In this episode, I join my beloved friends and colleagues Sarah Wells and Emily Boch to talk about why learning about art and culture from the edges of respectable society matters so muchtoday, especially in an era where many American cling to the ideals of normality, conformity, nostalgia, and popularity. Against all odds, the three of us have built vibrant careers studying media, art, and cultural practices created and enacted by people commonly left out of democratic public life:union workers on strike, queer of color performance artists, Jewish American comics creators, queer and feminist filmmakers, psychedelic mixed-media artists, Latin American filmmakers, and much more. We start our conversation bysharing our own stories of how we made our way to participate in artistic or creative worlds traditionally deemed taboo, underground, illegitimate or immature—from superhero comics to queer performance scenes—and then trace how our early attachments became rich areas of study and teaching that we share with students in our day-to-day professional lives. A central concept throughout our conversation is the simple but life-changing practice of permission giving: the idea that sharing, circulating, and discussing marginalized art and culture extends permission to others to explore surprising, unexpected, and unorthodox forms of human expression. For us, themarginal is always in fact, central: central to living freely; central to communing with others in non-violent ways; central to expanding one’s perspective about the diversity of life on earth.