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Linguistic Landscape: Online-First Articles

On the skids

Mediating anguish, visibilising abusive places

ORCID logo | University of Duisburg-Essen
 | University of Duisburg-Essen
As a way of identifying places which visibilise vulnerable groups, this paper analyses stories of people living on Los Angeles’ Skid Row from their visual portraits posted on photographer Mark Laita’s YouTube channel Soft White Underbelly. Recognising the important role of oral narratives in the production of semiotic landscapes, we are concerned with the ways people talk about space and (re)construct their vulnerabilities in relation to Skid Row. On their own, autobiographical accounts facilitate a deep understanding of how people structure their lives around particular places, but we also document semiotic landscaping tokens collected from ride-along vlogs and virtual walks. This paper shows that Skid Row is a space of contradictory but simultaneous identities; it is a place of excessive regulatory control and perceived disorder; it is bounded and confined but also easily and dangerously accessible; it is peripheral and overlooked but also appealing to ‘watch’.
Keywords: visible homelessness, Skid Row, carceral landscape, injurious home, assemblages of vulnerability, narrative analysis
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • 2.The carceral landscape of Los Angeles: Skid Row
  • 3.Visible homelessness as a market of vulnerability
  • 4.Data and method
  • 5.Analysis: Vulnerable minds — exposed bodies — injurious places
  • 6.Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 17 December 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ll.24018.kos
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