ABSTRACT
The existence of communities whose typical ways of knowing and talking about the world have been discredited, or marginalized, is a matter of increasing interest to scholars within the social problems field as well as outside it. This chapter sifts the larger theoretical discussion of marginality for what it has to say to analysts of social problems. It suggests that the social problems theorist can learn much about marginalization from these other perspectives. The chapter explores how have some ways of talking problems (making claims) emerged as privileged or normative, as others have been eclipsed or silenced. It also examines what these processes reveal about power and how it operates. The view from the margins tells us that apparently settled accounts of the world are never entirely settled, that dominant discourses are always being contested, whether as clearly visible confrontations between claimants and counterclaimants, or as "depoliticized" encounters between claimants whose status as claimants has been defused.
