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‘Go home, get a job, and pay some taxes to replace a bit of what you’ve wasted’: stigma power and solidarity in response to anti-open-cast mining activism in the coalfields of rural County Durham, UK
journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-10, 02:35 authored by Andrea BrockAndrea Brock, Carol Stephenson, Nathan Stephens-Griffin, Tanya WyattThis article explores the nexus of stigmatisation and environmental activism in the Campaign to Protect Pont Valley against open-cast mining in the northeast of England. Drawing on Imogen Tyler’s work, our analysis examines stigma power as embedded in wider efforts to police and repress environmental dissent and defend core neoliberal values. Examination of qualitative interviews with campaigners, drive-past insults shouted at activists, online police statements and public responses, and online trolling of activists by mining employees and the wider public reveals stigmatisation to be a process of power, informed by neoliberal ideologies (of the threat and danger of worklessness), and reproduced through neoliberal power structures (the state, corporate power, and popular culture), shaped by the insecurities that are specific to social and political contexts. We show how the state mobilises stigma through ideologies associated with austerity and the hostile environment to delegitimate activism through association with worklessness/idleness and the inaccurate representation of activists as part of broader processes of criminalisation, policing, and management of protest. In an area renowned for its work ethic and high levels of unemployment, the work of environmental activists is dismissed as illegitimate, drawing on tropes associated with the disciplining of the so-called deviant working classes. The historical importance of coal and activism in the defence of the ‘mining way of life’ feeds into dominant narratives associated with work and individualism. Pride associated with coal mining is reconfigured and forms the basis of insults against those (working class and otherwise) who are recast as ‘outsiders’, ‘wasting time and money’ in resisting environmental destruction. Finally, we examine how activists were able to largely deflect stigmatisation through collective engagement, solidarity, and political analysis of the process they were subject to.
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Publication status
- Published
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- Published version
Journal
Sociological Research OnlineISSN
1360-7804Publisher
SAGE PublicationsExternal DOI
Page range
1-22Department affiliated with
- International Relations Publications
Full text available
- Yes
Peer reviewed?
- Yes
Legacy Posted Date
2022-02-09First Open Access (FOA) Date
2022-02-09First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date
2022-02-09Usage metrics
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