Lens Of Liminality Research Articles

Certified But Not Qualified? EFL Pre-service Teachers in Liminality

ABSTRACTResearch on novice ESL/EFL teachers’ identity development often characterizes the teaching practicum/internship as a boundary-crossing period in which pre-service teachers move out of the sheltered environment of education to become in-service teachers in real classrooms. Nevertheless, many prospective teachers experience a prolonged pre-service period in which an examination-based selection mechanism is used to gatekeep teacherdom. Through the lens of liminality, the study explores the experiences of two Taiwanese pre-service secondary EFL teachers during a period filled with high-stakes recruitment examinations. By examining how the two participants negotiate their identities and learn about the profession amid the disheartening challenges and learning opportunities they face during liminality, the study gives voice to pre-service teachers caught in between institutional structures and allows them to articulate their struggles as well as their sense of agency in pursuing a teaching career. The findings yield practical implications for EFL teacher education and the examination-based selection mechanism.

Reconfiguring Social Value in Health Research Through the Lens of Liminality.

Despite the growing importance of ‘social value’ as a central feature of research ethics, the term remains both conceptually vague and to a certain extent operationally rigid. And yet, perhaps because the rhetorical appeal of social value appears immediate and self‐evident, the concept has not been put to rigorous investigation in terms of its definition, strength, function, and scope. In this article, we discuss how the anthropological concept of liminality can illuminate social value and differentiate and reconfigure its variegated approaches. Employing liminality as a heuristic encourages a reassessment of how we understand the mobilization of ‘social value’ in bioethics. We argue that social value as seen through the lens of liminality can provide greater clarity of its function and scope for health research. Building on calls to understand social value as a dynamic, rather than a static, concept, we emphasize the need to appraise social value iteratively throughout the entire research as something that transforms over multiple times and across multiple spaces occupied by a range of actors.

Between Scholarship and Dissidence: The Dissident Historical CollectionPamiat΄ (1975–1982)

This article examines the history of the Soviet dissident historical collectionPamiat΄through the lens of liminality. It argues that the publication sought to bridge the gap between dissident and professional scholarship, between grassroots memory collection, with its emphasis on the witness's voice, and historical research's reliability and “scientificity.” AlthoughPamiat΄was inspired by earlier dissident historiographical projects and its editorial team was closely linked to the human-rights movement, its ambitions of objectivity and representativeness also connect it to later Perestroika projects based on citizen involvement, such asMemorial.Pamiat΄s ambiguous identity and claim to neutrality may have delayed the Soviet authorities’ response to it, but repression eventually hit the publication. By putting into question the state's monopoly on historical scholarship and connecting readers and contributors across the Iron Curtain,Pamiat΄had clearly overstepped the boundaries of the permissible and acquired a political meaning it disingenuously claimed not to have.

Liminal geopolitics: the subjectivity and spatiality of diplomacy at the margins

This paper argues that the lens of liminality has the potential to enrich scholarship in critical geopolitics by offering a nuanced approach to the geographies and ambivalence of political subjectivity. In the context of a perceived proliferation of ‘new’ actors the paper turns critical attention to what happens at the threshold between the categories of state and non‐state, official and unofficial diplomacy. It asks what such a perspective on diplomacy might mean for understandings of who is, and who should be, a legitimate actor in international politics by turning to the notion of liminality as developed in cultural anthropology. This is a concept that surprisingly has been overlooked in political geography and this paper asks how geographers might engage more productively with it, particularly in light of emergent critical international relations research on liminality as a paradigm for understanding stability and change in institutionalised orders. Empirically, the paper focuses on the articulation of liminal political subjectivities and spatialities through the lens of the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO), a coalition of almost 50 stateless nations, indigenous communities and national minorities that currently are denied a place at international diplomatic forums. Drawing on this case study, the paper examines three areas of geopolitical enquiry that the notion of liminality opens up. First is the spatiality of diplomacy in terms of the out‐of‐placeness of liminal actors and the construction of transformative spaces of quasi‐official diplomacy. Second are particular qualities of political subjectivity, including the blurring of boundaries between diplomacy and activism, and the notion of geopolitical shapeshifters. Finally, attention turns to the notion ofcommunitasto draw out the politics of belonging, recognition and legitimacy. The paper concludes by suggesting that the idea of ambivalence that underpins liminality is a useful provocation to take creativity and aspiration seriously in geopolitics.

On the Edge of Existence: Malian Migrants in the Maghreb

Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Malian migrants and migration brokers in Mali, Algeria, Morocco, and France, this article investigates life in exile on the edge of Europe. Zooming in on the experiences of interlocutors in Morocco and Algeria, the article will explore the experiential dimensions of living in an extended liminality. Anthropologically, life in so-called places of transit, such as the Maghreb countries, has often been dealt with through the lens of liminality. In this article my aim is to build on the insights from such endeavors, and re-orient the focus by illuminating what this specific type of permanent liminality entails. I posit that a more suitable term to call this is ‘limbo’. This, I argue, consists of three main features. First, the motivation for leaving Mali is for most migrants embedded in the lack of opportunities for social mobility: the Malian youth who end up leaving, are in Honwana’s words, stuck in ‘waithood’ at home, in what many argue is a liminal social position. Second, social and political structures are not absent in the Maghreb, rather they are quite discernable and can be seen as continuations and mimicking of existing structures. Third, experiences of dramatic ruptures with humanity and morality are key characteristics of life on the edge of Europe.

Children, Migration and Mortuary Representation in the Late Prehistoric Central Illinois River Valley

Morton Village and the associated Norris Farms #36 cemetery site in Fulton County, Illinois, provide an opportunity to synthesise community and mortuary perspectives on life among Mississippian and Oneota inhabitants of the late prehistoric Central Illinois River Valley. Among research directions to develop from new Michigan State University-Dickson Mounds Museum excavations are questions regarding the role that the 143 subadults interred in the cemetery can play in the analysis of community social relations. In this article, we focus on the lives and deaths of Morton's youngest residents, particularly as they relate to broader patterns of migration and identity (trans)formation. We specifically seek to understand whether some of these children were born into families with blended Oneota and Mississippian identities, potentially signalling multiethnic identity in their mortuary signatures. To this end, a particular subset of juveniles is compared to other burials in the cemetery, and is discussed within a larger context of migration and multiethnic social interactions. We argue that the mortuary disposition of certain children might be viewed as an avenue for the symbolic expression of novel identity processes borne of unique Oneota and Mississippian interactions in the region, particularly when interpreted with reference to children's roles in that process and through a lens of liminality, hybridity and communitas.

‘[B]orn at sea, buried at Tarsus,/And found at sea again:’ Pericles and Liminal Form

In Shakespeare’s Pericles, hazard-prone dramatic subjects undergo any number of reductive transformations as they drift towards redemption. Arguing that the logic of these transformations resonates with certain anthropological structures, the paper examines the rituality of this late romance through the lens of liminality. Sequences of both trauma and healing in the play are suggestively compared with the movement of liminal subjects from separation, through trial, to communal reaggregation. Focusing on the patterns of performative language disclosed in Pericles, the author makes the case, moreover, that the choric and repetitive discourses that prompt recuperation in subjects boast liminal qualities themselves, and that our understanding of how the play works to broker its romance subjectivities is made less precarious when we take this into account.

Communitas and forms without foundations: Romania's case of interlocking liminalities

As Maria Mälksoo and Bahar Rumelili's contributions in this Forum show, the concept of liminality has either been ignored or understudied in International Relations (IR) theory. To a certain extent, liminality suffers from the same ills as the condition it refers to, since liminal actors, by finding themselves simultaneously inside and outside structures, puzzle and challenge them. It has been shown that through the lens of liminality it is possible to read deeper into the social construction of identities on the international scene, into the question of ontological security, and into actors’ capacities of consolidating or subverting structural arrangements. When considering liminality for a particular case, its position as a concept within IR theory must be kept in mind. It challenges the linearity and neatness of many IR categories, and also, questions certain tendencies in IR theory that make it a rather self-referential system of concepts with the worrying capacity of developing a world entirely divorced from field realities; it is equally important to look at liminality as a way of seeing things which is inspired and informed by the fluctuating facts of social dynamics.

Food, Fasting, and Itinerant Nuns

Spanish nuns who traveled to Mexico and Peru during the 17th and 18th centuries brought with them their pre-conceived notions on food and fasting. They firmly believed that they could keep up their prescribed regimen of fasting according to the strict Capuchin Rule. Their own descriptions of their travels, however, prove the contrary. Journeys that took them across the arid plains of the Iberian Peninsula, the high seas of the Atlantic Ocean and the towering peaks of the Andes, proved much more challenging than they had ever imagined. Little by little, itinerant nuns had to embrace the difficult rules of the road and accept the different foods placed in front of them. They also had to modify some of their spiritual regimes such as their devotion to Eucharistic piety. Based on archival research and first person narratives, this study will use the lens of liminality to explore food and fasting in the writings of these Spanish Capuchin nuns.

Betwixt and between: Temporary Employees as Liminal Subjects in Flexible Organizations

As organizations change to become more flexible and transient, the use of a flexible workforce becomes an attractive solution. Temporary employees are here tentatively viewed as being `betwixt and between' organizational structures, in transit between the relatively fixed positions of full-time, regular employment. Building on previous fieldwork and recent interviews among temporary employees in Sweden and the US, the notion of liminality is employed to explore aspects of temporary work. The liminal position of `temporaries', it is suggested, is an ambiguous position involving both risks and opportunities for individuals, temporary staffing agencies, and client organizations alike. It may be seen as a seedbed of cultural creativity, where old perspectives on work and subjectivity are contested and new ones created. Related to the transient, mobile character of temporary employment, is an enhanced awareness of substitutability and a continuous reflexive monitoring of manners and competencies. Furthermore, the mobile and temporary character of assignments lead to the development of transient and episodic imagined communities of the workplace. Through the lens of liminality then, temporal and contractual flexibilization of work is seen to challenge the old boundaries of industrial society and to suggest new ways of organizing and experiencing work, as well as new ways of constructing organizational subjectivity.