The stranger's tale: information seeking as an outsider activity

With a departure point in the Schutzian concept of “The stranger”, the aim of the article is to examine the usefulness of the concept as a tool for understanding information seeking practices from an outsider perspective in the context of leaving school and planning to apply to a university programme in Sweden.

The paper draws on the phenomenological sociology of Schutz together with narrative theory. In this study stories of information seeking gathered in interviews are related to a discourse of nationality and analysed using the concept of cognitive authority together with the concept of the stranger.

The findings reveal the effort required for young people with roots in other countries or from non‐academic homes to connect and interact with potentially valuable sources of information and that the concept of the stranger can be employed to render visible implicit dimensions of information seeking.

The article is based on an in‐depth study of the information seeking activities of one young person in a specific national, political and cultural context. It is particular and personal but at the same time can be related to wider issues in contemporary society through narrative analysis. The stories of information seeking taken up exemplify the social nature of barriers of access to information and may be of help in the planning of research projects on a larger scale.

In a time when a discourse of nationality is pervasive and integration policies are under question in Europe this study provides insight into the individual experience from the perspective of library and information science.