Liminal Experience Research Articles

Exploring Liminal Experience of Entrepreneurs in Information and Communication Technology Innovation in Underdeveloped Regions

Exploring Liminal Experience of Entrepreneurs in Information and Communication Technology Innovation in Underdeveloped Regions

Enacting writing differently through a collective liminal experience

ABSTRACT Writing differently presents numerous challenges, impossibilities, and anxieties. While literature underscores the significance of cultivating new writing forms, the actual experience of writing differently remains obscure. This paper seeks to better understand how alternative forms of writing can be enacted. More specifically, it aims to explore how writing differently affects the process of becoming an academiX, by analyzing our collective and individual experiences within Compo·X, a collective of PhD students. We perceive our doctoral experience as a liminal one, a transitional phase that reshapes our identities. We illustrate how our distinct writing practices facilitated the development of a shared identity and an environment for growth in academic world often known for its lack of inclusivity. At the end, we show how writing differently and collective writing helped us to swim against the tide and served as a platform for micro-revolutions within us and academia’s competitive and normative culture and organization.

The role of temporality in refugees’ work-related meaningfulness-making

ABSTRACT This study explores how refugees, i.e., people experiencing liminality due to career and life disruptions, make work-related meaningfulness, and it uncovers how they apply temporality in their meaningfulness-making. Analysing 48 interviews of 24 refugees in Germany, the findings show how, post-migration, refugees faced two types of under-institutionalized liminal experiences challenging their meaningfulness – one concerning self-focused and one pertaining to other-focused sources of meaningfulness. To navigate these liminal experiences, refugees actively made meaningfulness. This was a temporal process, as refugees connected their past, present, and future. They drew on their past and present vocational experiences when moving towards their future vocational self, built on their past and acted in the present to secure present and future social connections, amplified synergies and resolved tensions in meaningfulness sources, and compensated unavailable meaningfulness sources with available ones. Based on our findings, we propose a model on how people make meaningfulness despite missing its main ingredients (i.e., a clear sense of self and social connections) and how under-institutionalized liminality can turn from a space devoid of meaningfulness into an agentic and creative space of meaningfulness-making. We contribute to meaningfulness, temporality, and liminality research.

Consuming place: Women, wine and imagination

AbstractThis paper examines wine drinking among English and Australian women to discover and analyse the connection between their consumption of wine and their experiences, thoughts and imaginings. Comparing the experiences of women from the English town of Halifax with women from the southern suburbs of Adelaide and McLaren Vale (South Australia), I show how imbibing wine enables both groups of women to consume place, space and time, thus extending a liminal experience. Importantly, both groups of women engage with notions of national or regional identity. However, whereas English women typically experience wine drinking as a temporal engagement of social imagination involving a form of armchair alco‐tourism, Australian women mostly engage their social memory, and experience wine drinking as embedded within imagined communities of belonging. As such, this study demonstrates that wine drinking is not just gendered, but a complex, culturally situated practice and experience.

The Embodied Experiences of Injured Ultra-Runners: A Body-Mapping Study

AbstractThe sport of Ultra-running has seen exponential growth over the past ten years. These athletes attempt to push beyond unknown human limits by running for many hours at a time, often multiple times a week across mountains and trails. While research has begun to consider how injury impacts these athletes from an objective medical perspective, much less is known about their subjective embodied experiences. In particular, the discourses they resist and submit to when they are suddenly unable to run. This study describes the use of body-mapping and narrative interviewing as two forms of research inquiry merged together to explore the embodied experiences of eight ultra-runners who had recently experienced an injury. Plot lines were woven through the visual and textual material resulting in three master plots and eight sub plots. Stories of Body Self-transformation, Machina Carnis or the body-as-machine and senescence or the ageing body were layered by emplacing images and text onto life sized body maps creating vibrant art works. These art works were analysed alongside detailed narratives of endurance, strength, determination and loss. Through the art works participants were able to make visible the invisible, with the injury experience providing a window into former ways of being and current experiences of liminality and fear. This study provides insight into the shifting subjectivities of these extreme athletes brought about by pain and injury, and highlights the importance of using power leveling and emancipatory arts based research methods in accessing subjective experience.

Impact of Liminality in Organic Agricultural Tourism on Well-Being: The Role of Memorable Tourism Experiences as a Mediating Variable

Organic agricultural tourism integrates organic, toxin-free natural environments with agricultural industry and cultural lifestyles, creating a liminal space and experience away from everyday life. This study explores how this environment influences tourists’ memorable tourism experiences and subjective well-being. The research employed a questionnaire survey targeting tourists engaged in organic agricultural tourism in the Hualien and Taitung regions of Taiwan. This study used convenience sampling and collected a total of 440 valid questionnaires from 1 October to 30 December 2023. SPSS and PLS-SEM were employed as the analysis tools. The findings are as follows: 1. Developed scales for organic agricultural tourism liminal space, liminal experience, liminal place, and liminal benefits, validating their reliability and validity. 2. Verified that liminality has a significant positive impact on memorable tourism experiences, which in turn positively affect subjective well-being. 3. Identified and validated the mediating role of memorable tourism experiences in the relationship between liminality in organic agricultural tourism and subjective well-being. 4. Found that liminal experience has the most significant impact on memorable tourism experiences, followed by liminal benefits, highlighting the critical role of liminal experience in tourists gaining benefits from liminal spaces. 5. Expanded the application of liminality theory in tourism-related research, providing theoretical support for how organic agricultural tourism can deepen tourists’ memorable tourism experiences and enhance their subjective well-being through liminality. This study is innovative both in its theme and theoretical contributions, offering significant academic and practical implications for the field.

A Plein Air Painting Event as a Liminal Experience Building the Artists’ Community

The subject of the article is a plein air painting event, considered as a liminal experience that is widely practiced by traditional artists to create and maintain communities in the local and supra-local art fields. The interest in organizing this kind of meetings among artists, modern art galleries, and art schools is not decreasing, and one can talk about the exceptionally long duration of the phenomenon. This article discusses the experience of participants for whom these joint meetings have a metaphysical dimension. The descriptions and expressions used by the artists have become the inspiration to use Victor W. Turner’s concept in the analysis. That is why this practice is discussed as a liminal experience and a rite of passage, whereas the relations between its participants are understood in terms of a specific type of community that is called by Turner ‘spontaneous communitas’. All the considerations and conclusions included in this text are based on qualitative research conducted among visual artists.

Creating “Liminal Community”: Communal Liminal Experience and Identity Transformation Among Black Women Tech Founders in Detroit

Creating “Liminal Community”: Communal Liminal Experience and Identity Transformation Among Black Women Tech Founders in Detroit

Religion in a Time of Crisis: Pagan Experiences of Liminality and Communitas During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Calgary, Alberta

Religion in a Time of Crisis: Pagan Experiences of Liminality and Communitas During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Calgary, Alberta

Heritage as threshold: an autoethnographic exploration of the porticoes of Bologna (Italy)

The contents and aims of this paper derive from an autoethnographic exploration of the porticoes of Bologna, which in 2021 became part of the UNESCO World Heritage List. It was the difficulty of their candidacy process, which is not usual for Italian urban heritage, that shaped my concern with them. I conducted empirical research by walking under the porticoes in order to understand the reasons behind their otherness as official heritage and how these reasons can represent an interesting case for current geographical debates on heritage in its cultural dimension. Drawing first of all on the fact that my embodied experience of the porticoes was a liminal experience, I argue here that their otherness lies in being heritage as threshold by developing this idea in two ways. The first way consists of interpreting the spatiality of the porticoes in the light of the concept of threshold. To the extent that a threshold, as conceived here, is not a boundary but a zone of transition where binary terms are held together and interact with each other, the spatial nature of the porticoes as thresholds challenges the sedentary certainties and sharp boundaries of ‘authorized heritage discourse’. The second way in which I conceive and develop the idea of heritage as threshold consists of relating it, through the example of the porticoes, to the process of heritage-making. From this point of view, the idea of heritage as threshold is a spatial interpretation of the process of construction, deconstruction, reconstruction of heritage, whenever based on the interweaving of official discourses and everyday experiences, on their reciprocal influence and transformation. The construction of the narrative on the porticoes as heritage represents a perfect example of this process of transition and interchange between different perspectives – a process closely associated with the spatiality of thresholds.

Examining liminality in professional practice, relational identities, and career prospects in resource-constrained health systems: Findings from an empirical study of medical and nurse interns in Kenya

We examine new doctors' and nurses' experiences of transitioning from training to practising as health professionals, drawing on the concept of liminality. Liminality is a stage of ‘in-betweenness’, involving uncertainty and ambiguity as people leave one social context and reintegrate into a new one. Surprisingly little research has explored new health professionals' experiences of liminality during role and career transitions, particularly in precarious and resource-constrained settings. Drawing on 146 qualitative interviews and seven focus groups, involving 121 new graduate medical doctors and nurses transitioning through internship training in Kenya, we describe three aspects of liminality. First, liminal professional practice, where interns realise that best practices learned during medical and nursing schools are often impossible to implement in resource constrained health care settings; instead they learn workarounds and practical norms. Second, liminal relational identities, where interns leave behind being students and adopt the identities and responsibilities of qualified professionals within pre-existing professional hierarchies of status and expertise. We explain how these new doctors and graduate nurses negotiate their liminal status, including in relation to more experienced but less qualified professional colleagues. We also discuss how interns cope with liminality due to disappointing and inadequate supervision and role modelling from senior colleagues but then find peer support and their place within their own professions. Finally, we discuss how new doctors and nurses come to terms with the precarity of working in resource constrained health systems, abandon expectations of secure, permanent employment and careers, and accept the realities of liminal professional careers. We explain how all three forms of liminality influence professionals' developing practices, identities, and careers. We call for further studies with a specific liminality lens to explore this critical period in health workers' careers, to inform policy and practice responding to global transformations in healthcare professions and practice.

What Is it That Insists? Polaroids of a Night in Tunisia with Adrienne Harris

ABSTRACT Adrienne Harris´ “You Must Remember This” is a propeller to re-encounter the notion of “aprés coup,” a concept that continues to defy analysand’s and analyst’s archetypical constructions. Taking Harris’ invitation to stroll between Tangiers and Casablanca, this piece offers a voyage from the landscape of personal stories to the possibilities within relational clinic, using the savvy of music, film, literature, and philosophy, coalesced in a couple of psychic polaroids. The first polaroid frames the enigmatic presence and movement of memory, the issue of what is it that insists in session. The second, snapshots the bending movements of time and space in liminal experiences at inter-subjective spaces (session-treatment), which demands the analyst to go beyond its own “I” to maintain liminal spaces open for radical alterity to manifest. Finally, the author focuses on the notion of emptiness to create new paths, which may demand the analyst to disown its omnipotence.

Beyond the land of the living death: early-stage transformational entrepreneurs in digital healthcare as liminality navigator

PurposeThe lean startup approach (LSA) is extensively utilized by early-stage entrepreneurs, with “pivot” serving as a key pillar. However, there is a research gap concerning the boundary conditions impacting LSA and pivot decisions, especially when addressing societal challenges, as in the context of transformational entrepreneurship. In this regard, the healthcare sector, further compounded by a lack of research on startups and scale-ups, presents an embraced opportunity to provide multiple contributions for both theory and practice.Design/methodology/approachThe present investigation employs a grounded approach to explore the experiences of the co-founders of a fast-growing Italian e-health startup. A narrative strategy was employed to organize conditions and evolving strategic action/interactions into three different pivoting phases of the startup – before the pivot, its enactment and aftermath – with primary and secondary data collected over a period of one year.FindingsPivoting in digital healthcare unfolded as a liminal experience marked by factors such as high regulation, multiple stakeholders, technological and symbolic ambivalence, resource-intensive demands and institutional actors acting as pathway pioneers, leading to an information overload and unforeseeable uncertainty to manage. These factors challenge entrepreneurs' ability to attain optimal distinctiveness, presenting the paradoxical need for vertical flexibility for scaling up.Social implicationsBy uniquely illuminating the sector’s constraints on entrepreneurial phenomena, this study provides a valuable guide for entrepreneurs and institutional actors in addressing societal challenges.Originality/valueThis study introduces a process model of transformational information crafting when pivoting, highlighting the role of entrepreneurs' transformational stance and platform-mediated solutions as engines behind strategies involving information breaking and transition, preceding knowledge-driven integration strategies.

NOVICE TEACHERS’ LIMINALITY AND SELF-EFFICACY THROUGH TECHNOLOGY DURING COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic created a social-educational problem in understanding how novice teachers developed self-efficacy through technology amidst distance learning. Exploring the social-educational problem of novice teachers’ liminality and construction of self-efficacy during COVID-19-related school closures is an emerging issue that justifies further research because a gap in research and understanding currently exists regarding this topic. This qualitative study explored how novice teachers developed self-efficacy through technology amidst the liminal first-time experiences of distance learning. To explore this topic, three concepts were used: the theory of self-efficacy through mastery experiences, the theory of liminality, and the theory of innovation. The research questions addressed how novice teachers developed self-efficacy through technology amidst the liminal first-time experiences of distance learning. To collect data for this study, 10 novice teachers in a Pacific Northwestern state were recruited through professional networking to participate in a semi structured interview. Data was analyzed by conducting three rounds of coding and drawing conclusions concerning the research questions. The results of this study affirmed that novice teachers developed self-efficacy via technology in innovative ways amidst COVID-19 school closures. They confirmed that examining the liminal experiences of novice teachers can provide insight into educational improvements for preservice teachers. This study could positively impact social change by better preparing new teachers to use technology innovatively to serve students in the classroom and via digital instruction.

Crossing the Threshold by/around Water: A Critical Reading of the Liminal Experiences of Adolescents and Young Adults in Feeding the Moonfish and Our Place

AbstractThis study seeks to examine water as a liminal symbol that reflects and symbolizes the liminal identities of adolescents and young adults in two selected plays for young adults: Feeding the Moonfish (2011) by Barbara Wiechmann and Our Place (2015) by Terry Gabbard. Feeding the Moonfish deals with the young adults Martin and Eden who suffer from traumatic experiences. They go to the dock by the lake to rediscover themselves, and, eventually, heal by the water. In a similar setting, Our Place comprises five stories that revolve around adolescents and young adults’ feelings of loss, fragmentation, frustration, love, and death. In both plays, the characters go through the three stages of liminality defined by Arnold van Gennep: the pre-liminal, the liminal, and the post-liminal and, finally, emerge as reborn/healed. Water is a complex liminal symbol that reflects the experiences of adolescence and young adults, and combines contradictory meanings which are essential, expressive, and, most importantly, complementary for the development of the characters and for their eventual recovery. Using the concept of liminality and adolescent psychology to read scenes in which liminal experiences (confusion, indecisiveness, and disorientation) are present, this study argues that the depiction of liminal experiences near water in these plays for young adults offers complex symbols for the study of young adulthood and for encountering and responding to traumas experienced in adolescence.

“If you wish to see some great theatre…”

David Henry Hwang’s play M. Butterfly (1988), reworked by David Cronenberg into a film (1993), is well-known for its suspension of disbelief (which resulted in some rewriting for the 2017 Broadway revival). While the play and its film adaptation have been extensively discussed in terms of gender and race, performing femininity and masculinity, East and West (Chow, de Lauretis, Levin), I will look at the trope of theatricality in film (Bazin, Sontag, Knopf, Loiselle) and the effects of liminality that it mediates. M. Butterfly ascribes the “betwixt and between,” liminal quality to all complex issues of human existence, including art and politics. The essay illuminates four aspects of the liminal experience: its ability to blur spatial boundaries, to disorient temporarily, to intensify perceptions, and to transform the observers into participants (Turner, Schechner, Fischer-Lichte). M. Butterfly is the story of a French diplomat René Gallimard’s (Jeremy Irons) love for a Peking opera diva Song Liling—a spy and a man in disguise (John Lone). Hwang’s play elaborates on the spatio-temporal aspects of the liminal: the blurred boundaries between the past and the present, the inside and the outside, or the ego versus alter ego. The film places emphasis on the intensifying and transformational potential of the liminal space, relying upon intermedial effects of the theatre within a film. Theatricality flows over into the cinematic reality and creates—through intermedial contact—an alternative reality, self-conscious, disorienting, and hallucinatory. Condensing various liminality effects, the play and its adaptation foster liminal sensibilities in the audiences.

Intimate liminality in Spain's berry industry

AbstractSpain's berry industry relies on the agricultural labour of both local and seasonal migrant workers. A significant part of this migrant workforce comprises Moroccan mothers who leave their children with relatives in order to perform this wage labour. The bilateral recruitment regime favours the employment of Moroccan women with children for this labour to ensure that workers return home at the end of the harvesting season. Drawing on multi‐site ethnographic research in Spain and Morocco, this study revealed the effects of this bilateral labour regime on the intimate lives of migrant workers. We argue that the geopolitical prescriptions of this labour migration regime, along with the working and living conditions of migrant workers in Huelva, result in experiences of intimate liminality. We examined these experiences by exploring: (1) how the role of female workers as mothers becomes liminal as transnational labour agreements marginalise and outsource care obligations, (2) how governmental neglect of migrant workers' occupational health exposes them to reproductive health risks and (3) how this neglect places them in a liminal space in terms of access to healthcare, and (4) how, despite their liminality, migrant workers contest precarious conditions through everyday solidarity practices. We advance a feminist approach to liminality, emphasising the importance of an embodied, intersectional, and multiscalar perspective.

Between loss and restoration: The role of liminality in advancing theories of grief and bereavement

A recent national survey of bereaved partners found high levels of complicated grief and psychological distress, with evidence that loneliness and isolation may contribute to these outcomes. However, the mechanisms of action for this have not been explored. To advance grief theory this paper reports analysis of the survey free-text data to examine the relationship between social support and emotional responses to bereavement. Individuals bereaved of a civil partner or spouse 6–10 months previously were identified through death registration data. 569/1945 (29 %) completed surveys were received. Of those, 311 participants (55 %) provided responses to two free-text questions which asked about their ‘feelings since the death of their partner or spouse’, and ‘about the support around’ them. Data were analysed using corpus-assisted discourse analysis and the discourse dynamics approach for figurative language. Participants described diverse emotional responses to the bereavement (e.g. sadness, anger, denial, acceptance), and the value of formal and informal bereavement support. Although many of the experiences described are accounted for in existing grief theory, some participants described a liminal experience not recognised within these theories. They felt trapped, unable to engage with loss or restoration, and unable to move forward as their planned future no longer existed. They sought out ‘communitas’ (solidarity in experiences), but often found support from their social networks had diminished. Metaphors were used to describe this liminality, with partner grief expressed as a dark agentic force, a monster, an abyss, and as water. The findings of this study offer original insights into experiences and trajectories of bereavement, and our understandings of prolonged or complicated grief. A novel model ‘Between Loss and Restoration’ is presented to include these experiences. Recognition of the place for liminality within the spectrum of grief experiences could enhance grief literacy and improve formal and informal bereavement support provision.

“A man doesn’t drink from a straw. Never!” the experience of coming out as gay to oneself and to others

We examine in this paper the individual and social process of coming out as gay. Through a sociocultural and developmental psychology theoretical lens, we unfold the process as a liminal experience that starts within the individual and is continuously negotiated in between the person, the social others, and the broader society. Through interviews and autoethnography, we look at this process through the experiences of three young men coming out in Denmark. The findings highlight how coming out is a complex process that starts before one comes out to others and continues to develop as a meaning-making process as the person starts coming out to others, where others’ responses are internalized and continue to form this person’s identification within society.

Learned from a Semester Spent in Schools

ABSTRACT This article reports on the experiences of a mid-career teacher educator who spent a full semester supervising student teachers in schools. Adopting a self-study methodology, she and a critical friend collected and analyzed data, often in the form of reflection, on her experiences of third space and liminality. The time that she spent on the project helped her to develop more nuanced understandings of the complex daily realities faced by elementary teachers, which led to changes in her instruction with the preservice teachers with whom she worked. Importantly, the experience helped her to rediscover a sense of passion for her work. Her approach led to deeper insights on the importance of spending time in schools and of emotions and relationships in the work of teacher education. The experience points toward interesting professional development possibilities for teacher educators at mid-career.