You can’t eat art! But can arts-based research challenge neighbourhood stigma?

Not another community art project

As the COVID-19 global epidemic unfolds, it is impossible to predict its political, economic and social impact. At some point there will be an urgent need not only to consider its ramifications but also work towards rebuilding sociality in communities once restrictions are rescinded. While this paper offers critical reflections on how community-based arts practices were adapted to explore everyday life in marginalised neighbourhoods, its broader interest lies with the imaginative possibilities, limitations and risks of using art to explore complex social issues. We discuss a project that follows a long history of community-based artistic practice that combines creative and participatory approaches to draw attention to processes generating injustice and inequality (De Bruyne and Gielen, 2013; Dewhurst, 2010; Musher, 2015). Despite these worthy objectives, community-based art can be enacted for different purposes. For instance, Musher (2015) discusses how US President Roosevelt’s New Deal provided unprecedented funding for public art that variously aimed to promote civic and democratic engagement, quell working-class discontent, politicise inequalities and fortify the authority of the state in a time of crisis.

The New Deal and the ‘Proletarian Art’ movements of the 1920s and 1930s have been identified as the first of three surges of interest among western artists in promoting community arts for social change (De Bruyne and Gielen, 2013: 2–3). The other two are the countercultural art of the 1960s and 1970s and the ‘socially engaged’ art movement that emerged in the late 1990s and remains prominent. Notable within this latest incarnation is strong interest in community art as a catalyst for achieving social policy objectives targeting deprived communities (Belfiore, 2002; De Bruyne and Gielen, 2013). This potential for art is linked to the influence of neoliberal modes of government and the ways that strategies to ameliorate socioeconomic inequalities attend to local community capacities rather than targeting systematic factors (Amin, 2005; Gough, 2002). Put to task in these ways, there are concerns that community-based art becomes an alternative form of social intervention – a ‘cheaper form of social work’ (De Bruyne and Gielen, 2013: 2–3) – and even a form of ‘social engineering’ (Bishop, 2012: 5) with normative agendas aiming to patch up the damage being wrought through the impacts of deindustrialisation and contracting welfare states (see also Belfiore, 2002; Merli, 2002). This instrumentalisation of community arts has engendered understandable cynicism towards its value among artists and also by some of those who are prescribed art as a palliative for the disadvantages they are experiencing. After all, you can’t eat art.

Wary of depoliticising issues of inequality by claiming a socially transformative potential for art, we explored the potential of community-based art to challenge long-standing problems of territorial stigma that attaches to many low-income neighbourhoods, and their populations, in cities across the world (Atkinson and Jacobs, 2010; Brattbarkk and Hansen, 2004; Reutter et al., 2011; Thomas, 2016; Tyler, 2006, 2015; Wacquant, 2008; Warr, 2005). Stigma causes afflicted neighbourhoods to be viewed in misleading ways because, as Loïc Wacquant (1999: 1644) warns, ‘the discourses of demonization that have mushroomed about [low-income neighbourhoods] often have only tenuous connections to the reality of everyday life’. Responding to these distorting effects of territorial stigma, we experimented with strategies of arts-based research (ABR) – which broadly refers to practice-led investigations of artistic strategies (Knowles and Cole, 2008) – to stimulate local inquiries that might generate faithful and compelling portrayals of neighbourhoods that stemmed from residents’ actual experience.

This approach to ABR evolved through a series of collaborations involving sociologists and artists. In this paper, we discuss artist-residency projects that focused on two prominently stigmatised neighbourhoods in Melbourne and Hobart, Australia. We explain how the potential of ABR was developed to involve resident-participants in phenomenological explorations of familiar environments. Informed by sociological insights, and the possibilities of socially engaged arts-based practices, artistic tactics were used to activate sensory insights and to capture these explorations. It was envisaged that aesthetic outcomes might be used as provocations for challenging stigmatising assumptions among wider communities.

The remainder of the paper has four parts. First, we explain how our experiments in using art to challenge stigma sought to activate and portray phenomenological experiences of place. Next, we provide a fuller exposition of the theoretical and empirical insights that informed the project’s aims and methods. In part three, we describe the artistic and dialogic tactics that were devised for phenomenological explorations of place, and how these were blended with ethnographic and interview methods. Part four collates some of the insights from interviews with resident-participants reflecting on their involvement in the arts-based activities. In concluding remarks, we consider participants’ accounts and the artefacts they created and ask whether they shed new light on the capacity of art-based methods to augment accounts of neighbourhood that might unsettle the glib stereotypes that are projected onto low-income populations. Nonetheless, art alone remains limited in transforming the intersecting conditions of social, economic and cultural marginalisation that sustains territorial stigma.

Displacing stigma through art

It is not a novel idea to use art to challenge territorial stigma. There are examples of both researcher-led (Bridger et al., 2017; Byrne et al., 2016; Foster, 2007; Jones et al., 2013) and artist-led community-based projects. In Australia, examples of the latter include the Northcott Narratives project led by the community arts organisation Big hART (Wright and Palmer, 2009), and projects curated by the Information + Cultural Exchange (ICE) arts organisation in Western Sydney (Ho, 2012). Examples internationally include the long-running Cascoland initiative in Amsterdam (Knoester et al., 2014) and Creative Barking & Dagenham project in London (O’Connor, 2015). These initiatives grapple with the complex tasks of developing artistic collaborations with community partners who may have limited opportunities for learning and refining artistic principles and techniques. Critically, resident-participants are asked to reflect on problems of stigma while caught up in its psycho-social effects of ‘living inferiority’ (Charlesworth et al., 2004; Wacquant, 2008). These include internalising demeaning stereotypes in ways that can influence subjective interpretations of personal and local situations (Wacquant, 2008). These effects have been observed in our own research focusing on low-income neighbourhoods (Jacobs and Flanagan, 2013; Warr, 2005), yet the implications of the absorbed effects of stigma in generating artistic impressions (and research accounts) are rarely considered.

These issues – artistic inexperience and the distorting perceptual effects of internalised stigma – can limit the expressive and political potential of arts-based strategies. Resident-artists can struggle to interrogate taken-for-granted assumptions and imagine and communicate other kinds of social and cultural presence. This leaves them relying on obvious tactics of substituting derogatory descriptions with positive depictions. While this has some value, it can paper over the impacts of inequalities in people’s everyday lives and risks sentimentalising situations of poverty and marginalisation. Rather, cultivating reflexive processes of meaning-making and approaches to artistic practice might assist resident-artists to navigate through stigmatising assumptions. We explored if this potential could be facilitated through an approach to art-making that draws on, and gives value to, resident-artists’ phenomenological site-specific knowledge (Malpas and Jacobs, 2016; Taylor and Warr, 2018).

Aims of cultivating a phenomenological knowledge that (re)interprets and (re)presents everyday experience evoked John Dewey’s (1934) notion of ‘art as experience’. Dewey, whose work is being revisited in contemporary scholarship (Hickman et al., 2011), argued that art as experience can be socially transformative by expanding the ambit of social experiences that are explored and represented as ‘art’. It involves cultivating a deliberative awareness that transmutes everyday experience ‘with a view to the production of something visible, audible, or tangible’ (p. 207). Since then, the possibilities of art focusing on everyday experience have been given new impetus through a ‘social turn’, or a ‘return to [the] social’, among artists (Bishop, 2012: 3, emphasis in the original). This social turn reimagined and revalued the possibilities of community-based art in relation to studio-based art and practice and encouraged artists’ interest in issues that overlap with those that occupy many sociologists. Inspired by the potential of ‘art as experience’, our approach to ABR blended sociological concerns with socially engaged practices that emphasised creative and dialogic tactics, provocations and immersive experiences. Applying these ideas, we collaborated with artist-residents to explore and re-present familiar neighbourhoods in fresh ways.

The socio-political implications of these experiments with community-based arts practice are significant because of the ways that the stigma of poverty contributes to negative social recognition of residents of low-income neighbourhoods. Stigma is grounded in representational and communicative practices that deny affected groups being accorded social dignity. A lack of dignity evokes persistent ideas of the undeserving poor with effects of eroding public sympathy and undermining the legitimacy of claims for access to socioeconomic resources via the redistributive strategies of social welfare systems. These issues present significant political barriers in garnering public and political support for redressing socio-economic inequalities.

(Mis)representing neighbourhoods

Stigma heightens the vulnerability of low-income neighbourhoods, and their residents, to be perceived as distinct from a social mainstream (Crossley, 2017), and there is growing evidence that it contributes to place-based health and social outcomes (Inglis et al., 2019; Kelaher et al., 2010; Thomas, 2016). The journalist, Fatima Measham, lives near the site of one of the artist-residency projects we discuss, and draws on her experience to explain how territorial stigma inhibits potential for the wider community to acknowledge inequalities, empathise with the situations of residents and diminishes political will to address injustice:

The problem is that we do not only expose our sense of postcode superiority when we use places as shorthand for certain types of people. We also abdicate responsibility. Reducing people to the characteristics of their neighbourhood gives us permission to do nothing about the things that make it problematic. [. . .] We freely mock these places instead of wondering why they have lower rates of educational achievement and higher rates of domestic violence, unemployment, juvenile delinquency, mental illness and third-generation poverty. Such failures of insight affect the lives of real people. (Measham, 2014)

These material effects of stigma are interlaced with symbolic effects that include ‘remov[ing] the right or ability of [afflicted groups] to name and define themselves’ (Crossley, 2017: 2). Compounding these issues is that the wider community acquires their understanding of situations of poverty and marginalisation largely from second-hand sources rather than through everyday contact with those affected. The media (poverty news), forms of cultural production, such as television, films and novels (poverty stories) and research (poverty knowledge) have become hegemonic sources of information (Peel, 2003). These forms of account-making each have their own distorting effects that serve to infer radical differences between those living in low-income neighbourhoods and a presumed social mainstream. For instance, in the news media, there are tendencies for poverty news to focus on extreme examples (Mooney, 2009) and embellish accounts with images of squalor, misery and despair, either for dramatic effect or to provoke public concern (McKendrick et al., 2008). In poverty stories, portrayals of working-class lives are rare and seldom offer any kind of ‘cultural affirmation’ or exploration of the complexity of this social positioning (Haylett, 2000: 70). More recently, the popularity of reality television, including programs focusing on low-income neighbourhoods such as Struggle Street in Australia and Benefits Street in the United Kingdom, present highly editorialised content that invites disapproval and condemnation among audiences (Barton and Davis, 2018; Jensen, 2014).

Despite a long history of participatory and emancipatory research methodologies, even poverty knowledge generated through research is frequently informed by deficit models and imperatives to ‘perform poverty’ by emphasising problems – at the expense of resilience – in order to garner public attention and resources (Peel, 2003: 25). These consistently negative portrayals of low-income neighbourhoods, including through research, can have ‘reality effects’ that ‘contribute to creating the reality [they] claim to describe’ (Champagne, 1999: 56; Peel, 2003). ‘Reality effects’ are triggered when audiences respond to research findings in ways that exacerbate situations of socio-economic disadvantage (such as avoiding social contact with people living in particular neighbourhoods). Poverty knowledge can also display the effects of internalised stigma through the ways in which participants might explain their situations to researchers (Wacquant, 2008). These are evident when research participants offer self-incriminating explanations of poverty (for example, see Shildrick and MacDonald, 2013) or use stigmatising tropes to describe their neighbourhoods and neighbours (Kelaher et al., 2010; Warr, 2005). An example of this is resident-informants describing their neighbourhoods as ‘the Bronx’, whether they live in a French banlieue: ‘C’est le Bronx’ (Wacquant, 2008: 170); or a provincial suburb in Australia, ‘This is the Bronx (. . .) this is the ghetto’ (Warr, 2005: 299). While this type of account-making partly reflects the pervasiveness of North American culture, it also serves as examples of how research data can display the internalised effects of stigma. Using stigmatising stereotypes to describe lifeworlds substitutes for deeper reflection on such experiences and stands in for the complex realities of diverse situations. Residents’ struggles to express their experiences of place outside of the stigmatising discourses attached to low-income neighbourhoods have been evident to us through our long-time involvement in research focusing on these settings (Jacobs and Flanagan, 2013; Warr, 2005, 2007).

The significance of processes of social recognition is helpful for grasping the subjective and symbolic effects of stigma. In a collection of dialogic essays, Fraser and Honneth elucidate their shared and diverging understanding of how social justice claims are roped to issues of social recognition. In pluralised societies, positive social recognition is grounded in an acceptance of, and respect for, the diversity of humanity. This requires acknowledging and according social respect and dignity to identity formations arising through shared experiences of class, ethnicity, gender, religious beliefs, sexuality and others. Promoting socially just outcomes requires strategies of redistribution; however, the legitimacy of claims for redistribution is contingent on the ways in which social identities are recognised. Claims for social recognition and claims for redistribution are viewed by some as politically antithetical – identity politics versus class politics – but Fraser argues that economic structures and the status order are interconnected and interleaving. This means injustice is a ‘compound of status and class’ (p. 22), and redressing inequalities requires meshing concomitant strategies focusing on recognition and redistribution. Honneth differs in conceiving positive social recognition as a fundamental precondition in struggles for redistribution because the denial of social respect and dignity rationalises ‘distributional injustices’ and undermines the credence of demands for redistribution (p. 114).

Although their theoretical divergence remains unresolved, they each highlight issues of social recognition. For Fraser social recognition is ‘rooted in social patterns of representation, interpretation, and communication’ and addressing injustices must include strategies of ‘cultural and symbolic change’ (p. 13). Honneth contends that negative social recognition manifests as social disrespect. This disrespect is sensed in an inarticulable substratum of perception and experience – ‘the phenomenology of experiences of social injustice’ (pp. 114–134). These experiences of injustice are unlikely to surface as political projects to be contested in the public realm if they involve deeply personal, emotional reactions to injustices that cannot be readily reformulated as claims for particular kinds of social or cultural recognition. For Honneth, ‘a theory of recognition locates the core of all experiences of injustice in the withdrawal of social recognition, in the phenomena of humiliation and disrespect’ (p. 134), a tenuous, if not impossible, basis for social justice claims.

These related issues – the harms of negative social recognition, the phenomenology of stigma and ways in which research is implicated in these processes – pushed us to explore new approaches for research focussing on low-income neighbourhoods. We envisaged using creative practices and dialogical strategies that could cultivate a deliberative awareness of the everyday and contribute to a situational knowledge. Such explorations might facilitate processes of account-making of personal and local situations that transcend the tacit effects of stigma. Arts-based practices would generate insights in the form of images, words and other artefacts describing and re-presenting neighbourhoods. As sociological research we might gain thoughtful and textured insights into everyday life, while artefacts could be used to create artistic works to share these insights with local and wider audiences.

Experiments in blending art and sociology

This is a long and scattered history of using art for sociological inquiry. Renowned examples include collaborations between Bruno Latour and the artist, Peter Weibel – Making Things Public (2005), Iconoclash (2002) and Reset Modernity! (2016) – which used art to provoke ‘thought experiments that aimed to extend, reformulate and re-present theoretical projects for diverse audiences’ (Latour and Sanchez-Criado, 2007; Weibel and Latour, 2007). Puwar and Sharma’s (2012: 40) concept of ‘curated sociology’ uses art to move sociological questions into ‘different fields of creative practice’ and bring ‘artists, places and publics together’. Across a series of projects, we have been experimenting with the potential of art to investigate and communicate problems of territorial stigma. The Stigma Research Laboratory (Hobart, 2009) and Because I’m Lucky (Melbourne, 2010) involved commissioning artists and staging exhibitions of work exploring themes of place stigma (Cotterell et al., 2009). These initiatives offered provocative explorations of socio-spatial identity and differentiation. Stationed in art galleries and refracted through artists’ perceptions of issues of place stigma, however, they risked replicating troubling forms of cultural exclusion (Holden, 2008). A subsequent project centred on a suburban public housing estate and experimented with blending practices of socially engaged and site-specific art (Kwon, 2002), with community cultural development to engage residents in art-making and research-related activities exploring themes of place, home, identity and belonging (Oliver et al., 2011).

Insights from these initiatives informed the aims and methods for the two artist-residency projects that are our focus here. These included the challenges of engaging residents in an(other) art project, economic barriers to participation, lack of social and artistic confidence and perceptions that art had little relevance to their lives. The projects, collectively referred to as the Art and About projects, were conducted in prominently and emblematically stigmatised neighbourhoods in outer suburban Melbourne and Hobart (Australia). Heathdale is a former public housing estate locally referred to as ‘Birdsville’ or ‘the birdcage’ because its streets are named after birds. This has unintended effects of residents being socially classified simply by giving their address. Over the years, the neighbourhood had a number of name changes in unsuccessful efforts to shed its stigma. Moonah is situated in an area of Hobart that was referred to by inner-city residents as ‘beyond the flannelette curtain [where] all the bogans live’. ‘Bogan’ is a widely used and disparaging term for white working-class Australians who are frequently stereotyped wearing flannelette shirts (Nichols, 2011).

The projects comprised four parts: an initial period of local induction where the artist (GT) conducted small-scale demonstration projects with local partners; an excursion to a contemporary art gallery; a six-week workshop program; an exhibition event; and conducting semi-structured interviews with artist-residents at the conclusion of the projects. The interviews explored their perceptions of neighbourhood, awareness of stigma and reflections on the activities they had been involved in.

The demonstration projects involved collaborations with community groups. As outsiders to the neighbourhoods, this phase offered a period of local induction for the artist and researchers. It suggested how art can be responsive to local issues, while building interest in the keynote Art and About projects. The excursions were fully funded and invitations were extended to residents expressing interest in being involved in the workshops. They aimed to acquaint potential artist-residents with art venues and diverse forms of artistic practice and arouse artistic curiosity and enjoyment of art. They proved popular in offering many residents a rare opportunity to visit the city and a safe way of exploring the unfamiliar environs of galleries. These forays out of the neighbourhood even sought to provoke mild experiences of social dislocation that, recalling Dewey (1934), might be a prelude to stimulating deliberate awareness of familiar experience. In publicising the excursions and workshops, we emphasised opportunities to engage with contemporary arts practice.

Across the two sites around 40 resident-participants, men and women from a range of age groups and household situations were regularly involved in the programme of workshops. Their circumstances reflected the diversifying circumstances of households in low-income neighbourhoods that are a mixture of long-term residents and newer residents seeking affordable housing. In both sites, some participants with limited English were involved with the assistance of interpreters. Notably, most participants sustained their involvement in the workshops and exhibition-related activities. The workshops combined art-based activities, local walking tours and guest speakers (for example, a local Indigenous artist and an amateur historian). These discussions focused on a range of topics, including arts practices and neighbourhood stigma, presenting participant-artists with new ideas and encouraging dialogic exchange.

The walking tours were central to our method for combining art and research. The possibilities of walking as a creative practice and for social inquiry have been explored by artists and researchers, including those concerned with the politics of visibility (Kuntz and Presnall, 2012; Pinder, 2011). Offering multi-modal experiences – visual, aural, sensual and social (O’Neill et al., 2018) – walking is valued by ethnographers seeking to understand place as a multisensorial experience (Pink, 2009). For resident-participants as lay investigators who have deep familiarity with their neighbourhoods, this potential of walking can require some priming. Following Mannay (2010), who suggests how visual research methods can be used to render the familiar ‘strange’ so it can be perceived from new angles, the walks incorporated tactics for exploring connections between self and place. These included bringing objects from home that somehow represented or expressed aspects of identity, or using artefacts created in the workshops (such as decorated second-hand picture frames). Objects were taken along on the walks offering scope for performative experimentation and interactions with the environments we traversed.

The walking activities also adapted ‘psychogeographical’ strategies associated with the Situationists and aimed to heighten awareness of sensory and emotional responses to familiar urban spaces. A key Situationist tactic was the ‘dérive’, described by Guy Debord (1958) as ‘. . . a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances’ combined with ‘playful-constructive behaviour’. On our dérives participants were encouraged to use digital cameras to experiment with photographing scenes and objects they were visually or emotionally drawn to, and play with ways of symbolically enacting their presence in the landscape as shadows, footprints and reflections (see Figures 1 and 2). Participants were invited to imagine recent and distant histories and share personal memories or associations with place. Encountering neighbourhoods in these proximal and layered ways created a multiplicity of impressions that defied simplification. Imitating artist Richard Long’s Textworks (see http://richardlong.org/textworks.html), sensory recollections were sometimes captured as lists and arrangements of words and short phrases.

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Figure 1.

A dérive activity in one of the project sites (researcher generated image).

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Figure 2.

Placing objects in the environment, participant-generated images.

Using these varied tactics, the walking tours sensitised participants to familiar environments, stimulated aesthetic imaginations and generated a plethora of artefacts as photographs, text works and conceptual craft. They also emulated ‘walking’ or ‘go-along’ interview methods for research. Such methods are noted for generating phenomenological insights into individuals’ engagement and interaction with socio-spatial environments’ (Kusenbach, 2003). Walking through familiar environments presents opportunities for three-way conversations between ‘interviewee, interviewer and locality’ (Hall, 2009: 582), and sharing observations and conversations that provide description and explanation (Flick et al., 2019: 802). Enriched by the perceptual and expressive potential of walking methods to expand processes of sense-making and activate ‘felt emplacements’ and a ‘metaphorical wandering of thought’ (Kuntz and Presnall, 2012: 737–738), participants offered commentaries and reflections that were prompted by sights and sounds we encountered as we walked together. In addition, the walking had potential for local socially unifying effects across age and cultural differences in presenting opportunities for artist-participants, hitherto unknown to one another, to share their lived knowledge of the neighbourhoods. In observing and recollecting these conversations in fieldwork journals, we reflected on participants’ responses and the interactions between the elements that were brought together in the activities, rather than the content of the interactions.

Blending art and research activities, some brief remarks on the ethical issues associated with this approach to ABR are warranted. These include tensions between the ethical obligations of researchers and the ‘aesthetic alibi’ of art that grants protection to be socially provocative in ways that can elicit unease among participants/audiences (Bolt, 2015). These were managed by separating out artistic and research components, and conducting the project primarily as a community-based arts project. Ethical approval was obtained to analyse artefacts, interview data and ethnographic observations. This separation allowed participants to experience moments of shock when viewing some of the art work in the galleries we visited (including Hobart’s Museum of New and Old Art) or frustration in rendering artistic ideas into material form.

When pursuing artistic activities, however, research activities required attending to contingent ethical issues of anonymity, consent, authorship and ownership and ‘fuzzy boundaries’ that are associated with ABR (Waycott et al., 2015). The sites were not anonymised because this was unfeasible due to our extended involvement with the neighbourhoods and clashed with aims of generating representations that could challenge place-based stereotypes. While interview data are anonymised, it was possible some participants and key informants may be recognised. These risks were minimised through cautious description and use of quotes when reporting findings. Protocols were developed to guide photography activities and participants were asked to avoid creating images that would clearly identify individuals. These ethical considerations influenced some creative conceptual processes. For example, asking participants to resist the familiar visual device of the ‘selfie’ pushed us to experiment with ways of depicting presence with/in the local terrain as shadows, reflections and other traces of the self. Consent was obtained across stages of the projects. Participant-artists kept originals or received copies of artefacts they generated and groups had collective ownership of collaborative artworks.

The blurring of purpose and roles when there are multiple aims – artistic, knowledge-generation and advocacy – and participants, researchers and artists work together over extended periods of time required frequent checking in to ensure participants understood the shifting aims of varied activities. Given the intensive time we had spent together, a staged exit from the field was critical. This was supported by having celebratory exhibitions events and establishing local Facebook groups that enabled art-related information-sharing beyond the life of the projects.

Giving presence through art

Across the workshops, streams of practice – combining sensory and conceptual explorations – generated hybrid forms of ‘da(r)ta’ (Renold, 2017) that were incorporated into assemblages for exhibition. The exhibitions presented opportunities for others (locals and outsiders) to encounter, interact with and reflect on the artwork. Across the sites, there were differing capacities for participants to lead this phase of the projects. In one site, some participants collaborated with the artist to produce a visual and sound-based work entitled Curtain Call (see Figure 3), a riposte to the ‘flannelette curtain’. The work is a formatted design of photographic images laser printed on fabric and accompanied by a soundscape of words, recorded in unison, which was generated following a walking activity. It expresses levels of artistic ambition and confidence within the group and offers a striking and complex rendition of neighbourhood scenes that intermingles the picturesque, mundane, blemished and whimsical. Curtain Call was exhibited at a local community arts centre and displayed at academic conferences. In the other site the artist provided more conceptual scaffolding in curating work for the exhibition, New Frames, featuring decorated picture frames, textworks and photographs, which was staged at a local community centre. Works from each site were curated for an exhibition event at a gallery at the University of Melbourne (Not THAT Place: art versus stigma, 2016).

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Figure 3.

(A) Curtain Call (laser printed photographic images on a 5×2 metre flag); photo by G. Taylor; (B) Participant-generated photograph included in the Not THAT Place exhibition; (C) text and artwork included in the Not THAT Place exhibition.

While stigmatising stereotypes reiterate distal and extreme impressions that imply radical discontinuity with other neighbourhoods (Collins, 2004: 69–80), the exhibitions presented artwork that offered proximate and multifaceted representations of place that juxtaposed impressions and images of everyday suburban life. The local effects of socio-economic disadvantage were not overlooked as scenes of dilapidation were positioned alongside positive images of neighbourhood life, including depictions of sociability and natural beauty in the environment. This diversity expanded the frames through which the neighbourhoods can be viewed and interpreted. Among local audiences, the work evoked responses of recognition, surprise and affection: ‘Is that here? It looks really beautiful!’ (from fieldnotes). Among wider audiences the work presented opportunities for recognising common experiences and disrupting the communicative practices that Fraser (2003) argues are key to processes of social recognition. Nonetheless it was difficult to engage wider audiences with the artistic work. This requires time to identify opportunities for showcasing the work and piquing the interest of galleries and curators who might hold reservations towards the artistic integrity of community arts practice, particularly when generated as part of a research project (see Taylor and Warr, 2018: 13–14; Hawkins, 2012).

Using our senses: resident-participants’ perspectives

Participants’ reflections on their involvement in art-making offer a critical perspective on how the projects achieved aims of transcending the absorbed effects of stigma. Semi-structured interviews explored whether the artistic tactics had prompted artist-residents to perceive, and represent, neighbourhoods in new ways. This was an ambitious objective because we couldn’t ask participants directly about this because it risked eliciting polite agreement. Rather, it required participants offering accounts in which they expressed some self-awareness of changes that were linked to their involvement in art-making. This is conceptualised as ‘participant-centred reflexivity’, a speaking position that is rarely considered in methodological discussions (Riach, 2009). Indeed, Riach suggests that asking (or awaiting) research subjects to ‘interrogate their own way of understanding of [their] world [. . .] requires some form of epistemological interruption’ (Riach 2009: 360). Nonetheless, the accounts of some participant-artists inferred such interruptions.

Sixteen participants and six community-based workers agreed to be interviewed at the conclusion of their involvement in the projects and these were recorded and transcribed. One interview was conducted with two participant-artists using an interpreter and recorded in hand-written notes. Six men were involved in the art-making, but only one agreed to be interviewed. A thematic analysis approach was used to explore participant-artists’ motivations in getting involved in, and their experiences of, the art-making activities. It is notable that most participants reporting getting involved in art-making because they were interested in art but had few opportunities to pursue such activities. Some participants were involved in craft-making (such as woodwork and photography) as creative outlets. A few participants had previously been involved in artistic practices and reported these opportunities dwindling since moving to their current neighbourhood. In the following discussion, we focus on accounts where participants described some form of perceptual or interpretive interruption through their involvement in art-making (nb: pseudonyms are used to refer to participants and (. . .) shows where quotes have been edited for succinctness).

Heather, in her early 1980s and not long widowed, was a carer for her adult son. She had lived in her neighbourhood for over 30 years and although not concerned about stigma, she was troubled by perceptions of declining neighbourhood safety, which she attributed to increasing drug use. Curiosity towards contemporary art had motivated her to come along to the workshops:

I’ve never look[ed] at contemporary art and I didn’t know what to expect but it was an eye opener to me (. . .) I kept coming back because I was sort of enjoying what we were doing (. . .) it was just totally different to what I expected.

She enjoyed the creative activities: ‘When you go around taking photographs and you see things in a different way (. . .) it really opened my eyes’. This inspired her to go online to explore the work of contemporary artists where she became fascinated with the work of Serbian artist, Marina Abramović. Heather described how her involvement in the Art and About activities altered the ways she conceived of her surroundings:

You walk along every day and it’s like you’re in a tunnel. You see people, you see shops (. . .) I mean, I walk the dog every day, and there was a lot more I saw on the walks we did just staring at different things (. . .) I was looking at some grass there and somebody had taken the time to stop and weed the grass, and they’d weeded the long stems of grass, and I wouldn’t have noticed that because I wasn’t looking. I was looking through somebody else’s eyes in a sense. It could give you the stir to do things, you know, a little bit differently. (emphasis added)

Descriptions of seeing things as if through someone else’s eyes is an example of how reflexive self-positioning can manifest in interview accounts (Riach, 2009; see also, Skeggs, 2004).

Another participant, Madelyn, a young woman who had lived in her neighbourhood all her life, described how her involvement activated a sensory engagement with the neighbourhood:

When we went on the walk and we had to write down words that were associated with what you saw and what you heard – use all your senses – it makes you more aware. If I go on a walk now, and I stand on a leaf, I hear a crunch and I notice it. I think if I had to write it down, that’s what I’d write.

Edith told us that that when she moved to her neighbourhood her grand-daughter had objected, telling her ‘It’s a bit scummy, Nan!’ She recounted a dérive where the group had taken a short bus ride and then:

We walked down [through the] little park and went into the shopping centre. I loved that day! I wrote down a whole lot of words. One day, I’ll do something with that (. . .) I thought that would make a nice piece of rap or a poem or something.

The account of another participant, Rebecca, a full-time carer for her family, is noteworthy because she had previously experimented with using art to explore personal responses to place-based stigma she’d experienced. She recalled feeling dissatisfied, and even frustrated, with the results:

I didn’t know how you actually show that where you live doesn’t affect what your interests are. It doesn’t affect what you read, or look at or listen to, or what things you might do.

Her artistic experimentation involved photographing a bonfire of discarded flannelette shirts – a literal rendering, and repudiation, of the bogan stereotype. Following her involvement in creating Curtain Call she mused:

The curtain looks great. I love the fact, like someone else said, I expected a flannelette curtain. I think it’s great because it shows our area and it makes it look interesting and a bit vibrant. It doesn’t mention flannelette at all, which is good. It doesn’t say, ‘this is our stereotype and here we are’. We can present our place well.

Rebecca came to recognise the limitations of challenging stereotypes by inverting available tropes. These tactics are limited to reiterating or parodying problematic meanings and are unable to offer alternative imageries and interpretative possibilities.

Among participants with immigrant backgrounds, the creative activities were sufficiently versatile to be inclusive of those with varying proficiency in English and emergent relationships with place. These participant-artists tended to be less concerned about stigma; involvement in the art-making projects offered ways of getting to know the neighbourhoods and others who lived there. Thiri, who had lived most of her life in a Burmese refugee camp, practised craft-making but was unfamiliar with the concept of ‘art’, which she had only recently encountered observing her children at kindergarten. Reflecting on her involvement she explained:

I got more confident walking on the street with the group. As we are walking I’m thinking I’ve been here two years but I don’t know [the neighbourhood] that well.

Following a walking activity through local wetlands, Thiri generated a text work that suggested poetically how her perceptions of the neighbourhood were filtered through memories of other places and homelands:

I saw everything green.

The sky attracts my thoughts.

Same but different.

These selective insights, together with our observations of participants’ engagement with creative activities, suggest that the art-making sensitised participants to commonplace, and even mundane, experiences of place, which presented opportunities for creative and sensory place-based investigations. These investigations enabled participants to produce novel and complex representations of place. Participant-artists reported a sense of satisfaction with the artwork they collectively generated and felt it conveyed authentic impressions of their neighbourhoods.

Art versus stigma

Insights from the projects suggested that the art-based tactics enabled participant-artists to conduct phenomenological explorations across the familiar spaces of their neighbourhoods and some came to experience them as if they were ‘looking through somebody else’s eyes’. Guided by the artist, the artefacts were incorporated into art-based assemblages. These portrayed a multiplicity of identities, experiences and local observations that evoked the complex social fabric of the neighbourhoods and gave residents voice and visibility as artist-residents. In foregrounding the notion of ‘place’ rather than ‘community’, participants had opportunities to explore and represent experiences of co-presence. We observed local audiences being surprised and delighted when recognisable scenes were rendered in unexpected ways suggesting that the artistic outcomes resonated as depictions of familiar vistas. The artist’s experience in community cultural development was critical in designing project components, and her ability to support and develop the varied artistic capacities of participants helped sustain their involvement over an extended period of time.

These outcomes suggest that blending socially engaged art practices and participatory research methods offers promising potential for navigating the internalised effects of stigma in processes of meaning-making and generating nuanced insights. For the art historian Grant Kester, this capacity is linked to the ways that socially engaged arts practice combines creative practice, dialogical strategies and situational knowledge to enable issues to be contemplated from different angles: ‘inside and outside, engagement and observation, immersion and reflective distance’ (2011: 90). Critically, this kind of agile reflexivity chimes with Mills’ (1959, 2000: 143) concept of a sociological imagination, suggesting that arts-based tactics might be useful for actualising this potential in processes of social research. Other studies have noted how ABR methods facilitate a reflexive positioning in research focussing on varied issues including the stigma associated with sex work (Capous Desyllas, 2013), processes of artistic creativity (Blumenfeld-Jones, 2016) and experiences of gender injustice (Renold, 2017).

While outcomes from the projects achieved our methodological aims, the challenges of generating change through localised and place-based projects remain difficult to resolve. Our interventions risk being judged tokenistic and, given the time and depth of involvement among the artist-participants, the outcomes of art-making and the art works they co-created are uncertain. This uncertainty may be unavoidable, but such methods are not without potential. Reflecting on the nebulous outcomes of her long-term involvement in a community-based art project in an impoverished region of the United States, artist Suzanne Lacy (2010) concedes that community-based artistic practice is invariably incomplete, relational and unfolding. She noted, however, the potency of small shifts and disruptions. The artistic experiments described here are similarly open-ended.

In closing, we insist that ‘you can’t eat art’, understanding that place-based and poverty stigma thrives amidst entrenched and intersecting conditions of social, economic and cultural marginalisation. The imaginative resources of art may not be able to transform the material experiences of poverty – and reputations are indeed sticky – but using ABR to depict low-income neighbourhoods in nuanced and inclusive ways might begin to challenge distorting stereotypes and lessen harmful reality effects. Challenging territorial and poverty stigma must be a multi-faceted and long-term project, however, shifting the ways in which low-income neighbourhoods are socially recognised is a significant intervention point (Jacobs and Flanagan, 2013). Critically, this potential depends on expanding opportunities for people experiencing socio-cultural marginalisation to be actively involved in co-creating stories, news and research focusing on their situations. Community-based arts practice is likely to have many applications.