How do homeless immigrants describe themselves when they feel judged by society?

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This article analyses results from a study of homeless immigrants in Copenhagen. Based on 25 life-history interviews with male immigrants living in institutions for the homeless, it focuses on how interviewees present themselves and try to handle their stigmatized position.

The analysis combines two theoretical approaches. First, it reads the narratives as representations of the immigrants’ marginalized status in their new society. Many narratives echo Bauman’s (1991) description of the stranger as someone constructed as a “permanent other”: someone discredited, blamed and discriminated against because they are seen as “threatening the natural order of things.”

Second, drawing on Scott and Lyman (1968), the analysis reads the narratives as presentations—that is, as the narrators’ preferred interpretations of their present and past situations. The accounts are therefore read not just as reflections of “things that actually happened” to the interviewees, but also as reflections of their strategies for handling those incidents. They are also interpreted as attempts to present themselves in the interviews as people “permanently on trial” who are nevertheless “respectable after all.”