Deconstructing the discourse of degradation

Summary, in English

In research about degraded towns two cognitive currents can be observed: empirical (what? how? where? when?) and theoretical (why?). Contrarily, no study to date has dealt with the issue of discursivity of its central concept ‘degradation’, i.e. its a priori linguistic characterization determining ways in which research on the subject has been done. As geographers, we are fascinated by the ”real” world, which we wish to explore, examine and present in light of our proudly uncovered spatio-temporal regularities. However, we often tend to forget that while doing so we use specific concepts, which not only determine the choice of our methods, but also – consequently – the quality of our analyses and results. In that vein, before undertaking any kind of research, we need to pay greater attention to the relationship between the concepts we use and the “reality” inadvertently drawn by those concepts. This chapter forms a condensed summary of the main points elaborated in detail and developed theoretically in a separate article on the discursivity of the term “degraded town”. Including this summary in this book was motivated by the need to incorporate at least one text devoted to the discursivity of its key concept and the problems arising from its unreflected usage. For a comprehensive walk-through on the topic, I strongly refer to the main article.