Towards the end of the 1980s, 'Bridgetown' local authority, having decentralised its housing administration, established a Council Tenants' Forum in one area, with tenants and councillors as voting members. The Tenants' Forum is a formal meeting open to the public and serviced by an area housing officer. In 1994 the council stated that the Tenants' Forum had "required tenants, councillors and officers to take on new roles" and that "the tenants' role has become in a truer sense that of a consumer with ability to accept or reject a service". As part of a PhD study working with the concept of a 'liminal public space' on the boundaries of 'system and lifeworld', looking at the democratic potential of the forum over a period of two years, this paper uses critical discourse analysis to examine one item of business that constituted a 'moment of crisis' during a forum meeting in 1995. The analysis reveals the inter-discursivity characteristic of the forum with consequent indeterminacy of subject positions/identities, and relationships between the members. The analysis indicates a redrawing of lifeworld-system boundaries or, alternatively, the workings of a lifeworld-system interface and the paper concludes by considering the implications of this for the democratic potential of this type of 'user participation'.
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