Rethinking Stigma and Gambling
By Helen Keane How to cite: Keane H. (2019). Rethinking Stigma and Gambling. Critical Gambling Studies . https://doi.org/10.29173/cgs13 Stigma is an unusually successful sociological concept. Not only has it flourished in public health and social psychology by capturing the powerful effects of social exclusion on wellbeing, it has become part of vernacular language . The downside of this success is a loss of precision and diminishment of critical incisiveness. Rather than designating a political and social relationship based on the exercise of power, stigma is commonly used to refer to general reactions of social disapproval and/or the negative associations linked to particular conditions or identities. The critical element that remains intact is the idea of unjustified disapproval: to say that an attribute is stigmatised is to claim that is wrongly subject to discrimination or devaluation. However, stigma has recently benefitted from revitalising sociological attention and