Countering the stigma of homeless people

Contemporary polarisation debates often focus on the growing presence of extremist ideologies and the evaporation of the political centre. This focus comes at a cost, as it ignores structural practices of exclusion that pitch mainstream society against stigmatised groups. In the case of homeless people, we can see how they are constructed as outgroup through the centrality of the home as site of civilisation, the removal of social agency and the denial of citizenship. Street papers, publications that are distributed, and in a modest way co-produced, by homeless people, attempt to counter this hegemonic stigma by rehumanising homeless people. They do this through the articulation of the mobile and affective home, the re-allocation of agency and the defence of homeless rights and citizenship. In our chapter, we focus on the Swedish street paper Situation Sthlm, analysing a content sample, 12 interviews with producers and vendors and a brief set of observations. Theoretically driven by discourse theory, and methodologically by discourse-theoretical analysis, this chapter demonstrates not only how Situation Sthlm counters polarisation and stigmatisation, but also what the limits of these counter-hegemonic strategies are.