Voices of Homeless People in Street Newspapers: A Cross-Cultural Exploration

Abstract

This study is a discourse analysis of four street newspapers from Europe and the United States. Street newspapers (SNPs), which are sold on the street by homeless people, usually claim to make society aware of homelessness and related issues, to be a platform for homeless people and to help them regain independence and self-respect. This analysis will question this claim. It describes the framing of homeless people's voices and homelessness issues in these newspapers by looking at their objectives, topics and text genres, and at the (self)-representation of homeless people in texts written by them, or about them. The European SNPs give a limited platform to homeless people's voices, and tend to limit these to personal narratives and poetry. In contrast the American street newspaper, written by (former) homeless people gives a wide and diversified platform to the issues surrounding homelessness and to the individuals concerned. However, it is not completely free of a certain emphasis on feelings and pathos, which is also observed, with variations, in the European SNPs, and in many ways evokes traditional political and media discourse on poor and marginal people, reinforcing the negative social ethos of the homeless.