Nobody becomes stigmatised 'all at once

An interactionist account of stigma on a modernist council estate

Bibliographic Data

ID3337217
AuthorsStephen Hicks (0000-0002-3177-2957, University of Manchester, corresponding author), C Lewis (0000-0001-8137-4802, Newcastle University)
Year2020
Volume68
Issue6
Pages1370-1385
Publication date2020-11-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Sociological Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0038-0261 • E-ISSN: 1467-954X
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0038026120931424
OpenAlexW3023721950
LanguageEN
Citations received7
References cited32

This article examines how residents experience and account for stigma at Claremont Court, a modernist social housing scheme built in Edinburgh in the early 1960s. Although listed as having special architectural interest, the building has been subject to disinvestment and has a mix of residents, including council and private renters as well as owner-occupiers. This article explores micro-distinctions between residents, showing how the categories 'stigmatiser' and 'stigmatised' are not as rigid as we might expect. It then considers stigma associated not with residents but, rather, the building itself, and argues that closer attention to the relationship between the material and social is required in order to understand residents' complex articulations of belonging. Finally, residents' views on dirt and rubbish are explored, showing how they use these signifiers of stigma to reveal concerns about shame and respectability. Responding to the call from this journal for more sociological understandings of stigma, this article argues that interactionist approaches offer an important alternative, one that highlights how stigma is negotiated, resisted and apportioned in everyday life. This perspective reveals residents' practices in interaction with the material environment, as well as the ways in which stigmatisation processes work simultaneously in upward and downward directions, rather than in a unidirectional way

Aesthetics · Criminology · Dirt · Disinvestment · Estate · Housing estate · Political science · Shame · Social constructionism · Social science · Sociology · Stigma (botany) · Symbolic interactionism · Emotional Labor in Professions · Employment and Welfare Studies · Engineering · Gender Studies · Homelessness and Social Issues · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology

Tools

Open DOIOpen Access