Discovering Difference, Experiencing Difficulty

Abstract

As this quote suggests, the image of society is not a simple insiders or outsiders dichotomy. Nor is it simply the case that sociology can gaze at the public discourses on difficulty, difference, disappointment, denial and exclusion and discover how such concepts are experienced personally and privately without looking at the micro world of experience. The stark reality for the parents in this study was not that they were sipping cocktails in a privileged position, nor were they trapped, unlikely to survive. The participants in my research were 24 out of hundreds of thousands of families who rear children with impairments. Moreover, when these parents first discovered their baby or child had some kind of impairment, the expectations they unconsciously or consciously mapped did not include difficult difference.

[…] exclusion is a gradient running from the credit rating of the well-off right down to the degree of dangerousness of the incarcerated. Its currency is risk, its stance is actuarial — calculative and appraising. The image of society is not that of core insiders and a periphery of outsiders but more that of a beach where people are assigned to a gradient of positions in a littoral fashion. At the top of the beach there are the privileged sipping their cocktails, their place in the sun secured, while at the bottom there are creatures trapped in the sea who can only get out with great effort and even then are unlikely to survive. The beach has its gradient in between but this does not preclude at its extremes sharply segregated worlds, whether of the super-rich or the underclass [emphasis in original].

(Young, 1999: 65)