Abstract
A growing body of literature has investigated the various ways in which residents of stigmatized neighborhoods respond to and cope with stigmatization. However, these approaches have fallen short in tackling the question of how particular places shape responses to stigmatization. In this article, I take seriously the question of context and, based on a comparative ethnography of two social housing neighborhoods in Finland, show how residents in similar social structural positions differed in terms of the cultural milieus they inhabited, presenting them with different cultural resources for dealing with stigmatization. In the article, I suggest that non-recognition is an understudied but significant consequence of stigma related to social housing neighborhoods. Further, I suggest that depending on the historical and cultural context of the neighborhood, different destigmatization strategies are employed when residents face non-recognition. My data shows that locally lived collective place narratives informed residents’ experiences of class: In one neighborhood, the defining element of the locally acknowledged place narrative was class struggle, whereas in the other it was middle-class aspiration. These narratives served as building blocks for their destigmatization strategies.
Highlights
A growing literature has acknowledged that residents living in stigmatized social housing neighborhoods are not helpless victims who end up internalizing the negative image of their neighborhood, but actors drawing on a multiplicity of strategies to resist, manage and cope with it (e.g., Arthurson, Darcy, & Rogers, 2014; August, 2014; Gotham & Brumley, 2002; Kirkness, 2014; Pereira & Queirós, 2014)
In Fireweed Village, where the place narrative of class struggle worked as a cultural resource for dealing with non-recognition, the participants discussed the inconvenience of low water pressure
I have focused on neighborhoodlevel repertoires suggesting that in two similar social housing neighborhoods residents’ collective interpretations and habitual responses to similar practices of nonrecognition were related to locally constructed and historically formed place narratives
Summary
A growing body of literature has investigated the various ways in which members of stigmatized groups respond to and cope with stigmatization (Lamont, 2018; Lamont & Mizrachi, 2012; Moon, 2012) and territorial or housing stigma (August, 2014; Garbin & Millington, 2012; Kirkness, 2014; Kusenbach, 2013; Queirós & Pereira, 2018; Slater & Anderson, 2012; Wacquant, 2007, 2008). I show how residents in similar social structural positions possessed different cultural resources for dealing with stigmatization (Lamont & Mizrachi, 2012), depending on their neighborhood milieu. The defining element of the locally acknowledged place narrative was “class struggle,” whereas in the other it was “middle-class aspiration.” These narratives, as I will suggest, served as resources for collective destigmatization strategies employed by residents when faced with practices of non-recognition that, I assert, are the concrete but often unnoticed consequences of housing stigma. 294) in two social housing estates allows us to see stigmatized low-income neighborhoods as containers of the numerous negative effects of poverty, and as historically and culturally diverse milieus that residents collectively draw on in order to gain recognition Comparison of practices of “being-togetherness” (Binken & Blokland, 2013, p. 294) in two social housing estates allows us to see stigmatized low-income neighborhoods as containers of the numerous negative effects of poverty, and as historically and culturally diverse milieus that residents collectively draw on in order to gain recognition
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