Introduction

The ‘insider’ views of Southmead that are examined in this chapter set themselves up as different to official and media representations. The insider approach is that these outsider representations are generated from a position similar to the master's standpoint as described by Sandra Harding:

In place of this outside knowledge, the knowledge of subordinate, inside groups is privileged in terms of understanding. It is claimed as clearer and less distorted than the knowledge, gained through secondary experience, of those who occupy dominating positions in social life. That people within a situation know most about it is a widespread, if contestable, argument, common within Southmead. One of the participants wrote of the community play, which was based on local experience:

‘Insider’ knowledge claims are based on a primary concrete experience of the situation, and it is this experience that provides their credibility.

Vincent Berdoulay, a French language geographer, writes that ‘our scientific understanding of it [place] cannot be artificially separated from people's account of their place’; in fact, ‘a place becomes explicitly into being in the discourse of its inhabitants’. This is a different argument from that in which Southmead is created as a social space through the discourse of social policy, and is an argument that sets out to challenge the supposedly neutral and rational knowledge that that discourse generates.

Looking at knowledge about Southmead that comes from Southmead involves a very different approach to that of certain strands of sociology that are summarised thus in a book on community: ‘The analysis of any problem in sociology cannot make people's opinions of that problem its point of departure’. Instead, it involves what Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift call a politics of location, ‘a politics that makes no claims to second guessing others’ experience, but still allows people to speak for themselves’. Writing about this politics of location is not, however, a simple process.