Nancy Evans
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nancycevans.bsky.social
Nancy Evans
@nancycevans.bsky.social
170 followers 290 following 2 posts
Sociologist. Senior lecturer & course leader at Uni of Chester. Part of @socjustice-uoc.bsky.social. Qualitative & participatory research. Poverty, social (in)security, stigma, & social harm. Navigating academia & life with ADHD.
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nancycevans.bsky.social
Conference lanyard Abstract of Paper Stigma functions as a divisive mechanism to craft and augment inequalities in power through driving support for increasingly punitive social policies, weakening social solidarity and eroding the potential for collective resistance. In liberal welfare regime types such as the UK, welfare support is residualised and deeply intertwined with stigma. Under such conditions, examining how individuals and communities navigate and challenge these dynamics is important. This paper draws on PhD research – a qualitative project with women claiming social security benefits in the UK – to contribute to understandings of how stigma, as an assault on collective, class-based solidarities, is experienced, resisted and responded to. On the one hand, participants rejected individualising, blaming narratives, and indicated the potential of community solidarity and cohesion in challenging stigma. Nonetheless, the findings also revealed a contradictory tendency towards the partial acceptance and internalisation of dominant stigmatising ideas and, connected to this, the defensive practice of ‘othering’ fellow claimants, reflecting the divisive and corrosive power of stigma in weakening social solidarity and limiting the complete rejection or disavowal of stigmatising discourses. By interrogating the intersection of stigma and the structural erosion of welfare support and drawing on empirical research findings, this paper contributes to critical debates on social policy, offering insights into how neoliberal frameworks exacerbate social fragmentation and how alternative forms of solidarity might emerge in response.
July 11, 2025 at 8:05 AM