Marked Identities Narrating Lives between Social Labels and Individual Biographies

Western society has become increasingly diverse, but stereotypes still persist in the public discourse. This volume explores how people who have a marked status in society - among them Travellers, teenage mothers, homeless people - manage their identity in response to these stereotypes.

Introduction; Alessandra Fasulo and Roberta Piazza 1. '… Since Big Fat Gypsy Weddings (…) Now [People] … Understand More 'cos of that Programme': Irish Travellers' Identity between Stigmatisation and Self-image; Roberta Piazza 2. The Nice Stasi Man Drove his Trabi to the Nudist Beach: Contesting East German identity; Molly Andrews 3. 'They Paint Everyone with the Same Brush but it Just Simply isn't the Case': Reconstructing and Redefining Homeless Identities; Phoebe Trimingham 4. On the Margins: Aboriginal Realities and 'White Man's Research'; Maria I. Medved and Jens Brockmeier 5. 'The Racial Laws have Turned our Lives Positively': Agentivity and Chorality in the Identity of a Group of Italian Jewish Witnesses; Roberta Piazza and Antonia Rubino 6. Young Motherhood: Is it Really a Case of 'Shattered Lives and Blighted Futures'?; Hilary Bruffell 7. Reordered Narratives and the Changes in Self-understanding from Addiction to Recovery; Georgia-Zetta Kougiali 8. History in Wait: Receiving a Diagnosis of Asperger in Mid-life; Alessandra Fasulo in collaboration with Philip Adrian Hunt and Perry Isidore Afterword; Anna De Fina

Alessandra Fasulo, University of Portsmouth, UK Molly Andrews, University of East London, UK Hilary Bruffell, Open University, UK Phoebe Trimingham, BBC News, UK Maria Medved, University of Manitoba, Canada, and American University of Paris, France Jens Brockmeier, University of Manitoba, Canada, and American University of Paris, France Roberta Piazza, University of Sussex, UK Georgia Kougiali, University of Cambridge, UK Antonia Rubino, University of Sydney, Australia