Situated knowledge and the production of culture

Bourdieu has shown how social order is inscribed through ‘cultural products’.¹⁶ 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 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.

Faced with threats of demolition and redevelopment of their dwellings, dispersal of tenants and communities,¹⁷ and with persistent stigmatisation and demonisation in mainstream media,¹⁸ some residents of public housing in Australia have used video and other creative media to create alternative cultural products.

Three examples are outlined below which emerged during a four-year project (funded by the Australian Research Council, St Vincent de Paul Society, UWS and Loyola University Chicago) entitled Residents’ Voices: Advantage, Disadvantage, Community and Place. The aim of the project was to collaborate with residents to challenge conventional outsider approaches to understanding place and disadvantage by facilitating the emergence and validation of situated knowledge and ‘insider’ theorising about this relationship. Each is a response to stereotyping and stigma, and can be understood as a limited attempt to reclaim the identity of specific neighbourhoods or of public housing tenants collectively. Importantly, as will be shown, the residents involved in these projects do not set out primarily to change the views or actions of policy makers or other outsiders – although such an outcome might be welcomed. In each case, the primary audiences for their efforts were the participants themselves, their neighbours and other tenants.

The examples discussed below are, firstly, digital storytelling disseminated through a website; secondly, tenant-driven media analysis of the popular Australian television parody Housos; and, finally, a short dramatic film written and directed by tenants entitled Into the Woods. In each of these examples, public housing residents speak back to popular stereotypes, yet in each case their main purpose was not primarily to influence public perceptions or the policy agenda, but rather to reclaim and reinforce their own identity and connection to place.