Outsiders or Insiders in “the Own Society”? – the Experience of Adults Raised in Residential Care Institutions

The paper will present the biographical experience of being a stranger “in one’s own society” on the example of biographical/narrative interviews conducted with adults (born 1959-1980), raised in children’s residential care institutions in Lodz, Poland. The empircal basis of the presentation comes from the project “Institutionalized identity? The processes of identity development on the basis of biographies rendered by adults raised in residential care”, 2011-2014. In the paper I will consider the phenomenon of stigmatising identity work performed by institutional and non-institutional interactional partners during the period of narrators’ institutionalisation and in their adulthood. I will also address to the concept of the institutional space of impunity as the area of emerging of asymmetrical power balances in interactions between institutionalised children and adolescences and their care-takers.