Marginal Publics / Privacy in Motion: Homelessness in Times of Mobile Media

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This project concerns itself with the rarely researched topic of homeless and digital media use. It addresses two main questions: a) How do homeless people in Berlin use digital and mobile media, and b) How far does this media usage also include processes of ‘going private’ and/or ‘going public’? Empirically, the project consists of two sub-projects: a survey on media use of the homeless and a qualitative experiment, providing mobile phones to those who do not use them, yet. Both sub-projects build on longer-term ethnographic research in the field (in homeless shelters, homeless meeting points, public spaces). The innovative combination of both methods provides the first substantial project in Germany on homelessness and digital media use. The project has an exploratory character as it combines two theoretical fields (homeless media use and the question of publicness/privacy in the homeless context) in order to sketch a theoretical-empirical synthesis on marginal publics/privacy in motion. Due to its exploratory character and experimental design, the project draws on different fields of existing research: research on homelessness itself, studies of media usage among homeless populations, and explorations of mediated publics/mediated privacy.