Personae Non Gratae

The Hungarian literature on homelessness is almost entirely descriptive, lacking the insights of social theory, but instead approaching the problem from the perspective of social work or homeless assistance. Our goal with the present selection of articles is to introduce a different approach, which examines homelessness within broader historical and theoretical frameworks: not as a subsection of welfare administration but as an issue of political economy, philosophy and citizenship. Here we focus on literature from the United States, and on the issue of spatial exclusion and criminalization. The geographical—and cultural—distance notwithstanding, we argue that many of these analyses are useful for the understanding of the Hungarian situation as well.