Del Casino—A Companion to Social Geography M Chapter 25 The Geographies of Marginalization Dan Trudeau and Chris McMorran Introduction How is space fashioned to privilege some groups and marginalize others? How does space contribute to the social exclusion of particular groups? These questions have been at the center of much scholarship on the social geography of marginalization over the past four decades. Concern about social exclusion was excited within geography by multiple tears in the social fabric of societies throughout the world, including the end of colonization, the rise of civil rights movements, the arrival of third world migrants in irst world locations, widening gaps between rich and poor, and the increasing feminization of labor. Anglophone social geographers initiated the academic journal Antipode in 1969, for instance, in order to provide a speciic forum for discussion and debate about the role and effect of social relationships and geographic environments in the processes of marginalization. Geographers initially focused on illustrating the patterns and extent of social inequality and exclusion, often producing maps to illustrate such patterns. Studies of experiences, effects, and causal processes of exclusion were soon added to the growing literature on marginalization and subsequently contributed to theories of marginalization. In the case of racialized ghettos, for instance, social geographers have explored how members of racial groups in these areas experience forms of material deprivation that may result in a lack of access to services, food, or shelter, which may in turn affect individual’s health. Since the 1980s, cultural geographers have added to our understanding of this instance of marginalization by documenting the discursive and symbolic ways in which the material conditions of ghetto environments inluence the social labels and negative stereotypes that reproduce the marginalization of social groups. Extrapolating from this example, the broader geographic literature on marginalization has consequently produced multiple conceptualizations of A Companion to Social Geography, First Edition. Edited by Vincent J. Del Casino Jr., Mary Thomas, Paul Cloke, and Ruth Panelli. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd. c25.indd 437 11/29/2010 1:54:28 PM