Rileggere The Hobo 100 anni dopo: dalla homelessness di frontiera alla homelessness di confino

Rereading The Hobo 100 Years Later. From Frontier Homelessness to Border Homelessness. ABSTRACT: People who are homeless represent – today as a hundred years ago – one of the most extreme forms of poverty. Too often, the lack of recognition of the social problem adds up to the per- sonal drama of a condition of grave poverty. Following Nels Anderson’s unsurpassed text The Hobo as a conceptual map, a reflection on some selected theoretical and analytical points related to home- lessness is proposed. Retraced the genesis of Anderson’s research, from a perspective of comparison and dialogue with the classic, we will focus on the defining aspects of the phenomenon; the themes of work/non-work and marginalization in the urban context will be investigated; finally, the most current reconfiguration of the processes of material and relational impoverishment and the dynamics of exclusion in the contemporary socioeconomic background will be analyzed.