La seguridad a partir de datos

In Part Two, I have explored a range of collective storytelling processes in and about Bradford. My analysis has been content-focused as I have tried to draw out from the collective narratives the various elements that characterise public and collective representations of Bradford. Doing so, and as much as was possible and relevant, I have considered issues of authorship and audiences of collective stories. I have found that there is a great variety of public authors that story Bradford, such as travel writers, the national visual and written media, national and local government institutions, local media and local artists to name a few. Generally, there is a perception that these authors are either insiders or outsiders, but this does not seem to have much bearing on the collective legitimacy of the stories they tell. In addition, there is not a simple equation in which national stories are articulated by outsiders and local stories by insiders. This tends to be the case but such an interpretation must be nuanced, as we have seen with the cases of Dunbar and Alam for example. In academia, there was not enough information on the background of the researchers and their connections to Bradford to be able to advance that they have different interests, approaches and ultimately articulate different storylines depending on their links to the city. In terms of who the collective stories are for, I interpreted the audience as being mainly a national one, even in the case of the local stories. Some of these may have also had the Bradfordian public in mind, but generally they aimed to reach a wide audience, if sometimes specialised as in the case of many of the academic papers.

I have argued that a reductive and negative national story of Bradford, established through a) processes of identity politics concerning the North-South divide and relying on long-held prejudices against the North of England, b) processes of identity politics focused on ethnicity and religion that put the emphasis on identification with the nation-state at the detriment of ethnic minorities in a context of “failure of multiculturalism” and prejudice and moral panics about immigrants, and c) a tendency towards reductionism and sensationalism widespread in the media. All this combined meant that evidence of alternative or

counter-stories in the national imagination were sparse. Having looked at other sources of public knowledge on Bradford, namely academic and local stories, I observed that there is a dynamic interplay between the national cultural stories and the academic and local stories. In each case, I found examples of academic and local stories that either concurred with and reinforced the national story or countered and/or complexified it. In the academic sphere, there were limitations to the challenges though, in that the “countering” academic stories may have been critical of the culturally dominant stories but with overlapping themes and mainly an overwhelming focus on “Asians” and debating issues such as segregation within the framework of the nation-state, they rarely challenged the terms of the stories themselves. The above has a number of implications for the city. The various stories reflect the various material, cultural and political realities that are at play in Bradford. The city faces some real challenges in the wake of deindustrialisation, but it has also experienced some regeneration. However, the various stories as they oppose each other give a polarised view of the city, with on the one hand the national negative image reinforced by sections of the academic and local discourses, and on the other hand some academic stories that give a more nuanced story and local story “compensating” for the negative story with an overly positive story. As a result, the identity of the city is contested along those lines, with a mainly negative story and a positive one and no established alternative beyond this dichotomy. However, beyond the content of the collective stories, it is how they are used and mobilised by individuals that gives them a sense of dominating or countering. This is what I now turn my attention to in Part Three.

PART 3: Revealing (aspects of) the relationship between individual and collective narratives in/of the contested urban space

Part Two focused on collective narratives and the relationship between various collective stories, in particular the emergence of culturally dominant storylines and counter-stories. I identified the various collective stories mainly through a content-focused analysis, although observing, when possible, how the range of authors situated their own stories in relation to others’ contributed to the inquiry. As a result, Part Two provides the context within which I analysed the in-depth interviews I conducted with a range of inhabitants from a selected geographic area within Bradford.

Then, Part Three is concerned with the social world as it appears to these individuals. It seeks to explore how they narrate their experiences of the city and engage in complex negotiations of collective stories. The premise of Part Three is that no story is dominant in and for itself. Rather, it is only relatively dominant.

Investigating the individual narratives allows me to consider the extent of the determining power of dominant stories by asking what stories are relevant and meaningful for inhabitants as they construct their own narratives of urban life.

Doing so, I aim to address the final sub-research question: to what extent do individual stories reflect, reinforce or contest existing collective stories about the communities they live in? It leads me to consider the relationship between individual and collective stories of place and community.

Like in Part Two, language was problematic. I was reluctant to use pre-imposed categories such as “Asian,” “White” and “community,” especially considering some of the findings from the academic literature, which emphasise the complexity of identity and belonging. However, some of the participants used them in an unproblematic way in our conversations and some did not. I tried to reflect that in

relating the discussions, and like in Part Two, I used inverted commas when I used the terms in my own interpretation and analysis.

Part Three is made of three chapters, which all look at individuals’ complex negotiations of public discourse. They explore how at times individuals formulate their experiences of the city in ways that may reinforce and contest existing stories, but also complement them with parallel stories that neither reinforce nor contest but construct a different narrative. Chapter Six looks at the themes that were meaningful for participants in their stories and that resonated with the culturally dominant storyline. Decline, crime and immigration were amongst some of the concerns of the residents of the selected geographical area of Bradford, Billesley, but a close inspection revealed that individuals did not merely repeat the dominant story. Rather, it was negotiated and presented in their own terms. In Chapter Seven, however, I investigate the residents’ explicit and overt countering of the culturally dominant storyline. As they exposed outsiders’ negative images of Billesley, they also affirmed a positive counter-story of the area, which created an alternative identity for the area. In a move in contradiction with some of the stories from Chapter Six, they emphasised the importance of people over place. Finally, in Chapter Eight, I explore stories that were relevant to the participants but that are not necessarily present in the culturally dominant storyline. They reveal how the so-called contested urban space is experienced in different and creative terms as a

“natural setting for human life,” (Finnegan, 1998: 206) a world of possibilities and humanity rather than a mere place of conflict and restrictions. Beyond the content and construction of the stories though, I also consider and attempt to qualify the agency that is retained by the narrators.

Chapter 6: Individual stories: