Marginal/marginalised?: Rethinking marginality
Photo by Migsar Navarro on Unsplash
On September 16th 2021, we ran an open and free online zoom workshop to discuss marginality in relation to landscape, human and more than human interactions. This was organised by the AHRC funded ‘Unlocking Landscapes: History, Culture and Sensory Diversity in Landscape Use and Decision Making’ Network in conjunction with Professor Karen Jones and her Wellcome Trust funded project, ‘The Lungs of the City’. We aimed to share knowledge and experience in relation to people and landscape beyond the well-known urban park and garden. We hope that this will also encourage future networking between academics, practitioners and those involved in landscape decision making.
We asked participants to suggest questions to frame the event when booking their place. These are listed below before notes from the resultant discussion.
Defining Marginality questions
1. Whose landscape experiences are marginalised? (Human and nonhuman)
2. How might marginality affect the ways in which people embody different landscapes?
3. How does stigma over certain areas attach itself to and derive from both nonhuman animals and humans?
4. Through which processes do particular people come to be marginalised? e.g. role of
- Regeneration and gentrification?
- Exclusionary social/cultural norms?
- Climate change?
- Heritage designations?
- Representations of landscape history?
5. How can we think about the subtlety of segregation in British landscapes?
6. How can we better contextualise conflicts and contested use and experiences of such spaces?
7. How has Covid-19 shaped people's feelings of marginalisation or perceptions of marginalised landscapes?
Discussion Responses
Marginality as resistance. Marginality is created through interactions within communities. Doesn’t have to be negative?
How do we think about the intersection of place and people in terms of marginality?
Temporality of marginality. Places and people can shift through time.
Territorial passages, classifications of place as home and away, margins as neutral zones, perspective and position influencing perspective on what a place is.
Policy definitions of marginalisation. How can policy actors in varied roles understand and respond adequately?
Human/non-human marginality - when/how do non-humans become marginalised?
Points of collision - conflicting placement of certain people/nonhumans in certain places... tensions concerning expectations of what people expect to find in certain places.
Ideas of 'dark' or 'rebellious' spaces (colonialism and wetland management) - historical ideas of taming spaces to 'tame' their inhabitants, and how this gave way to a very specific set of conservation ideals.
Whose landscape experiences are marginalised, by whom and on the basis of whose values? What metrics are used to establish value? Who are spaces designed for? The politics of 'purpose'.
The context-dependent nature of who/what/where is marginal
Reframing and Addressing Marginality Questions
1. Who decides how spaces, people, species and practices are marginal?
2. How do knowledges framing policy processes shape marginalisation?
3. How can landscape access/relevance be improved with and for diverse communities without inadvertently deepening experiences of marginalisation?
4. Are marginal/marginalised useful terms? Is marginality a useful way of thinking about these ideas?
5. Does everyone have a marginal landscape?
Discussion responses
Marginality as a process - people/places can move in and out of being considered marginal.
Space could be an alternative way of thinking about marginalisation. It would allow us to talk about the place rather than the people and allow for temporal shifts/changing nature of use and experience.
Ethics of defining people as ‘marginal’, internal-external.
Challenges of classifying marginalisation - indices of poverty/education/lack of access could be one way of categorising marginal groups, but what defines wellbeing and quality of life?
We do accept some measures of people and status – poverty, education, access to facilities etc. But this is not always clear. Can they be contested?
Who has agency in a space? – thinking about animals, often pushed to the edges.
Children's playgrounds as an example of spaces where adults typically make the decisions not the users, the children. Yet the children are the main users/central to the space. Is this a process of marginalisation?
The edges are the exciting bits! Margins have potential.
Orbits, territorial passages, people need to be able to find edges irrespective of affluence or lack of it. Marginality can be situational, that’s often determined by others, power, but it can also be a choice, going to the edges.
Marginality of use. Transgression and resistance.
Post-industrial spaces and marginalisation. Example of central Scotland remediation works - marginalised through lack of consultation, marginalisation through designation of a space as unimportant, marginalisation of un-/acceptable uses.
People can be marginal and central at the same time e.g. teenagers. Important to remember sense of place and identity in relation to this.
Ideas of risk and ontological (in)security, and how this shapes the marginalisation of specific humans/non-humans, including those with a long-term historic landscape presence (e.g. mosquitoes and wetlands).
Landscapes we take for granted until they are threatened - how processes of potential marginalisation encourage re-evaluation of landscapes.
If landscapes are typically valued economically, how can space be made for marginal/intangible landscape values that do not easily translate into economic value? Do efforts to do this (e.g. ecosystem services frameworks) go far enough in trying to do this?
Potential value in biocultural heritage frameworks.
Unintended consequences of the pandemic - creating the freedom to re-embody landscapes amongst human/nonhumans who have previously been marginalised, or creating new processes of marginalisation?
Is it helpful to think in terms of marginality? Does the label of ‘marginal’ create unhelpful binaries? The marginal exists in relation to the normative, the who- or what-ever is at the centre. When are people empowered to use the agency of marginalisation, and when does it create a sense of vulnerability/expendability?
Role of government and conservation orgs in favouring certain types of landscapes - the embedded politics of landscape decision making
References and suggestions for further reading from participants:
· bell hook’s work on how dominant social groups create marginal people and places. Railway tracks within cities defining margins. Of particular interest to one participant was the idea that we should accept the margin as a place of potential, rather than expecting everyone and everywhere to adhere to the norms of the centre... hooks, bell. “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness.” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, no. 36 (1989), 15–23.
· Mary Gearey et al's book on English Wetlands: https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030413057
· Resources from an event on adapting and using bio-cultural heritage framework in the UK: https://www.inherit-institute.org/resources