Stigma, class, and ‘respect’: Young people’s articulation and management of place in a post-industrial estate in south Wales

Abstract

Using data from two studies in an economically under-resourced, post-industrial estate in the south Wales valleys, we explore the ways in which young people articulate and negotiate the place in which they live. Taken together, both studies provide observational, interview, and visual data on how young people manage, and resist, dominant media and policy-oriented representations whilst living in a place bearing the wounds and the scars of economic neglect. Here, young people face double discrimination: living in a place externally portrayed as ‘abject’, and representing a demographic perceived locally and elsewhere as the embodiment of apathy, trouble, and disorder. Using creative methods, we show how young people reimagined their futures and engaged in forms of activism to resist stigmatising depictions and to realise recognition and a desire for change. Dissecting the micro-processes through which stigma is embodied and confronted, we highlight the opportunities of confronting, disrupting, and rewriting entrenched macro-political narratives in a neo-liberal age. However, we also identify the limitations of this, specifically the misalignment between recognition (i.e. of what young people call ‘respect’) and resources (i.e. of confronting structural inequalities). We conclude by sketching out the potential of young people to become more active agents of change.