Forms Of Liminality Research Articles

Liminality between the lines: self-defined, socially constructed and ontological constraints in the narratives of Russian-medium school teachers in Estonia

PurposeThis study explores the segregated context of Estonian education systems, where Estonian and Russian medium schools coexist. Using the underrepresented theory of liminality in sociology, the author examines the vulnerable positions of teachers in Russian-medium schools.Design/methodology/approachThis study employs a qualitative research design with semi-structured interviews as the main method, the snowball sampling technique of data collection and a hybrid thematic analysis. The sample includes 27 teachers from around Estonia.FindingsThe findings reveal that these teachers experience different forms of liminality, shaped by self-defined, socially constructed and ontological constraints. These liminal moments foster teacher reflexivity, serving as a catalyst for their transformations while navigating the state of “in-betweenness.”Practical implicationsPractically, as Estonia continues to navigate its educational reforms and cultural shifts, recognizing and addressing the liminality of Russian-medium school teachers is crucial for promoting diversity, equity and inclusion within the nation’s educational landscape.Originality/valueThe study brings theoretical novelty to the anthropological theory of liminality, combining it with a new empirical case of the Estonian parallel education system, which had been under-explored from the side of the Russian-speaking community (particularly the Russian-medium schools).

"I Love Every Part of You"

"I Love Every Part of You"

It Never Ends: Vulnerable Consumers’ Experiences of Persistent Liminality and Resource (Mis)Integration

Transformative Service Research (TSR) highlights the fundamental importance of resource integration for consumer well-being. However, recent research suggests that resource integration can be problematic and imperfect, particularly for vulnerable consumers with complex and ongoing resource requirements. Such vulnerable consumers may face transition challenges and end up in an uncertain “in-between” experience of liminality, where the linkage to resource integration remains under-researched. In response to recent service prioritization challenges, we explore how vulnerable actors experience liminality and resource integration in service systems. The vulnerable actors highlighted in this study are parents in families of children with life-long conditions (e.g., autism spectrum disorder/ASD and Down syndrome). We reveal a new form of liminality as a persistent, relational phenomenon that interdependent vulnerable actors with ongoing complex resource needs collectively experienced within service systems. Further, we identify the dynamics of persistent liminality as Precipitating, Subsisting, and Resisting. Finally, in line with TSR, we shed light on the resource constraints that decrease the well-being of vulnerable consumers. We also identify implications for theory, practice, and future research.

PUBLIC RECONVERSIONS TO ORTHODOX CHRISTIANITY IN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE, 1730–1820

The Christianization of Muslims turned upside down the one-way logic of religious conversion under Ottoman rule, which dictated that a non-Muslim (Christian or Jew) could become a Muslim, but a Muslim could not abandon their faith. The conversion of Muslims to Orthodox Christianity constituted thus an act of defiance of Ottoman political order, and the converts were exposed to the charge of apostasy that could cost them their lives. Given the above, it is not surprising that abandoning Islam for Christianity was a marginal phenomenon; it occurred either outside Ottoman territory or after losing an Ottoman region to a Christian state. However, the period between 1730 and 1820 saw the emergence of a particular form of Christianization that was a double conversion; namely, the public renouncement of the Muslim faith by Christian converts to Islam who proclaimed their return to Christianity wishing to wash out the sin of apostasy with an atoning death. Several of them were executed and were hailed by Greek-Orthodox subjects of the sultan as martyrs for the faith. In this study, I analyze the dynamics of double conversion from three points of view: that of the makers, that is, of those who promoted reconversion to Christianity at the cost of death, provided it with a theoretical framing, and formed networks of training and support for the double converts; that of the actors, namely, of the double converts themselves, of their social backgrounds, and of the reasons behind their fatal decisions; and that of the public, of the various social groups and individuals who witnessed this liminal form of conversion, assessed it and responded to it. The interpretation endeavours to shed light on a radical aspect of Greek-Orthodox confessionalization at a time of intense sociocultural conflict and political upheaval, and to highlight the complexity of responses to, and instantiations of, modernity.

Pilgrimage, Precarity, and Pandemics

Pilgrimage, Precarity, and Pandemics

Angolan children’s experiences in residential centers: displacement, liminality, and belonging

Abstract This article examines how language, liminality, and social marginalization converge in the institutional lives of two displaced children in Angola. A displaced child is very likely to be placed into institutionalized care, which in Angola exists in the form of centros de acolhimento, residential centers that house minors affected by orphanhood, poverty, displacement, or abandonment. Drawing on one year of ethnographic research in two residential centers, the article argues that despite being sites of care and protection, some children come to desire living on the street as a byproduct of persistent marginalization and forms of liminality in the institutions. Utilizing audiovisual recordings of everyday interactions among children and the center’s staff as data, the focus of the article is a set of communicative practices that routinely positioned certain children as liminal subjects who possessed the negative attributes with which liminality is most often associated: danger, pollution, and being an ambiguous nonentity. As a result, those children occupied marginalized positions within the centers and their attempts at claiming their belonging were repeatedly undermined. The lived experience, talk, and perspectives of two children, a boy and a girl, are closely analyzed to illuminate the micro-processes involved in the discursive production of their liminality and social marginality. More broadly, the article elucidates the everyday forms of liminality that take place in the mundane, rather than in ritualized rites of passage, and questions the traditional notion of liminality as a temporary state.

The Protective Gaze and the Ideology of the Endangered Child

The Protective Gaze and the Ideology of the Endangered Child Jason Middleton (bio) It might seem counterintuitive to begin a discussion of grown-up horror with a film paradigmatic of a horror cycle so indelibly associated with adolescent characters and audiences: John Carpenter's iconic slasher Halloween (1978).1 But I will suggest that the minimal presence of literal adults throughout the film facilitates a mode of cinematic vision I term the "protective gaze," which gives formal expression to a set of distinctively adult fears and anxieties about child endangerment that took hold during the period of the film's long theatrical run. I will then discuss the Black Mirror episode "Arkangel" (Jodie Foster, 2017) as exemplary of how some recent grown-up horror positions adult mothers as protagonists terrorized by a culture of parenting radically transformed since the 1970s and 1980s by the very fears of child endangerment that Halloween and other early slasher films allegorize. Carol Clover's influential analysis of the first slasher cycle called for viewers and critics to move beyond the "literal" onscreen gender of the characters toward a "figurative or functional analysis [that] begins with the processes of point of view and identification." 2 But in Clover's work and in most subsequent scholarship on [End Page 328] the slasher, where gender has been understood as figurative, the principal characters' age—their status as adolescents—has generally been taken literally. For Clover, the figurative liminal gender of the Final Girl and killer, respectively, works in tandem with the Final Girl's more literal liminal social and developmental status as an adolescent between childhood and adulthood. Taken together, these forms of liminality suggest the centrality of the presumed teenage male viewer for whom the Final Girl's life-and-death struggle with the killer symbolically represents the psychodrama of sexual maturation and gendered subject formation. Her phallicization in the final defeat of the killer stages the achievement of normative adult male heterosexuality. Offering a different perspective on the characters' status as youths, Adam Lowenstein historicizes Clover's Oedipal narrative, arguing that Laurie's age can be understood in the same figurative register as her gender. Lowenstein reads Halloween as historical allegory for the explosive American divorce rate between 1960 and 1980. He points out how the teens in the film actually figure childhood, or even adolescence, much less so than they do adulthood: "their place within the mise-en-scène aligns them with parents more than anything else."3 Parents are either absent or impotent in Halloween. We see Laurie's own parents only briefly at the start, when her father, a realtor trying to sell the long-abandoned Myers house, tasks Laurie with dropping off the keys. He thus unwittingly endangers her, as this errand is the first scene in the film to place her in Michael's sightline. Laurie's caregiving role as Tommy's babysitter casts her as the only competent parental figure in the film, but she is "simultaneously a child removed from her own parents."4 Michael in turn is both a demonized child and, symbolically, a punishing parent. In Lowenstein's reading, the film speaks to the "hypothetical teenage child of divorce" by offering Laurie and Michael's drawn-out union as a "sort of fantastic resolution" to the trauma of a broken home, "two parents who keep coming back together again, who seem destined for each other . . . or two children overcoming their divorce-induced fear of romantic relationships."5 For Lowenstein, the fluid and figurative age of the principal characters responds to the spike in the American divorce rate during the era of the film's production as well as the upheaval of the postwar nuclear family's dominant social status. But what links Clover's psychoanalytic interpretation to Lowenstein's allegorical, sociohistorical one is that in both cases Halloween and other slasher films of the time are seen to assuage anxieties attributed to an adolescent viewer. This essay argues that the liminality of both [End Page 329] Laurie's gender and her age positions her to represent the fears and anxieties of a parent or caregiver in this sociohistorical context. As scholars such as Robin Wood...

From ‘Something in Between’ to ‘Everything All at Once’: Meditations on Liminality and Blackness in Afro-Finnish Hip-Hop and R&B

Since its global spread in the 1980s, hip-hop has been a crucial cultural sphere in which Europeans of color have engaged the experiences of race and racism, gender, and national belonging, with hip-hop music and culture often considered to function as the cultural lingua franca of the African diaspora. Given the continued dominance of Nordic exceptionalism and formal color-blindness in both the Finnish national imaginary and public discourses, hip-hop emerges as an important site for examining the production of counter-discourses and -narratives by Finns of color, and Afro-Finns in particular. This article approaches Afro-Finnish hip-hop as an alternative archive of Afro-Finnish experience and thought. It centers three works by the Afro-Finnish R&B singer Rosa Coste and Afro-Finnish rapper Yeboyah to examine articulations of liminality in relation to Blackness, mixedness, and Finnishness. Exploring the multiple readings of liminality discernible across these works, the article shows that they offer meaningful meditations on Afro-Finnish identity and experience. In raising the multiple forms of liminality that shape the Afro-Finnish experience, these works also raise questions about the potentials and limitations of multiraciality as a category of analysis in the Finnish context.

“We are the living dead”, or, the Precarious Stabilisation of Liminal Life in the Presence of CKDu

AbstractThis article examines how everyday encounters with kidney disease treatment in Sri Lanka’s dry zone generate distinct space‐times of liminality. Building on work that explores the alternative coordinates of biopolitical intervention, I argue that health improvement schemes in the dry zone yield complex materialisations of “living death” in conditions of austerity, poverty, and aridity. Specifically, I illustrate how intervention reconfigures body‐ecologies, dismantles infrastructures of liveability, and re‐works relations between life and time in order to stabilise liminal forms of existence. Drawing on 15 months of ethnographic data, I describe two space‐times of liminality that emerge through experiences of treatment: the “zombie” and “life in the bubble”. As part of my analysis, I document how these bodily states are ambiguously configured by experiences of care. Across these encounters, I illustrate how patients toggle back and forth between states of debility and capacity in ways that blur boundaries between life/death and bodies/environments.

Dual Liminars: Teenagers and Young People with a Family Member in Prison

Abstract Young people’s voices are rarely heard within research or policy discourse, including in respect of familial imprisonment. This article centralizes their voices and specific experiences of parental and/or sibling imprisonment by drawing on in-depth interviews with 17 young people aged 17–25 at the time of interview, though also reflecting back on when they were younger. Drawing on the concept of liminality, and specifically dual liminality, it argues that in order to fully recognize and understand these experiences, we must consider the interactions between the multiple forms of liminality they are subject to – in places, as people with a family member in prison and as adolescents – in order to understand their experiences as the family member of a prisoner and as young people.

The Ridiculous Legend of El Gran Vázquez: Self-deprecation and Picaresque in the Autofictional Comics by Vázquez

ABSTRACT Autobiography in graphic narrative has been extensively used and studied as a wide concept; however, autofiction, as a liminal form of it, has not received the same critical attention. Despite this, autofictional creations have been present in graphic narrative since its beginnings. Self-representation has not only adopted transcendental intimate stories involving reflective traumatic experiences or confessional involvement but has also allowed sarcastic and parodic performances. This humorous possibility in autofictional practices is the one that Manuel Vázquez Gallego, known as Vázquez, used since 1958 to introduce himself in his stories and create an extravagant graphic double, famous for his fanciful (mis)adventures and crooked illusions. For more than thirty years, Vázquez represented himself in order to establish an imaginary identity and to place himself as a licentious ideal figure. What started as a simple satirical and self-deprecation mechanism became the central motif of his latest publications, to the point of blurring the limits of his fictional enterprises and his daily real life. In this text, I will analyse the way in which Vázquez articulated an absurd and picaresque legend of himself based on the subversion of the intimate story through an autofictional humoristic and fantastic self.

The liminal role of the screenplay: Pre-production, the screen idea and the visual concept

The screen idea is a scholarly term used to describe the collective idea for a narrative screen project that exists in the minds of the collaborators as their concept for the work is evolving. The term has mostly been related to the script development phase of a project to elucidate the liminal form and function of the screenplay during that period. The screen idea can also be related to subsequent phases of conventional commercial screen production, such as the intensive planning period known as pre-production. One of the central activities during pre-production is the process undertaken by key heads of department – director, production designer and director of photography (DOP) – in conceiving a visual style with which to tell the story. This group is sometimes referred to as the visual triumvirate. The visual concept developed by the triumvirate sets out a plan for how the formal qualities of the work, such as colour, contrast, camera movement and lens choice, will be used to drive and enhance the expression of the narrative. During this phase, the imagery inferred through the words of the script begins to find tangible form, thereby contributing to the evolution of the screen idea as it progresses beyond the script development phase. Through examples taken from creative practice in recent Australian film and television, alongside the author’s own industry experience, this article examines factors influencing the process of negotiation between the triumvirate as they develop a visual style for their screen projects.

The Short Story, the New Weird, and the Literary Market

AbstractThe short story is commonly – and very productively – treated in the spirit of critical terms such as marginality and liminality. Quite surprisingly, though, New Weird Fiction, which postulates similar interests in, e.g., formal and aesthetic innovation as well as literary ambition, is primarily associated with the novel. The underlying lack of interest in the New Weird Short Story in both popular culture and academic work is scrutinised in this article. In a first step, it will survey the short story as a liminal form, both formally and aesthetically, and contextualize it by drawing upon the state of the literary market in the twenty-first century. The contribution’s main argument is that the short story has always either been considered to be too ‘popular’ or too ‘literary’ in order to contest the novel as the prevalent literary form. Step two will perform a similar move regarding Weird Fiction, thus highlighting the parallels between the short and the Weird, and the need for more academic attention dedicated to the New Weird short story.

Liminal moods and sense-making under conditions of uncertainty

Researchers have begun to recognize the importance of intuition and strategies of affectively grounded sense-making, specifically in the context of late modern societies which are characterized by high degrees of uncertainty, risk and rapidly changing environments. In fact, affectivity has been considered one of the most central features of today´s permanently liminal forms of life. However, the roles of different varieties of affective experience have not yet been fully taken into consideration. Drawing from Gilbert Simondon´s theory of individuation, we here focus on moods specifically and develop a theoretical perspective on how moods functionally contribute to situated sense-making under conditions of uncertainty. We thereby hope to contribute to solving some of the problems psychologists keep having with mood experiences. At the same time, we think that our approach will prove fruitful for studying processes of sense-making in undecided and open (social) environments

"Reverse Centrifugal Movement": Reading Liminality at the Shrinescape

Abstract: This paper main objective is to explain the nature and dynamics of solidarity and kindness that being shown in arbain walk, an annual Shi`i pilgrimage where noticeable presence of non-Muslims are observed. Coming from different religious and ethnic backgrounds, these lovers of Imam Husain are united by Imam Husain`s barakah in one hand and epic hospitality of Iraqi people for Imam Husain`s millions of devotee in other hand. The paper argues that this is an elaborated form of liminality, as emerge and envelope the pilgrims in their shrine-related religious activity, cordially affected by its shrine centered pilgrimage, namely Imam Husain`s shrine, in which shrine`s materiality and its multilayered intellectual and spiritual narrativity determines the form and intensity of pilgrim`s comradeship that being sensed. Reverse centrifugal movement is a dynamics through which Imam Husain`s shrinescape shapes the form and intensity of mutual friendship that emerge during this bigger than hajj annual rite.

Liminality of women’s leisure in Mumbai, India

This paper theorizes the transformative potential of women’s night-time leisure in Mumbai’s urban areas. To this end, I draw on instances from qualitative field-based research focused on Mumbai’s call centers and surrounding areas of informal urban activity. For women working night shifts in this sector, leisure activities occur with the help of informal vendors who run food stalls on streets around call centers. These times and space of leisure, I argue, disrupt capitalist and caste-based patriarchal systems. I analyze such leisure as a “limen” (cf. Lugones, 2003 ), a form of liminality that disrupts systems of production and reproduction that constitute the everyday (cf. Lefebvre, 1991 ). I elaborate on the temporal attributes of the limen to show how it goes against the grain of “efficiency” that otherwise shapes women’s routines. The fluid spatial nature of women’s night-time leisure helps rework dichotomous understandings of the public and private realm, demonstrating possibilities for intimate interactions within the public domain. The limen and intimate interactions therein often occur between food vendors and women working night shifts, revealing an intersubjective dynamic that ephemerally disrupts societal hierarchies. As such, the limen reworks and challenges existing structures, and in doing so, holds significance for envisioning a politics of change.

Costumed doubles and avatars in Janieta Eyre’s photographic self-portraits

This article aims at furthering our understanding of costuming in self-portraiture through the analysis of Janieta Eyre’s photographic works. Exploring the fictionalizing potentialities of photography and flouting the conventions of self-portraiture, the Canadian artist stages her multiple doubles in a playful yet introspective way. The studio becomes an experimental huis-clos harbouring fantasy self-explorations. The costumes that she assembles allow for complex dramatizations of the othered self. In these performative self-fictions the costume constitutes a prosthetic device. Her burlesque impersonations address gender identity in a subversive way. Judith Butler’s view of gender as stylized repetition of acts chimes in with Eyre’s use of seriality and endless mises-en-abyme, while Paul Gee’s definition of projective identity as a liminal form of identity—an interface between the real and the virtual self—and other researchers’ exploration of the avatar in game theory shed additional light on Eyre’s use of costuming.

Liminality and the asylum process in Switzerland

The process of turning asylum seekers into refugees involves a complex management and bureaucratic machinery that often creates prolonged periods of uncertainty (social, legal and economic) as people are reclassified and reconfigured. Turner’s category of liminality helps to explore the process of determining economic migrants from refugees as a rite of passage in which people are indefinitely trapped ‘betwixt and between’. In the current reaction against immigration, the liminal period indefinitely inhabited by asylum seekers no longer serves the purpose of passage from one status to another and ultimately, incorporation into the social structure. Instead, it acts as a barrier or filter which insulates the social body at a time of intense movement and mobility. Therefore, the liminal period is no longer a formative one with the potential for the reproduction of social structures, but rather a space/time of annihilation and negation of sociality. This article examines the multiple forms of liminality that asylum seekers in Switzerland experience during the process of asylum request.

The In-Between of Jazz and the Blues : Beyond Marginality in Esi Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues

In this paper I show how in the Ghanaian-born Canadian writer Esi Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues, the marginality of a“hitherto little-regarded corner of the black Diaspora”—the history of the so-called Rhineland Mischlingers—is put in the center of a story that concerns itself with specific memories of the Second World War of a Black American jazz musician. In order to do so, I focus on the different forms of liminality—or in-betweenness—that these memories present : temporal, spacial, ethnic and musical, as well as generic and finally linguistic. I show that these liminalities—at the very margin of marginality, or beyond—will reveal the horrors of war but will also create a Deleuzian ligne de fuite that allows the protagonist to come to terms with this painful period in his life as a musician and as a man.

Biographical suspension and liminality of Self in accounts of severe sciatica

Sciatica is a common form of low back pain (LBP) that has been identified as distinct both in terms of the persistence and severity of symptoms. Little research has explored individual experiences of sciatica, and none focuses on individuals with the most severe, long-lasting symptoms who may experience the most profound impact. This paper addresses this gap through proposing a theoretical framework for understanding such experiences, that of biographical suspension as a form of liminality of Self. Twenty semi-structured interviews were conducted with individuals with severe sciatic symptoms between January 2016‒March 2017, as part of the UK-based SCOPiC (SCiatica Outcomes in Primary Care) randomised controlled trial. Data were analysed thematically using the constant comparison method. The concept of ‘biographical suspension’, originally developed in LBP, emerged as one whereby individuals put life on-hold in the expectation of an eventual return to their former, pain-free selves. Deeper analysis extended this concept to a form of liminality, whereby individuals are caught between pre- and post-sickness selves, unable to fully identify with either. This liminality is underpinned by ongoing beliefs about sciatica as a temporary and fixable ‘injury’ rather than long-term ‘illness’, even among those with long-lasting symptoms. This led to a disjuncture between individuals' ongoing pain beliefs and experiences, resulting in longer-term psychological impacts. Biographical suspension is further conceptualised as an experiential stage giving rise to four distinct short-term trajectories: i) symptom resolution leading individuals to occupy a clearly post-liminal state; ii) remaining in suspended liminality; iii) ongoing symptoms leading to a post-liminal state of resignation; ix) a state of being both between sickness and wellness, and straddling hope and fear; thus exemplifying differing states of liminality experienced over time. Findings have implications for the support provided in clinical settings to individuals who may struggle to self-manage due to sustained liminality of Self.