Silenced by space: Where knowledge doesn’t count

Theoretical anchoring: Epistemic injustice and territorial stigma

This study draws on feminist social epistemology and feminist media theory to interrogate how knowledge about marginalised localities is produced, disqualified, and contested in public discourse. It is anchored in the frameworks of epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007), epistemic friction and activism (Medina, 2013), territorial stigma (Wacquant et al., 2014), affective credibility and epistemic affect (Frost-Arnold, 2023), and Foucault’s notion of subjugated knowledges (Foucault, 1980). Taken together, these approaches illuminate how credibility is distributed, how emotions circulate through media discourse, and how power is embedded in epistemic and representational practices.

At the core of this framework is Fricker’s (2007) account of epistemic injustice, which distinguishes between testimonial injustice—when speakers are dismissed because of identity-based prejudice—and hermeneutical injustice—when marginalised groups lack the conceptual resources to render their experiences intelligible in dominant discourses. These insights are crucial for analysing media, where institutional and expert voices are routinely privileged, while subaltern testimonies are dismissed, erased, or misinterpreted. Feminist media scholars have theorised such dynamics as forms of symbolic erasure and silencing (McRobbie, 2009; Orgad, 2012), highlighting how discursive practices determine who can speak and whose knowledge is legitimised.

Foucault’s (1980) concept of subjugated knowledges extends this analysis by directing attention to the systematic disqualification of local, everyday, and experiential forms of knowing. When applied to media, this perspective clarifies how vernacular knowledges from marginalised communities are rendered invisible or delegitimated, while official and institutionalised discourses acquire epistemic privilege. Bringing Foucault into dialogue with feminist epistemology underscores that power operates not only through silencing but also through the hierarchisation of credibility and intelligibility. These hierarchies are also affective. Building on Frost-Arnold (2023) demonstrates that emotions are integral to epistemic practices: they shape how credibility is allocated and how testimony is received. From a feminist media perspective, this means that registers such as disgust, pity, or shame do not simply describe social actors but actively construct their credibility, positioning them as unreliable or unintelligible (Banet-Weiser, 2018; Gill, 2007). Affective dynamics therefore form part of the epistemic architecture of representation, reinforcing who is authorised to speak and who is discredited.

Spatial dynamics further intensify these processes. Wacquant’s (2008) theorisation of territorial stigma shows how entire places become objects of symbolic devaluation, linking epistemic injustice to spatialised forms of exclusion. When neighbourhoods are discursively marked as deficient or threatening, their residents’ credibility is undermined by association. Schwarze’s (2022) notion of hyperbolic territorialisation highlights how repetitive and sensationalist media framings amplify such stigma, sedimenting symbolic violence and producing durable forms of epistemic exclusion. Yet media are not only sites of domination but also terrains of contestation. Medina’s (2013) concept of epistemic rezistance reframes representation as a dynamic field where subjugated knowledges can disrupt hegemonic narratives through irony, counter-narration, or strategic silence. His related notion of epistemic activism foregrounds the resistant practices by which marginalised actors expose the limits of official truth claims and open space for alternative epistemologies.

Taken together, these frameworks position media representation as a site of epistemic struggle. Feminist media critiques of symbolic violence and selective visibility (Banet-Weiser, 2018; Gill, 2007; McRobbie, 2009) converge with feminist epistemology and Foucault’s genealogy of subjugated knowledges to show how voice, affect, and credibility are unevenly distributed within spatial representations. Rather than treating media as a neutral mirror of social reality, this study conceptualises it as an epistemic apparatus through which knowledge, power, and affect are co-constituted.

This argument also speaks to media and communication research on how marginalised neighbourhoods are discursively produced through reality television, tabloid journalism, and urban documentary cultures. Scholars have shown that vilified neighbourhoods are repeatedly framed through tropes of dysfunction, danger, and moral failure, producing what Tyler (2020) describes as the symbolic bordering of disposable populations. Research on “poverty porn” further demonstrates how working-class and racialised communities become objects of voyeuristic spectacle while structural inequalities are obscured (Jensen, 2014; Tyler and Bennett, 2010). Building on this scholarship, the present article contributes an epistemic perspective by analysing how territorial stigma shapes not only visibility and affect, but also the distribution of credibility and the intelligibility of local knowledge.

Situated knowledge production: Hermeneutical context of the locality in Czechia

Zárubek is a historically working-class neighbourhood in Ostrava, one of the largest cities in the Czech Republic. Established as a miners’ colony adjacent to a coal shaft, it became emblematic of post-industrial decline after the collapse of heavy industry following state socialism. By the early 2000s, many housing units were substandard or dilapidated, and the neighbourhood faced concentrated poverty, unemployment, and institutional neglect. Mikulec’s (2016) ethnography documents that during this period Zárubek was home to roughly 200–300 inhabitants, including many Roma families, low-income households, and individuals displaced from elsewhere in the city through redevelopment or housing precarity. Eventually, all residents were relocated, and the neighbourhood itself was remade into a luxury residential area—a transformation that not only erased a community but also re-inscribed its history through processes of symbolic revalorisation and material gentrification.

In Czech social policy, neighbourhoods such as Zárubek have been categorised as “socially excluded localities.” While presented as neutral descriptors, these labels are deeply performative. They highlight persistent educational disadvantage—where large shares of residents have not completed primary schooling or hold only basic qualifications, with secondary or vocational attainment rare (Agency for Social Inclusion for Czechia, 2023)—and link these deficits to broader patterns of economic exclusion. Official unemployment rates have reached 80%–85%, with widespread long-term joblessness, dependence on state welfare, and exposure to debt enforcement proceedings. Yet rather than simply describing social realities, such categories enact what feminist media scholars identify as symbolic violence (McRobbie, 2009): communities are rendered visible primarily through deficit logics of risk, dysfunction, or failure.

For feminist media studies, the case of Zárubek illustrates how state categories and media logics converge to produce epistemic injustice. Bureaucratic labels such as social exclusion are translated into journalistic discourse as ghetto transforming technocratic language into affective metaphors of disgust and abjection. These representations erase the situated knowledges and lived testimonies of residents, instead framing the neighbourhood as an object of policy management or moral panic. In this sense, Zárubek is not simply a materially deprived space, but an epistemic terrain where policy discourse, media representation, and everyday testimony collide—shaping who is granted credibility, whose histories are erased, and how urban futures are imagined.

Media corpus

The media corpus was assembled through a purposive, multimodal sampling strategy designed to capture the dominant discursive currents surrounding Zárubek in Czech regional and national outlets. Rather than relying solely on aggregated databases, Direct searches were conducted in the online archives of IDNES (n = 2), Moravskoslezský Deník (n = 6), Přerovský deník (n = 1), Polar (n = 3), Česká televise (n = 1), and Český rozhlas (n = 1). The sample includes national commercial platforms (iDNES.cz), regional dailies (Moravskoslezský Deník and Přerovský Deník part of the Deník network), a regional television broadcaster (Polar TV), as well as national public-service media with regional studios (Česká televize and Český rozhlas). This mix enables attention to how different institutional locations—national versus regional, commercial versus public—mediate the representation of marginalised urban spaces. This approach ensured access to the complete published artefacts—including headlines, captions, images, and page layout—allowing for a multimodal critical discourse analysis attentive to both linguistic and visual framings. Visual materials were analysed not as illustrative supplements to textual reporting, but as constitutive elements of meaning-making. Attention was therefore paid to framing, absence/presence of residents, visual proximity, depictions of material decay, and the affective atmospheres produced through photographic composition and repetition across outlets. Where possible, screenshots were taken to preserve visual materials in their original context.

To extend the sample beyond a few isolated stories, I employed a snowballing strategy. The process began with known stigmatising articles, such as those explicitly referring to Zárubek as a ghetto. These were then used to generate a set of related keywords (excluded locality, revitalisation), which guided further searches across outlet archives. This iterative approach captured discursive variation across different narrative registers, from overtly derogatory framings to regeneration-oriented narrative. Following this two-step procedure, a total of 14 media texts were collected. These texts were published between 2008 and 2025. The corpus includes news articles, feature stories, and photo essays, representing two temporal phases: degradation (2008–2021) and regeneration (2023–2025). This design makes it possible to analyse how discursive strategies shifted over time and how the neighbourhood’s symbolic position was reconfigured in relation to broader urban and policy agendas.

To avoid reproducing only explicitly stigmatising framings, the sampling strategy retained discursive variation across the dataset, including regeneration, redevelopment, and institutional “success” narratives. The final corpus therefore includes sensationalist, technocratic, celebratory, and ambivalent representations of Zárubek. This diversity was analytically important for examining how epistemic marginalisation operates across different representational registers, including seemingly positive narratives of urban renewal. The aim was not to demonstrate a uniform media bias, but to analyse how credibility, visibility, and legitimacy are negotiated through shifting discursive forms.

List of media texts:

Interview data

The second dataset consists of six in-depth interviews with long-term residents and memory-holders who lived in the neighbourhood during the period under study. Access to participants was facilitated by a former resident who had previously taken part in an ethnographic dissertation project on Zárubek neighbourhood and who acted as a gatekeeper in this study. Through his mediation, an additional five participants were recruited.

The interviews focussed on how residents perceived media portrayals of the neighbourhood and how they themselves understood its identity. As part of the design, selected media articles from the corpus were sent to participants 1 week in advance via email and were also brought to the interview by the researcher. Participants were also asked to reflect on selected media articles from the corpus, which served as elicitation material. This dialogical method enabled exploration of the disjuncture between journalistic representations and lived experience. All interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim, and lasted on average 1 hour. The sample comprised four women and two men, aged between 45 and 65, each with approximately a decade of lived experience in the locality.

Analytic strategy

Bringing these two datasets into dialogue made it possible to trace how dominant media discourses intersect with situated everyday knowledge practices. The methodological pairing of comparative critical discourse analysis with narrative interviews is grounded in feminist epistemology: it foregrounds silencing and voice, highlights the affective dimensions of credibility, and situates media as an epistemic arena where hegemonic framings are reproduced, resisted, or resignified.

The analysis draws on critical discourse theory (van Dijk, 2001; Wodak, 2022).These theoretical tools enable attention to both discursive power—how language shapes social reality—and epistemic power—who is afforded credibility, intelligibility, and recognition. In particular, the following analytic dimensions were used as sensitising concepts:

These categories were not imposed deductively but emerged through iterative reading of the materials, moving between media and ethnographic fragments to identify patterns of contrast and resonance. The analysis adopts a feminist commitment to situated knowledge (Haraway, 1988), foregrounding the partiality, embeddedness, and power dynamics of both knowledge production and interpretation. Rather than treating media texts as objective artefacts or resident voices as unmediated truth, the study attends to the conditions of speech: how subjects are enabled or constrained to narrate their realities, and under what epistemic hierarchies. The comparative frame was not merely descriptive but analytical: it enabled us to explore how different discursive regimes (media vs. lived experience) construct the same space with radically different affective, moral, and epistemological consequences.

The analysis proceeded in three stages. First, media texts were closely read to identify recurring discursive and visual patterns, including metaphors, actor positioning, attribution of voice, and affective framings of the locality. Second, interview transcripts were thematically coded with attention to how residents negotiated or resisted dominant representations. Finally, both datasets were analysed comparatively to identify epistemic tensions between institutional discourse and lived experience.

The study adhered to the Ethical Principles of Human Research (American Psychological Association (APA), 2016). Participation was voluntary, and all participants provided informed consent. Particular attention was paid to maintaining participant anonymity and ensuring confidentiality throughout all stages of data collection and reporting. This study is not without its limitations. To begin with, the findings draw on self-reported accounts that may be shaped by social desirability pressures or by idealised versions of experience articulated within the research encounter. In addition, as Hollway and Jefferson (2013) remind us, interview narratives often represent deliberate acts of self-positioning, while more defended or unconscious aspects of identity may remain outside the reach of such methods. A further limitation lies in the modest sample size and the reliance on non-probability sampling, which restrict the extent to which results can be generalised. Nevertheless, as is customary in qualitative research, the purpose here was not statistical representativeness but rather analytical richness and contextual understanding. Within these parameters, the study contributes important insights into how social workers engage in disadvantaged neighbourhoods and how they navigate the socio-spatial and affective dynamics through which disinformation circulates.

Pejorative naming and epistemic pre-emption

Headlines such as “Ghetto Zárubek: anything but a place to live” (Moravskoslezský Deník, 2017) and “Ghetto Zárubek: dirt and disorder. ‘Why would anyone care?’ wonders the owner” (Moravskoslezský Deník, 2019) do more than describe: they enact discursive violence. The repeated invocation of the label ghetto operates as a powerful shorthand for decay, dirt, and danger, condensing a wide range of pejorative associations into a single word. Across the corpus, the term “ghetto” was paired with vivid descriptors—“filth,” “ruin,” “waste,” “unliveable”—that cement the association of Zárubek with abjection. In some photo essays, captions juxtaposed the word ghetto with images of broken fences, piles of trash, and stray dogs, making the label appear self-evident: a place defined by deficit and disorder. Residents themselves are scarcely quoted, and when they appear, they are framed through pathologising tropes—landlords complaining about tenants, or municipal authorities lamenting “problem families.”

As one resident reflected, the damage is done before any conversation even begins: “When they say ghetto, people imagine only filth and Roma. It doesn’t matter what we say, they’ve already decided who we are” (CP1). Another explained how the word followed her children into school: “The teacher said to my son: ‘You live in the ghetto, right?’ He didn’t want to answer, because he knew the others would laugh” (CP2). Naming here functions as epistemic pre-emption: it forecloses credibility in advance, positioning residents within racialised and classed stereotypes before they are able to speak on their own terms.

In feminist media terms, this is a process of symbolic othering (Orgad, 2012), whereby the label ghetto erases individuality and reduces a heterogeneous community to a homogenous category of deficiency. It is not simply that the media reports on marginality; the act of naming actively produces and reproduces it. By circulating through headlines, captions, and photogalleries, the “ghetto” trope becomes naturalised in public discourse, shaping how audiences feel about and relate to the neighbourhood. As one man bitterly noted: “They don’t even need to write a story anymore. Just say ‘Zárubek’ and people know what to think” (CP3).

This circulation across genres—from hard news reports to photo spreads and online comment sections—intensifies the affective charge. Readers are invited not to consider Zárubek as a community but to react with disgust, pity, or moral outrage. In this way, the label ghetto performs the work of affective condensation, gathering multiple stigmas (poverty, Romani ethnicity, dirt, danger) into a single signifier.

Yet residents also respond with irony and pride, turning stigma back against itself. One woman joked: “We should put up a sign: Welcome to the filth. At least then people will stop pretending” (CP4). Another asserted: “Yes, we’re from Zárubek. We know how to survive things others wouldn’t last a week in” (CP5). These counter-discourses exemplify Medina’s (2013) notion of epistemic resistance: practices that subvert stigma’s affective charge by reclaiming credibility on residents’ own terms. A younger resident put it more bluntly: “They call it a ghetto, we call it home. You can laugh, but you won’t find neighbours like this anywhere else” (CP6).

What emerges, then, is a struggle over naming as a struggle over recognition. Media discourses impose a frame that locks Zárubek into a narrative of deficit and danger, while residents articulate counter-narratives that insist on dignity, survival, and belonging. The politics of naming thus becomes a central site of epistemic struggle, revealing how credibility and marginality are co-produced at the intersection of discourse and lived experience.

Metaphorical spatialisation and affective economies

The media corpus repeatedly mobilises metaphorical framings of space designed to evoke strong affective reactions. A striking example is the 2021 headline “Colony Zárubek in Ostrava: after the homeless, tons of waste and a burnt-out site remained” (Moravskoslezský Deník, 2021). The article described the colony as “a black spot on the city map” and illustrated it with images of charred beams and scattered refuse, thereby casting the neighbourhood as a dumping ground where human presence is reduced to residual garbage. Similarly, in 2020 coverage of Zárubek’s attempted clearance, the report “A new face for Ostrava’s Zárubek ghetto. The evicted return” (Moravskoslezský Deník, 2020) framed residents themselves as a problem that keeps resurfacing, likened to contamination or invasion. Even regeneration news (Moravskoslezský Deník) in 2023 invoked spatial metaphors of “zones” and “logistics,” displacing residents with abstracted economic functions.

These framings do not merely describe social problems; they actively organise how the space and its inhabitants are imagined, felt, and governed. The metaphors of waste and recurrence mobilise disgust and fatigue, encouraging readers to see residents not as neighbours but as problems that overflow, spread, or return. A resident reflected: “They write as if we are trash that someone forgot to take out. That’s how people look at us when they read it” (CP1). Another added: “When they say ‘the evicted return,’ it sounds like we are cockroaches. They never ask why people come back—because they have nowhere else to go” (CP2).

Ahmed’s (2014) concept of affective economies helps to explain how these metaphors work. Emotions such as disgust, fear, and pity “stick” to Zárubek and to those associated with it, accumulating affective force through repetition. Once attached, these emotions circulate across platforms—from tabloid headlines to television broadcasts. For instance, Polar TV’s coverage of a tram fire at the Důl Zárubek stop in 2022 visually reinforced danger by situating even a random infrastructural accident within the spatial imaginary of Zárubek as hazardous.

Such framings also rely on absence. In photo essays and video reports, Zárubek is depicted as a space of ruins, trash, or waste, with residents’ voices either absent or represented only as anonymous figures in the background. This aligns with Lefebvre’s (1991) notion of the production of representational space: media visuals inscribe the neighbourhood into an urban imaginary where abandonment appears not as the product of decades of municipal neglect or structural inequality, but as a naturalised condition of the place itself.

From the perspective of feminist epistemology, these representational practices enact epistemic injustice. Testimony from residents is either ignored or foreclosed in advance. As one woman observed: “They come with cameras when something burns down, but they never ask us what we need” (CP4). A mother described how these framings seep into everyday life: “My daughter asked me not to write our street on the school trip form. She said the teacher will know and laugh” (CP3). Another man captured the embodied effects of metaphorical spatialisation: “When people hear Zárubek, they step back a little. They imagine dirt. That’s the first reaction” (CP5).

These accounts reveal not passivity but epistemic resilience (Dotson, 2011): a reflexive grasp of how stigma operates, coupled with strategies of adaptation and withholding that preserve dignity. Some residents respond with humour—“If we are waste, then we are waste that recycles itself” (CP6)—while others engage in everyday practices of concealment, downplaying their address to protect their children from ridicule. Together, these strategies demonstrate how metaphorical spatialisation not only shapes external perceptions but also structures residents’ affective negotiations of self, space, and belonging.

Visual discourse and symbolic erasure

Visuals play a central role in entrenching discursive patterns of stigma. The 2020 Moravskoslezský Deník photogallery “Ostrava’s Zárubek ghetto” staged Zárubek through images of derelict houses, piles of rubbish, and collapsed fences—scenes conspicuously devoid of residents. The captions reinforced this framing with descriptors such as “ruins,” “shame,” and “abandonment,” which presented the place as an object of urban pathology rather than a living neighbourhood. Other photo-based pieces, such as the 2019 “Ghetto Zárubek: dirt and disorder” report, zoomed in on scattered furniture, burned-out interiors, and heaps of trash, producing what residents describe as a gallery of humiliation. One man reflected bitterly: “It looks like no one lives here, like it’s just ruins” (CP1).

This imagery does not merely document material decay; it actively constructs Zárubek as a space emptied of social life, a ruin rather than a lived environment. Feminist media scholars theorise this as symbolic erasure (Banet-Weiser, 2018; Orgad, 2012): a representational practice through which entire communities are rendered invisible, reduced to debris or problems to be “cleaned up.” The absence of people in visual frames is not incidental but constitutive—it signals who counts as worthy of recognition and who can be safely ignored.

The aesthetic of abandonment recurs across outlets. A 2017 article headlined “Ghetto Zárubek: anything but a place to live” was illustrated by wide shots of crumbling façades, accompanied by close-ups of litter-strewn courtyards. Even Polar TV’s coverage of the 2022 tram fire at Důl Zárubek stop relied on visuals of police tape and smoking infrastructure, reinforcing the neighbourhood’s association with hazard and breakdown. Such choices align with feminist critiques of visibility politics (Gill, 2007; McRobbie, 2009), where selective representation reaffirms hierarchies of voice, value, and legitimacy.

Residents recognise these visual framings as both injurious and misleading. A woman explained: “They always take pictures of the worst house, the broken fence, the garbage pile. They never show the gardens we care for” (CP2). Another noted: “When you look at the newspaper, it seems like only dirt lives here. But in reality, we are people, families, children” (CP4). For younger residents, this absence of representation becomes internalised. As one teenager said: “I stopped inviting friends. If they google Zárubek, they only see trash and ruins. That’s not how I want them to see me” (CP6).

Against this erasure, residents cultivate relational recognition in everyday life. As one man recalled: “Even if it was a stranger, you always called him uncle” (CP3). This kinship naming asserts an ethic of familiarity, proximity, and care that contests the media’s portrayal of emptiness and disorder. Everyday acts—lending tools, sharing food, transporting firewood—form infrastructures of care that remain invisible to dominant representations. A woman concluded: “They photograph garbage, but not when neighbours bring soup to an old man who lives alone. That is also Zárubek, but nobody shows it” (CP5).

These counter-discourses expose the partiality of the media gaze and foreground the epistemic violence of visual erasure. Where media frames reduce Zárubek to waste and ruin, residents insist on its relational life-worlds, carving out spaces of recognition that resist the aesthetic of abandonment.

Technocratic abstraction and regeneration discourses

Even when media coverage shifts from narratives of degradation to those of regeneration, residents remain conspicuously absent. The 2023 Moravskoslezský Deník article “Implementation of the Ostrava City Logistics Zárubek project has begun” framed the development in purely technocratic terms: “Construction of a zone that will bring new jobs has started.” The accompanying text described square metres of industrial space, modular logistics halls, and investment capital, while promotional visualisations showed glass facades and delivery trucks. The inhabitants of Zárubek—those who live in the shadow of this project—were entirely missing. Inhabitants are displaced by abstract economic signifiers—zones, jobs, logistics—and the neighbourhood is narrated not as a lived community but as a unit of productivity and investment potential.

This technocratic register appears consistently in redevelopment coverage. The 2021 iDNES article “The old Zárubek mine will revive, becoming an industrial zone” similarly foregrounded investors, municipal growth, and “revitalisation of brownfields,” with no reference to how existing residents might be affected. Even celebratory reports such as Polar TV’s 2024 piece “In Slezská Ostrava, socially excluded localities are decreasing; their number has been reduced by half” erase residents’ perspectives, presenting statistical decline in exclusion as a self-evident improvement without asking whether daily life has changed for those still living there.

In feminist media terms, this represents a form of technocratic erasure: policy-driven discourses of development overwrite the social textures of everyday life. Success is measured in square metres and job projections, not in human well-being. The “neighbourhood” disappears into the language of zones and modules.

Residents are acutely aware of this abstraction. One woman expressed her frustration: “They talk about new jobs, but no one asked if we can get them. It’s always about the space, never about us” (CP2). Another noted: “They build halls and roads, but we need a doctor here, a shop, a bus that comes on time” (CP4). For some, these discourses of improvement are not only irrelevant but alienating. A man reflected: “When they say ‘Zárubek will change,’ they don’t mean for us. They mean for investors” (CP3).

This dissonance highlights what feminist media scholars call symbolic recuperation (Banet-Weiser, 2018): the surface appearance of progress without substantive inclusion. The neighbourhood is discursively rescued through redevelopment, but residents’ testimonies remain unrecognised, their needs unacknowledged.

At the same time, women’s narratives reveal how strategies of resilience are articulated through attachments to place. One reappropriated a gendered insult by reframing her labour as grounded in the materiality of the settlement: “I say, if it’s women’s work, then it’s women’s work” (CP2). Another narrated her authority through practical reasoning tied to household economies and the built environment: “I told him that buying a saw for 1,800 was nonsense, and he should have listened” (CP5). These accounts exemplify what Cresswell (2015) theorises as the politics of place—where everyday practices and meanings consolidate attachment under precarious conditions—and resonate with Hooks’s (2009) reflections on homeplace as a site of resilience and epistemic authority, even when dominant policy discourses render such place-based knowledge inaudible.

Together, these dynamics reveal the paradox of regeneration discourse: the more technocratic the language of improvement, the less visible the people who inhabit the space. What is celebrated as progress at the level of urban planning is experienced as erasure at the level of everyday life.

Temporal shifts: From degradation to regeneration

The temporal shift in media coverage—from narratives of degradation (2008–2021) to those of regeneration (2023–2025)—introduces new epistemic complications. Earlier coverage cast Zárubek through metaphors of decay and disorder. The 2008 Český rozhlas report described the area as a “problem locality” linked to the influx of Roma families, situating Zárubek in discourses of demographic threat rather than community life. Throughout the 2010s, headlines such as “Ghetto Zárubek: anything but a place to live” (Moravskoslezský Deník, 2017) and “Ghetto Zárubek: dirt and disorder” (Moravskoslezský Deník, 2019) anchored the neighbourhood in imagery of unliveability and filth. The 2021 coverage of Moravskoslezský deník, “Colony Zárubek: after the homeless, tons of waste and a burnt-out site remained,” further consolidated this association with ruin and residue. Residents recall these years as a period of relentless vilification: “We dreaded opening the paper, because it was always another story about dirt, waste, problems. Never about the people who live here” (CP1).

More recent reports, however, replace this register of decay with celebratory narratives of progress. The 2021 iDNES article “The old Zárubek mine will revive, becoming an industrial zone” announced the transformation of the area into a hub of productivity, while Moravskoslezský Deník’s 2023 coverage of the Ostrava City Logistics project stressed construction and job creation. By 2024, Polar TV proclaimed, “In Slezská Ostrava, socially excluded localities are decreasing; their number has been reduced by half,” a headline that positioned statistical decline in exclusion as a marker of success. In 2025 (Polar), the mayor of Slezská Ostrava declared Zárubek “no longer excluded,” a discursive act that effectively erased decades of stigma through a simple reclassification.

On the surface, this discursive shift appears positive, reframing the neighbourhood not as blight but as evidence of progress. Yet residents remain absent from these celebratory accounts. A woman remarked: “If they say it’s better now, why don’t they come and ask us?” (CP2). Another noted ironically: “They say we are less excluded now, but for us nothing has changed. My husband still can’t get a job, the bus still doesn’t come on time, and the doctor’s office is still closed” (CP1). A younger resident commented with frustration: “They build warehouses and call it improvement. But improvement for who? Not for us” (CP4).

Her words exemplify Medina’s (2013) notion of epistemic friction: irony and scepticism as double-voiced discourses that acknowledge official narratives while exposing their irrelevance to lived experience. Residents engage these discourses not as passive recipients but as critical interlocutors who can recognise the dissonance between media celebration and everyday life.

From a feminist media perspective, the mayor’s 2025 declaration epitomises symbolic recuperation (Banet-Weiser, 2018): the surface appearance of inclusion without epistemic repair. Declaring Zárubek “no longer excluded” may repair the city’s image, but it does not repair residents’ long histories of being unheard. The paradox is clear: degradation discourses harm through vilification, regeneration discourses harm through erasure. Both deny residents what Fricker (2007) calls testimonial justice—the right to be heard and believed.