When Is Helping Hurting? Understanding and Challenging the (Re)production of Dominance in Narratives of Health, Place, and Difference in Hamilton, Ontario

This chapter describes the Code Red series of newspaper articles to explore how efforts to document geographic disparities in health can work to further marginalize and stigmatize particular people and places. In order to contextualize our observations, the following section provides a brief history of Hamilton, Ontario, focusing on how the spatial arrangements of the city developed over time. The chapter then describes the Code Red series and the lasting effects that it has had on the city, before presenting the insights from our analysis. Code Red emerged as a collaborative project between the Hamilton Spectator and researchers at McMaster University. The City of Hamilton is located in southwestern Ontario, on traditional Haudenosaunee territory. Located on a harbor, and later an important railway junction, Hamilton became a manufacturing hub and eventually was one of the largest steel-making hubs in North America.