Abstracts - Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa

LÉSMER ANTONIO MONTECINO SOTO, PONTIFICIA UNIVERSIDAD CATÓLICA DECHILESPEECH AND EXCLUSION OF THE HOMELESS IN SANTIAGO, CHILEEveryday discourse reproduces the discursive representation that all homelesspeople are a threat to those inside the system: they are insane, delirious alcoholics,drug addicts, violent criminals; however, their own speech tells us somethingdifferent: they are with us, they have been made invisible by a system that deniesthem as social actors, since they are not shaped as subjects with a legitimizingidentity, with an identity of resistance nor with ant identity of project (Castells,2003). In other words, they are excluded. Discursively, these are people whopossess their own belief systems, desires, wishes and difficulties as well as possiblesolutions that do not differ in any respect from the official or dominant discourse.In the context of critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2003), the objective of thispaper is to account for the discursive representations of self and others by streetpeople, in order to make visible the prejudices and excluding practices they aresubject to. Through a linguistic analysis of discourse, with emphasis on theconstrual of experience (Martin and Rose, 2007), the results give qualitativeevidence of their marginalization, their infantilization and stigma, both by theinstitutions that take them in, as by those who could provide a job that will allowtheir inclusion. To show this, we have 150 life stories taken between 2007 and 2009in the city of Santiago, Chile, as part of the FONDECYT research project 1071094. Ofthis data, we analyze here three episodes (case studies) that show how thehomeless discursively construe their exclusion.Keywords: homeless, identity, CDA, ideation.PAPER SESSION 5A - ROOM 1 - WEDNESDAY, 27 JULYISFC38 Book of Abstracts Page 115 Lisbon, July 2011