Watt, Paul (2008) 'Underclass' and 'ordinary people' discourses: representing/re-presenting council tenants in a housing campaign. Critical Discourse Studies 5 (4), pp. 345-357. ISSN 1740-5904.
Abstract
This paper employs critical discourse analysis to examine discourses of council (public) housing tenants. It focuses upon one example of housing activism, a local campaign that mobilized in opposition to a proposed stock transfer of council housing in South East England. The hegemonic societal-wide discourse regarding council tenants is that they constitute a socially excluded 'underclass', as in New Labour urban policy and the mass media. In contrast, the paper demonstrates how the housing campaign presented a counter-hegemonic discourse of tenants as 'ordinary people'. Drawing upon a textual analysis of campaign literature and letters to local newspapers, the paper illustrates how this populist discourse abjured an explicit reference to class identity, but at the same time managed to effectively signify class inequality.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Keyword(s) / Subject(s): | working class, underclass, class identity, habitus, council tenants, stock transfer, housing activism, New Labour, neoliberalism, rhetoric, newspaper letters |
| School: | Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences |
| Research Centres and Institutes: | Moving Image, Birkbeck Institute for the (BIMI) |
| Depositing User: | Administrator |
| Date Deposited: | 25 Jan 2011 10:55 |
| Last Modified: | 02 Aug 2023 16:52 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/2239 |
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