Looking in From the Edge

There is an edge to every society and people are living here. It is where few from the centre would choose to go because this is a place of unease. People seldom choose to live here but choice is not a privilege afforded to them. They are drawn here out of desperation, when their identity is feared by social norms or when they can no longer maintain dominant expectations of wealth, class, and race.

This blog contains reflections of my work and research with marginalised communities, particularly youth in poverty-stricken neighbourhoods, who give perspective on the adversity of limited opportunities. I want to explore what it means to live a marginal identity, how individuals who live on the edge of society look at the world and make sense of it. This is because each such story contains a unique social perspective, an outlook on how society has failed or saved the most vulnerable among us.

These are grainy stories, of struggle and anger and resilience. They hold up a mirror from the margins and reflect the inequalities of social engineering that favour those at the centre. It is only in looking at these reflections that we are able to re-imagine and reconstruct more inclusive and sustainable responses.

In foregrounding the voices of those among us who live at the edge, I aim to highlight the blindspots of development initiatives. Using

• ethnographic field notes,
• photo essays,
• news commentaries,
• and biographic narratives,

I hope to make a contribution to conversations that build social equity.

What is it about our society that breeds discontent and what does it mean to find fulfilment, what disempowers and what rescues people from such risk, how have we engendered segregation and how can we build affinity? Finding a new response to these old questions means amplifying perspectives from the edge, where voices have long struggled to find resonance with the centre.