PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

This chapter presents the case of Nina F., a young woman who has expe-rienced feelings of alienness, as she and her family moved intercontinentally three times. These feelings of being the alien and, as Nina says, "the odd one out" occurred primarily when she was an adolescent and had to deal with, among other things, the challenge of not speaking the same code that the other teenagers used, even though she spoke the same language. These experiences led to her current attitude of accepting and even welcoming alienness, of letting herself benefit from new encounters, and also of experiencing a certain independence concerning relationships. In the context of the typology of biographical trajectories toward a culture of welcoming in our Bielefeld Study on Xenosophia and Religion in Germany, Nina represents the type of trajectory which is based primarily on interpersonal relations.