reflections on the summer, including their gardening, cooking, and workshop experiences. I also asked about the role of food in their lives, and the kind of food available at home and in their neighborhoods (see Cairns 2018). Finally, I asked about their experiences growing up in Camden, and their reflections on how Camden is perceived by others, framing these questions as a follow up to the many discussions about this issue over the summer. In this article, I analyze fieldnotes and interview data relating to the theme of place. My own social location was of course significant to the research process. As a white academic, originally from Canada and now working in Camden, but living in nearby Philadelphia, I was an outsider in a number of ways. I was open with youth about the fact that I had only been working in Camden for two years at the time of the research, and I invited them to share their knowledge of this place with me. In turn, youth asked me about life in Canada, and also about my experiences as a professor. Thus, as we formed relationships over the summer, our differences were sometimes a source of connection, opening up opportunities for youth to share experiences and expertise from their lives in Camden. I made an effort to demonstrate that I was not an authority figure in this context, and that I wanted to learn from youth on their terms – a relationship we negotiated over time. Early in the summer, as one of the youth leaders was delegating gardening tasks, he said, “This is weird, giving instructions to a teacher.” But over time, this sense of my authority seemed to lessen, as youth came to openly break rules in front of me (e.g., using their phones at work), and youth leaders gave me work assignments without hesitation. In addition to participating in everyday work 5

Cairns - Forthcoming in Antipode activities, I accompanied youth on a canoeing trip, drove them to a pool party at a staff member’s house, and stayed overnight with them at an organized sleepover. Thus, by the time of the interviews, we had a range of shared experiences together that laid the foundation for these conversations. Negotiating territorial stigma “Today’s workshop is about environmental injustice,” announces Jorell, a Black 18-year-old youth leader. Jorell explains that before they can tackle this topic, they need to establish a common language. He calls on the group to develop definitions for key terms listed on the board, including words like prejudice, racism, and stereotype. When they arrive at “internalized oppression,” Jorell takes the lead again. “Internalized oppression is when you let the oppressor’s message get to you,” he tells the group. “Like if I was like, ‘I’m Black, I live in Camden, I’m never gonna make it, I might as well just sell drugs,’” he says, adding “some people actually think like that.” His friend Will shakes his head and says, “it’s sad but true.” Shifting to the focus of today’s workshop, Jorell invites the youth to brainstorm groups of people who might be especially harmed by a polluted environment. Damarae calls out “homeless people,” and Sheylinn says, “infants,” adding “you don’t see anyone pushing babies around in strollers in the park here. Yeah, there’s needles and stuff, but also because there’s bad stuff in the air that can harm them.” Jorell’s co-leader, Ricardo, asks the group why racial and ethnic minorities might be especially affected by pollution. Lenecia says, “’Cause we surrounded by it,” and someone else adds, “Like people in Camden.” Ricardo asks why that might be, and Jacob says, “’Cause they don’t care about Camden.” This comment sparks debate. “Yeah they do. If they don’t care, why they be changin’ it?” Lenecia asks. She points to improvements to parks in the area downtown, near the university, as evidence that those in power are working to create better conditions for Camden residents. Dylan says, “That don’t help people in Camden. It just helps the corporations that want more business.” At this point, the adult facilitator, Mark, jumps in to say he thinks they might both be right: that conditions are improving in some areas, but that it’s important to look at what areas receive the most attention and resources. As they debated the changes they saw occurring in their city, youth actively confronted of territorial stigma: how the symbolic denigration of a place contributes to the marginalization of those who live there. In a familiar pattern of ecological injustice, their city serves as the dumping ground for surrounding municipalities – all of which are whiter and more affluent – and their neighborhood hosts more than double the number of polluting facilities found in most New Jersey zip codes (Taylor 2014). Within a half-mile of where these youth gathered each day, a regional sewage treatment plant and trash incinerator process waste for the entire county, and a cement manufacturer releases clouds of hazardous dust (Foster 2004). Situated under a highway, the neighborhood’s main street is a throughway for a steady stream of diesel trucks, and asthma rates among local children far exceed national averages (Luna 2012). The ecological assault on this place is facilitated by, and in turn perpetuates, the perception of Camden as an undesirable space, a metaphorical “wasteland” undeserving of the kinds of environmental protections ensured elsewhere. Through workshops like this one, youth developed a critical analysis of the structural issues shaping their community, challenging the view that such conditions are an inevitable feature of the landscape. Even still, youth continued to grapple with the stigmatized portrayal of their community that dominantly defined this place and their location within it. The statement, “I’m Black, I live in Camden, I’m never gonna make it, I might as well just sell drugs,” is one that Jorell emphatically rejects. But the ready 6

availability of this narrative – which seamlessly intertwines race, place and youth identity – offers a poignant illustration of the power of territorial stigma. Camden youth expressed deep frustration with the narrative of their city that circulated in the media, and actively contested the legitimacy of these representations. “Camden is not as bad as people make it seem,” Mia told me. “I just wish they would tell the truth.” None of the youth claimed that Camden was free of problems, or that concerns about their city were entirely unfounded. Instead, they argued that the dominant story was a partial and thus inaccurate one, and claimed a sense of spatial authority based on lived experience. Jacob said: People outside Camden, they just hear what they wanna hear. Like, you gotta actually stay here for like a week or two and see how it is. Like, people, they make it seem on the news that in Camden somebody gets killed every day, everybody’s house get shot up. Like you see, on every corner you see crack heads, you see drug dealers, which, that is a little true, but it’s not all the way true. Youth consistently argued that such outsider accounts dealt in partial truths, and that as insiders, they could generate a more accurate depiction of their community in its complexity. Jorell said, “I just wish people would actually try and, like, put themselves inside Camden, like, physically put themselves in Camden and see actually how it is.” To physically put themselves in Camden, Jorell suggests, would close not only a geographic distance, but also the social distance that designates Camden residents as Others, and reduces their lives to a fixed account of poverty and crime. These outsider narratives not only circulated in media representations, but also travelled into Camden via retreat groups who came to spend time at the center where these youth worked. This organization hosted various groups from elsewhere (e.g., student groups, faith-based, employment-based), who came to Camden to volunteer in the community. One day, as we were cleaning up after lunch, Dylan stopped to look at a whiteboard in the corner in the dining room. “CAMDEN” was written in large letters in the middle, with various words surrounding it. He began reading aloud, first softly, then growing in volume. “Drugs, crime, corrupt, poverty, inhumane,” he said. “Inhumane?” He turned to Jacob, who was sweeping the floor beside him. “Yo, you know what that means? It means unlivable.” With building anger, he called over Mark, the adult facilitator, and said “You let the retreat group write this about my city?” Speaking in a calm voice, Mark said, “You weren’t there for the discussion. It was actually a really good discussion.” Dylan reached for a roll of paper towel and began wiping off the board with vigorous strokes. “Inhumane,” he repeated to himself, while scrubbing. Notably, some of the words on the board were the same terms these youth used when discussing problems within their community. But to Dylan, the words carried different meanings when affixed by outsiders. His response might be understood as an expression of “spatial anguish,” which refers to “the shame one feels at having outsiders fear, condemn, or ridicule their place of residence” (Contreras 2017:657). According to Contreras, spatial anguish centers on the concern that territorial stigma will come to define a community’s people, who “become living embodiments of their blemished space” (2017:657). This question of the relationship between a place and the people within it arose repeatedly in youth’s responses to perceptions of Camden. For Dylan, this spatial anguish was accompanied by a deep anger with what he saw as an unjust portrayal of his city. Youth not only critiqued representations of their community, but described how these disparaging views shaped their position in the world. “I dislike the stigma,” Sheylinn told me. “Because every time you tell somebody, ‘Oh where you from?’ ‘Camden.’ ‘Ohhh.’ You just like, automatically get 7

Cairns - Forthcoming in Antipode that reaction.” Felisa described how dominant accounts of Camden had shaped her own sense of place at a young age, making her fearful to go outside. Until age 12, she says, “I was always scared to like, walk around here… I guess because of all the things that people were saying.” She found herself thinking back to these fears while doing community outreach to promote the youth-run farmers’ market. “When we were going to doors, I was thinking, ‘Oh my god, I used to be scared to walk around here and now look at me,’” she said. Felisa was proud to say that her perspective had changed, and that now, “I just feel more comfortable.” Even still, the affective potency of the dominant narrative sometimes took hold. “I still like, kind of get scared,” she said. “But then I’m just like, why am I scared? This is just a place, you know?” While some previous studies have found that residents reject territorial stigma entirely and offer wholly positive assessments of their community (e.g., Jensen and Christensen 2012), none of the youth I spoke with espoused this kind of untroubled account of Camden. In fact, several told me they would prefer to live elsewhere, if they had the choice. Even still, youth’s responses to territorial stigma were far from passive internalization. Instead, they pointed to redeeming features of their city that go unnoticed, including the promise of successful pasts and possible futures. In what follows, I explore youth’s efforts to locate goodness in Camden, and thus to produce their city – and themselves – as good. Finding good in Camden “I’m not saying like, bad stuff don’t happen, but good stuff, a lot of good stuff happens, it just goes unnoticed.” This was a common refrain echoed in youth’s accounts of their city. Acknowledging the sources of struggle that drew so much attention, they took up a modest, yet challenging, project: to excavate the good that is buried in accounts of crime and violence. When asked how she would describe Camden to someone who had never been there, Felisa said, “I guess I would say it’s like, it’s not the best place, but it’s like a nice community. People get together and do stuff.” Youth pointed toward stories rarely featured in the media, like a recent block party, a community festival, or the success of a high school dance team. Sheylinn described it this way: Camden, it’s not a perfect place. Nowhere is. But at the same time, Camden’s full of redemption. You look around and you see familiar faces everywhere, friends, family. And I think that people just get the thought that we don’t all connect with each other, but we do. At small events… something like an art festival here in our city. A lot of people just get the sense that Camden is a bad city, and it’s not. It’s a very good place. Like, kids grow up here. This is home to many, many people. And that’s the way I’ll always see it. Highlighting the social relations of everyday life, Sheylinn rescripts Camden through neighborhood bonds and feelings of belonging, challenging the stigmatizing narrative of a deprived landscape. This portrayal speaks to the kinds of support networks that may be forged in poor communities of color, yet erased within outsider accounts of marginalized places (August 2014; Gilbert 2010; Nayak 2017; Reese 2017; Silver 2018). In addition to highlighting connections forged within their community, youth also pointed toward collective efforts to improve residents’ quality of life. Jorell noted that “a few organizations are doing really good things and they’re all small and I wish they would just get more recognition.” He

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imagined how the city’s reputation might shift if the work of community organizations were incorporated into the dominant narrative. So that people could say, ‘oh yeah, Camden might be known for drugs, but oh! Did you hear about what um, what that group’s doin’ over in Camden with all the kids doing photography shoots and all that stuff?’ I wish people would like, recognize the good things even though they’re really small. Among the community efforts that youth felt were deserving of greater recognition was their own work growing food, echoing previous research on the collective significance of urban food production within poor and racialized communities (Reese 2017). Youth saw their work as a source of pride, and a meaningful contribution to Camden. Gesturing to the gardens around her, Jelinda said, “This is definitely something in Camden that’s good.” Like Jorell, she reflected more broadly on the lack of recognition for collective efforts to support members of the community. There’s definitely organizations in Camden that do help Camden, but the media doesn’t want to broadcast that… Like “oh my god they’ve got like, 12,000 homeless people” and it’s like, yeah really that’s good, but what about all the other times we’re helping the homeless or we’re doing this good thing, or this good thing? By highlighting the forms of good pursued by Camden organizations, youth foreground the collective agency of local residents, contesting the narrative of victimization that renders them passive (see Gilbert 2010; Reese 2017; Silver 2018). While youth sought to excavate goodness within Camden, their accounts were not sanitized of struggle. Instead, they grappled with the coexistence of multiple truths about this place. This ambivalence was foregrounded near the end of the summer, during a collective poem-writing activity. Leaders circulated sheets of paper that were titled with topics they had explored during workshops, such as “Food Security,” “Environmental Justice,” “Food Systems,” and “Camden.” Youth were instructed to write one line of poetry related to this theme, and then to fold the page and pass it on, so that only the line they’d written remained visible. When the exercise was finished, Mark asked if anyone wanted to read aloud the poem they’d ended up with. Jacob volunteered to read the one titled, “Camden”: A city filled with brotherly love Where it shows the kittens from the lions A dangerous place Where the struggle is real Where it’s hard to find a healthy meal Where my cousin might be the next kid in the back of a patrol car A city invisible Where Rico from A city worthy of redemption When Jacob finished, the youth erupted in finger snaps of support, indicating their appreciation for the poem. Mark suggested they read this piece aloud at the community luncheon the next day. But in the discussion that followed, specific lines were contested. Laughing, Damarae said, “‘shows the kittens from the lions.’ What does that even mean?” Dylan was immediately defensive. “Shut up, man. You don’t get it,” he said. “If you grew up here, you’d get it.” This statement alluded to the fact that Damarae lives part time in the suburbs with his mother, questioning his status as a Camden insider. In response, Damarae insisted he’d lived in Camden full time until third grade. Dylan shook 9

Cairns - Forthcoming in Antipode his head and said, “You were a little boy. You wasn’t raised here,” implying that experiences as a young child would not allow someone to truly know this place, and thus to speak with legitimacy about it. Attention then shifted to another line. “Who wrote, ‘a dangerous place?’” No one identified themselves as the author. Some youth suggested the line should be removed before the poem was shared, as it seemed to affirm Camden’s negative reputation. Others disagreed, declaring, “it’s the truth!” A debate erupted, as youth aligned themselves with different accounts of their city. Did a defense of Camden require them to erase the presence of violence? Or was the project of re-scripting place achieved by locating goodness in a space of struggle? The adult facilitator eventually intervened to say they would leave the poem as is, to reflect the process that created it. In the end, the poem told a story of Camden in its complexity, showing this place to be multiple and contested. Rather than deny the existence of hardship, some youth claimed these struggles as the source of what makes Camden good. During our interview, Dylan said, “I can say I love Camden, ‘cause it made me who I was.” Reflecting on the ways this place had shaped him, he said, “growin’ up rough, it’s like, you want better in life.” He laughed, and said, “this is basically like, the bottom. So if you can live off here, only imagine what you could be at the top.” Dylan claimed the challenges of life in Camden as a source of strength, suggesting that growing up there meant he could thrive elsewhere. He told me he planned to get a tattoo that signaled his Camden roots, “showin’ that’s where I’m from.” In doing so, he flipped the script of territorial stigma: rather than disavowing the markers of a blemished place, Dylan sought to permanently inscribe this place onto his body, claiming the goodness within it as a personal strength. Finding good in Camden’s past The most popular workshop of the summer explored the history of Camden. Introducing the session, Jorell tells the group they will see “how a city could go from boom to gloom.” His co-facilitator, Will, asks, “Who knows what Camden used to be like? Like, what kind of stuff used to be here?” Someone calls out “factories,” and Will says, “yep.” He asks if they’ve heard of RCA/Victor, a prominent recording studio, noting that “they made the first …” he looks to Mark, the adult facilitator, who says, “phonograph”. Mark adds more details, noting Camden was “like LA at that time,” attracting musicians from across the country. Someone mentions the Campbell’s Soup factory, and Mark nods. He says Camden helped establish the reputation of the beloved “Jersey tomato,” and that he’s heard tales of a time when Camden streets were stained red because of fresh tomatoes falling off the back of Campbell’s trucks. Campbell’s has since moved operations elsewhere, and only their corporate headquarters remain in the city today. The last company discussed is the New York Shipbuilding Corporation, which collapsed after the war, laying off over 40,000 workers. To emphasize the impact of this economic blow, Will points out that this company once employed more than half the current population of the city. The workshop continues with a simulation game, in which youth are assigned roles like restaurant employee, WoolWorth owner, farmer, and mall developer. They move through a series of scenarios designed to illustrate processes of deindustrialization and globalization. Reflecting on the activity afterwards, Mark notes that this simulation highlights just one piece of a complex puzzle. They go on to discuss histories of white flight, discriminatory banking and housing policies, and race riots that erupted in response to police brutality in the 1960s and 1970s (Gillette 2005). Jelinda says, “That’s what my teacher was trying to tell us, he just did a really bad job explaining it. He said minorities moved here and that ruined Camden.” 10

When asked about his favorite workshop of the summer, Dylan said, “Learning about Camden.” He explained, “Just learning about where I’m from. And all the crazy crap that happens here.” Dylan saw the city’s history as a source of possibility – a sign that this place could be different. Reflecting on the activity, he said, “So, Camden can be better. It was better, why can’t it go back?” Mia also saw promise in the city’s prosperous history, which took her by surprise. This city is known as one of the worst cities and I didn’t know it was like, one of the best back in the day… Camden for me is not as bad as people make it seem. But the fact that it was one of the best and I didn’t know that …it’s hard to understand how it went from being the best to being the worst. Mia struggles to comprehend the changes that have unfolded over the last 70 years, leading to current conditions in Camden. She defends the city against its negative reputation, but then affirms the narrative of decline from “best” to “worst.” Even still, this engagement with the past breaks open the narrative of stasis that characterizes Camden as a hopeless landscape, revealing place to be a historically specific event, produced through the inequities of global capitalism. Notably, nostalgic accounts of Camden’s history gloss over the historical experiences of residents of color, who were seldom the beneficiaries of the city’s thriving economy. Celebratory tales of Camden’s “boom” rarely feature histories of racial segregation and police brutality recounted by older African American residents (Gilette 2005). Thus, while youth seize the city’s prosperous history as a symbolic resource, this tale may also participate in the erasure of racism and state violence. One day when I was driving a carload of youth through a neighboring South Jersey town, Jelinda said, “I figure this is what Camden looked like back in the day.” She gazed out the window at the shops and cafes that line the main street, bustling with mostly white pedestrians. Pointing to a pizza place, Jelinda said the food there was pretty good, but they refuse to deliver to Camden, a policy she saw as “subtle discrimination,” since they deliver to other places that are just as far away. “If they’re worried about getting robbed, I don’t know why they don’t just say it has to be credit or debit,” she said, matter-of-factly. During interactions like this one, it became clear that Camden’s history occupied an ambivalent place in youth’s spatial imaginary: a source of pride and possibility, but also loss and frustration. During an activity in which youth were encouraged to envision Camden’s future, Dylan said, “It’s just hard ‘cause it’s been this way for so long. It’s hard to think it’s gonna change.” This statement can be contrasted with the more optimistic view he expressed during our interview: that Camden had been “better” in the past, and could be once again. These seemingly contradictory narratives coexist in youth’s accounts of their city; they look to the past as proof that change is possible, but struggle with the question of how such change will occur. Finding good in Camden’s future The question of Camden’s future was a frequent topic throughout the summer, beginning from my very first day of fieldwork. The youth leaders have spent the day welcoming the newest batch of young farmers who have been hired for the summer. After a series of icebreakers, a discussion of ground rules, and an overview of introductory information, we arrive at the final orientation activity – setting collective goals for their work together over the coming months. The youth are quiet at first, averting eye contact, so the leaders call out a few suggestions. Ricardo says he hopes to “experience new things,” Jorell says, “grow as a community,” and Mark says his dream is for them to “harvest 11

Cairns - Forthcoming in Antipode more than 2000 pounds of vegetables”. Finally, Dylan calls out, “just put ‘change Camden’ up there. Big as crap.” Jorell follows the instruction, writing the words “CHANGE CAMDEN” in large print, set apart out from the small cursive he used for previous ideas. This leads to a discussion: what would it mean to “change Camden”? Dylan says he hates the negative perceptions of Camden, as a city of people who are “reckless and not intelligent.” Jorell picks up on this point. “What we are portrayed as is not what we are,” he says, noting that the news only shows stories of crime and drugs. Dylan says he wishes there were greater visibility for Camden successes. He shares the story of someone from Camden who made it into the NBA, but unfortunately lasted less than a year because he “got caught up in some bad stuff.” Dylan sighs and says, “too bad the only person that came outta Camden made us look bad.” Jacob speaks up for the first time, sharing the story of a successful football player from Camden in the ‘90s. “So that’s another good person came outta Camden,” he says. Bringing the conversation back to Dylan’s initial suggestion, Mark asks, “So how do we pursue this goal of changing Camden?” The youth think quietly for a moment. Someone suggests the importance of positive role models within the community, who can help youth “choose a better path.” Dylan declares, “If I’m successful – and I probably will be – I want to start an organization to help kids who don’t have a lot of money to make it to college”. It’s noteworthy that when asked to envision collective goals for their summer together, the discussion quickly moves to hopes for a better future for their city. But as they look toward the future, the question of how to “change Camden” slips into narratives of model individuals, many of whom achieve “success” through exit. In addition to finding good in Camden’s past and present, youth identified hopeful possibilities in Camden’s future. Some of these possibilities were linked to organizations like the one they worked for, which were helping to build a better future for Camden residents. Reflecting on the positive features of her community, Sheylinn said, “I like that there’s a lot of people who are trying to get it on the right path.” She named several organizations that were working to “make the city a better place, and more safer for a lot of people.” When discussing these hopeful possibilities, youth often emphasized their position as young people, taking up the narrative of youth as the promise of collective futures (Katz 2008; Ruddick 2003). Dylan said a key strength of their organization was that “it grabs youth before they experience a life that they don’t want to.” He situated his own life within processes of social reproduction, stating, “we’re the next generation, so, you know, the older people are all workin’ trying to feed us, and do things for us so we can change.” Dylan applauds the organization for providing youth an alternative to a future in the drug trade. Notably, the locus of change in this narrative is young people themselves: “they do things for us so we can change.” In addition to seeing potential in their own futures, youth highlighted the stories of those who “came outta Camden.” Jacob presented successful athletes as a challenge to territorial stigma: They basically saying that nothing is good coming out of Camden. Which, that is a lie. ‘Cause there’s a lot of football stars coming outta Camden, there’s a lot of basketball stars came outta Camden. It’s a lot of people came outta Camden that’s, like, good.

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In this account, Jacob locates “good” not within Camden itself, but within the possible futures of those who have left it. The fact that these athletes have roots in Camden is seen to prove the potential of this place. The message is that young lives in Camden are not entirely determined by the negative portrayal of their surroundings; the future holds the possibility of becoming “good.” Lenecia offered a similar set of success stories, also centering on athletes. “Some girl, she goes to Camden High and like, she’s very good at basketball and she got a lot of scholarships and she’s like, I forgot her name. And then, some boy who run track, he got all these scholarships and into great colleges.” Stories of model individuals who “came outta Camden” contest the assumption that youth’s destinies are determined by the place in which they grow up. In his Chicago research, Wacquant found that “the first indicator and symbol of success in the ghetto is to leave it behind” (2008:149). While Camden youth do frame success as exit, they mobilize these narratives as a challenge to territorial stigma, rather than an acceptance of it. Lenecia and Jacob point to those who “came outta Camden” as proof that this place could produce people who are widely regarded as “good.” The fact that the most visible route to success is the rare athletic scholarship speaks to the deeply constrained opportunity structure these youth encounter as they look toward the future. When envisioning the future, youth reflected on how young lives were shaped by their geographic location. Jelinda felt it was essential for Camden youth to develop an analysis of the constraints shaping their lives. “I feel like, when you grow up where you are and you don’t want to be confined to where you are, you need to be more knowledgeable,” she said. “To be like, oh, this is why everything’s been harder for me. This is why I had to work twice as hard, five times as hard than the next person who would, say, be born out of like, a suburban area, whose family is well off.” While Jelinda sees potential in the future, she recognizes that individual pathways are socially and geographically situated, shaped by racial and economic injustice. Others acknowledged these constraints, but emphasized the power of the individual to transcend their circumstances, asserting that place does not determine the pathways of those within it. Lenecia said, “just because you’re from a place, doesn’t mean you have to be like everybody else that lives there. You can be your own person, be different.” Sheylinn reflected upon the socializing influence of the highly visible drug trade: Where I live, you’ll see people just standing out there [on the corner], and you know what they’re standing out there for, it’s not something positive. And, I don’t like that because you already are a product of your environment and children do see that. So some grow up to be like that, so, it’s kind of hard to prevent, but at the same time you know that you can always change your path. Sheylinn offers a complex perspective on the relationship between youth, place, and possible futures. On the one hand, she notes that children “already are a product of your environment,” and in Camden that includes the visible presence of drug markets. But she ends on a note of individual agency, insisting “you can always change your path.” Sheylinn’s narrative speaks to a broader tension that emerged throughout my research: between a structural critique of place-based inequalities, and a belief in the individual to chart their own future. Youth developed a keen analysis of the circumstances shaping life in Camden, including histories of economic disinvestment, inequitable development, institutional racism, and environmental injustice. For many, these ideas were not new: they could see the odds were stacked against them, and they insightfully pointed toward the economic and racial injustices that disadvantaged Camden residents. 13

Cairns - Forthcoming in Antipode Yet, faced with the dilemma of crafting futures in a stigmatized place, young people ultimately turn to stories of successful individuals: people who “came outta Camden,” and who represent the possibility of a life that is good. Negotiating this tension is part of the everyday struggle to create lives and envision futures within a stigmatized place. Conclusion Camden youth were deeply frustrated with the dominant story of their city; they did not simply internalize territorial stigma. Instead, they engaged in the symbolic work of re-scripting place (Nayak 2017), excavating positive elements of Camden’s past, present, and possible futures, in order to locate themselves within a place that is good. In this process, youth debated competing visions of their city, and offered differing assessments of what makes it good. Recall, for example, the debate over whether a new park would yield real benefits for residents, or the dispute over specific lines in their collectively written poem. While youth identified redeeming features of this place, they did not deny the significant problems faced within their city. Instead, they grappled with the coexistence of multiple truths, yielding tensions and ambivalences. Did a defense of Camden require them to erase the presence of violence? If the past was proof that change was possible, how would such change occur? Was a successful future always achieved through exit? Contreras (2017) has called for greater attention to how the experience of territorial stigma is shaped by the social location of residents. I build on this insight by foregrounding the significance of age as a social category shaping the racialized and classed experience of place. Young people are positioned within narratives of becoming, in terms of both individual pathways and collective futures. This means youth are uniquely situated within the production of place; their perspectives bring insight into the temporal dimensions of territorial stigma. In their efforts to reconfigure disparaging representations of their community, youth not only find goodness in the present, but also look to Camden’s past and future – weaving together spatiotemporal processes of individual and collective change. This analysis deepens understanding of the “role of symbolic structures in the production of inequality and marginality in the city” (Wacquant, Slater and Pereira 2014:1270). Building on the literature exploring responses to territorial stigma (Kirkness and Tije-Dra 2017), I find that symbolic processes not only underpin territorial stigma, but are also crucial to its contestation. When residents of stigmatized places internalize their blemished reputation, this may prevent them from developing an analysis of structural processes disenfranchising their community, and thus undermine forms of solidarity required to build collective action (Wacquant 2008). By contrast, youth in this study had access to an analysis of the issues facing their community, and built forms of solidarity through food justice work. During workshops, youth developed a structural critique that made visible the social and economic processes underpinning conditions in Camden. Stories of Camden’s history challenge the perceived stasis of a blemished place, revealing the historical specificity of current conditions, and the inequitable relations that produce and sustain it. Yet, in addition to developing this critique, the symbolic work of redeeming Camden was also essential to youth’s coping strategies. In the process, youth did not entirely dismiss territorial stigma, but sought to identify goodness in Camden’s past, present, and possible futures. Engaged in this project, they sometimes looked to stories of individual success – emphasizing one’s capacity to “choose a better path,” or celebrating athletes who “came outta Camden”. While previous scholarship has shown how individualizing success stories work to obscure structural inequities (Cairns 2013), this analysis reveals how such narratives 14

may be strategically deployed as a sign of hope in a space of struggle. The apparent contradictions in youth’s narratives speak to the immense challenge of forging identities and envisioning futures in a stigmatized place (see Cahill 2000; Reay and Lucey 2000; Sung 2015)ii. These youth are collectively developing a critique of structural conditions shaping their community, and this analysis provides resources with which to challenge symbolic defamation. However, identifying the structural underpinnings to the problems facing their community does not provide a clear pathway to material changes, and thus can leave youth with a sense of discouragement. This research also speaks to the political possibilities of collective food struggles within poor communities of color (Ramirez 2015; Reese 2017). My analysis has focused on youth’s narratives of Camden, which did not always center their food-growing experiences. Yet, their accounts emerged within the context of food justice organizing, where youth came together to transform the material conditions of their lives. In addition to contesting media representations of Camden and unearthing systemic injustices of institutional racism, state surveillance, and capitalist disinvestment, youth actively transformed their environment through urban agriculture. Their place-making was thus simultaneously symbolic and material (Crossan et al. 2016). This research builds on previous research demonstrating the importance of studying the experiences and strategies of those who dwell within pathologized places (August 2014; Jensen and Christensen 2012; Kirkness 2014). These youth confront this stigma openly, and emphatically reject the claim, “I’m Black, I live in Camden, I’m never gonna make it.” Even still, their lives remain marked by the blemish of place. According to Wacquant, one of the most devastating outcomes of territorial stigma is “the dissolution of ‘place’, that is, the loss of a humanized, culturally familiar and socially filtered locale with which marginalized urban populations identify and in which they feel ‘at home’ and in relative security” (2007:69). Yet my research suggests Camden is still very much a place to the youth who live there. These young people encounter significant struggles relating to environmental, economic, and racial injustice, as well as concerns surrounding safety. At the same time, they refuse to have their lives defined by these negative conditions, and work to mobilize alternative accounts of place. Acknowledgements I am grateful to the young people in Camden who shared their experiences with me. I also want to thank Lauren Silver and students in the Childhood Studies PhD Proseminar at Rutgers UniversityCamden for their thoughtful feedback. This research was supported by a Rutgers University Research Council grant (202293 RC-17).

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Wacquant L (2008) Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality. Malden, MA: Polity Wacquant L, Slater T, Borges Pereira V (2014) Territorial stigmatization in action. Environment and Planning A 46:1270-1280 Watson N (2015) Reading Camden: Examining the Lives of Children in Camden Through AfricanAmerican Children’s Literature. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Rutgers University-Camden. Winkler E (2012) Learning Race, Learning Place. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press Valentine G (1996) Angels and devils: Moral landscapes of childhood. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 14:581-599 Van der Burgt D (2008) How children place themselves and others in social space. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 90(3):257–269 i While the term “food desert” was used within this organization, critical food scholars have critiqued this metaphor, suggesting a deficit model of “presumed ‘nothingness’” may distract from how “residents make ‘ways out of no way’” (Reese 2017:3). ii One avenue for future research is to examine the specific conditions and interactional dynamics in which youth alternate between accepting and resisting stigma.

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