ABSTRACT
Human agents interact with one another; however, some of us are interacted with as strangers and others as ‘normal’ and ‘familiar’ people. Strangers are excluded from various aspects of social life in that they face barriers to participation that people who are not regarded as strangers do not face. The book is organised thematically around the work of five principal authors: Georg Simmel, Erving Goffman, Pierre Bourdieu, Norbert Elias and Zygmunt Bauman and attempts to go beyond a commentary of each single author to identify and evaluate the mechanisms of social inclusion and exclusion with reference to the sociological literature on the stranger. Practice is the guidance that we draw upon in any situation when deciding the appropriate way to behave. When it comes to the processes of estrangement, people make sense to a given person by attempting to read their behaviour in relation to their own practice. Social exclusion is then a product of the of the thoughts and feelings of individual people that guides their actions and decisions to treat others as different, generating barriers to participation and creating a category of person that is known in the literature as ‘the stranger’.
