Nobody becomes stigmatised ‘all at once’: An interactionist account of stigma on a modernist council estate

Abstract

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.

Navigating stigma through everyday city-making: Gendered trajectories, politics and outcomes in the periphery of Lima

“…As those stigmatised become individualised, isolated and undermined, they also are deprived of being part of a collective experience, and are deeply challenged when reclaiming their agency as entitled citizens. I contend that a deep examination of the material world -the dwelling, the neighbourhood and the cityand of the practices and imaginaries that produce this material world, opens a window into the micro-politics of how stigma is negotiated, apportioned and resisted in the everyday lives of those who are politically and materially unsheltered (Hicks and Lewis, 2020).…”

Concealed Stigmatization: Resident Experiences and Practices in Area-Based Development in Gårdsten

“…(60s, 10 years in Gårdsten, January 2023). Besides this being an instance of internal stigmatization (Hicks & Lewis, 2020;Wacquant, 2008), the moral outcome of the frustrations that my informants expressed about litter is that they take it upon themselves to pick up litter. I identify this as another example of pragmatic resistance.…”

“…Connecting littering to the behaviour of certain groups of othered and racialized residents constructs these groups of residents as being partially responsible for the (continued) stigmatization of the neighbourhood (Hicks & Lewis, 2020;Wacquant, 2008) and thus becomes a way for a person to assert their own moral position in relation to litter. This is a form of internal stigmatization that connects neighbours' behaviour to dirt and stigma (Jensen & Christensen, 2012;Palmer et al, 2004;Pattison, 2023;Wacquant, 2008).…”