Silenced by space: Where knowledge doesn’t count

Abstract

This article examines how media discourse constructs epistemic legitimacy and marginality in relation to Zárubek, stigmatised neighbourhood in Ostrava, Czech Republic. Drawing on a comparative critical discourse analysis (CDA) of 14 regional and national media texts (2008–2025) alongside narrative interviews with long-term residents, the study interrogates how credibility, belonging, and voice are unevenly distributed through place-based representations. The analysis identifies five recurring strategies in media coverage: pejorative naming, metaphorical spatialisation, visual erasure, technocratic abstraction, and temporal shifts from degradation to regeneration. Each of these discursive practices enacts what I term spatialised epistemic injustice: the systematic devaluation of knowledge through the symbolic disqualification of place. Narrative counter-discourses reveal forms of irony, kinship naming, and care that I conceptualise as epistemic place-attachment: practices of belonging that sustain dignity and credibility under conditions of symbolic violence. By integrating feminist epistemology with place-attachment theory, the article develops a new framework for analysing how media logics reproduce urban marginality and how residents reassert epistemic dignity through everyday practices.