Placing Townies: The Symbolic Work of Naming

This article explores how students in one college town use the name “townies” to describe some local residents who are not affiliated with the university. Embedded within this name are unspoken connections that link townies (and the students who use the name) to discourses of socioeconomic class. In addition, the naming of particular bodies as townies symbolically works to stretch the social space of the university well beyond its physical boundaries, which reshapes the conceptual map of the local sociocultural terrain to, ironically, position townies as “out of place” within many portions of the town.