Marginalization

Marginalization is a process of becoming or being made marginal to centers of power, social standing, or dominant discourses. People can become or be marginalized as a result of either individual circumstance, by being members of historically oppressed social groups, or by choosing associations with particular ideologies. Ideaseven entire disciplinescan become marginalized by virtue of their threat toward, or insignificance to, institutional, economic, or political centers of power. These centers of power can be local, national, or global in scope. Both human (individual and social circumstance) and ideological forms of mar-ginality are of interest to curriculum studies. Curricula can be examined on the basis of the ways they represent and relate to, or fail to represent and relate to, issues of race, class, gender, ability, and sexual orientation. Multicultural curriculum theory, in particular, has focused on these social categories. Curricula can be designed to either challenge or reinforce power relations around such categories. One task of multicultural education has been, at least ostensibly, to challenge [Page 557]the status quo and, therefore, reduce the effects of marginalization by the curriculum. For some versions of multicultural curriculum theory, the goal is not only to reduce or eliminate the effects of marginalization, but also to educate for activism against marginalization in the larger social sphere.

Curriculum that encourages social critique is often marginalized. When curricula are designed to open complex questions to ambiguous responses responses that require sophisticated interpretive workthose curricula pose particular difficulties, for example, for common accountability measures. Such curricula may also present problems for particular communities that find ambiguity difficult to accept, understand, or work with. On the other hand, a curriculum that rejects such ambiguity, but endorses a particular set of ideas may likewise be marginalized if those ideas are outside the mainstream societal norms in any way. As such, a state of marginalization belongs to no particular political, moral, or ideological standpoint.

The concept of marginalization is too complex to be reduced to a good versus bad dualism. To be marginalized is oftentimes to be subjected to various kinds of punishment such as rejection, invisibility, suppression of basic rights, and even violence. But invisibility, in some situations, can be advantageous when it leads to, for example, a reduction in scrutiny by an overbearing state or other center of power. What is more, margins are markers of difference. These differences are numerous and carry a range of psychological and material effects that are not equal in intensity or force. In this sense, identities are constituted by one's range of mar-ginalizations. It is within these differencesthese areas of marginalizationthat individuals or groups may find the most fertile ground for learning and understanding as one so placed has need to understand both the marginal position and the center of power. As such, a marginalized position can be characterized by deeper insight and intelligence than a centralized position in the same sense that bilingual capacity is richer than monolingual.

Various types of marginalizationindividual differences, membership in historically oppressed groups, marginal ideologiesmay coexist within one body, further complicating our understanding of the functioning of marginalization. Everyone is marginal in some aspects. The ways in which one attempts to define or identify oneself has much to do with who or what one attempts to define or identify as other to one. Indeed, marginality in all its layers is constituted by encounters with otherness. The social margins result from encounters across differences between in terms of race, class, gender, nationality, sexual orientation, and ability. And encounters across differences between transform all who are involved. Individual margins may be constituted by encounters across differences withindifferences generated by socially and culturally produced psyches. Social and individual margins within one body give rise to yet another level of potential marginalizationthe surprise offered by a breakdown of stereotype. Rigid categories at any level do not hold up under close scrutiny.

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