Researching territorial stigma with social housing tenants : tenant-led digital media production about people and place

This chapter considers how social housing tenants produce digital countercultural products to talk about, represent and analyse people and place relationships, and particularly how they used these products to explore territorialised representations of poverty and class. We draw on three examples from. the Residents' Voices - Advantage, Disadvantage, Community and Place project (hereafter Residents' Voices): (1) digital story telling disseminated through a website; (2) tenant-driven media analysis of the popular Australian television parody 'Housos'; and (3) a short dramatic film written and directed by social housing tenants. Each example uses digital media production to represent, and perhaps even challenge, territorial stigma, but represents social housing tenants and their neighbourhoods in different ways. The aim is to expose the methodological challenges within each digital cultural production process in relation to representations of territorial stigma. Bourdieu (1986) has shown how social order is inscribed through' cultural products'. These products include education, language and the media. Cultural products work through framing and reworking alliances over culture both symbolically and materially. This leads to an unconscious sense of acceptance of social differences and one's place in society both in a social/cultural and geographical/spatial sense. In other words, through these cultural products meanings are attached to certain practices, places and events and these meanings are internalised even by those who themselves are being culturally defined.