Liminal Moment Research Articles

Constructing extraordinary experience from everyday life: Zibo barbecue check-in vlogs’ digital narratives

Examining the intersection of check-in tourism and travel vlogs within the context of Zibo, China—a destination popularized on social media platforms for its barbecue culture—this study analyzes 24 check-in vlogs from Bilibili platform. Through the rite of passage theoretical lens, this work investigates how vloggers utilize digital storytelling to shape and construct destination narratives. The research reveals how tourists assert agency over space by integrating place, body, and narrative elements, contributing to an extraordinary tourist experience comprising liminal moments of ordinariness and authenticity, thereby effectively (re)writing Zibo as a welcoming city of barbecue and a slow-life destination. This investigation provides insights into the evolving dynamics of contemporary tourism influenced by social media practices, highlighting the transformative role of digital narratives in shaping tourist perceptions and experiences, as well as meaning-making processes.

Recipe for Identity

The placement of recipes in a food memoir serves the unique function of contextualising a life story against culture, tradition, and history. They serve as a form of self-expression that looks at life in its entirety through an amalgamation of the material and abstract aspects of existence. For women in the diaspora, recipes not only enable them to maintain a link to the homeland through the preservation and perpetuation of foodways but also serve as a medium to adapt to the new country. Bengali-American historian and writer Chitrita Banerji’s A Taste of My Life: A Memoir in Essays and Recipes (2021) is structured as a three-course meal and uses recipes to frame liminal moments of existence. The food memoir traces the arc of Banerji’s life over seven decades—from her childhood in India, to her student life in the US, followed by married life in Bangladesh and culminates with her mature years spent dividing her time between the US and India. Banerji reconstructs her life through the food that has defined her with the recipes providing a structure for her transnational life that spans years and continents; they provide unity and coherence across space and time. This paper argues that the inclusion of recipes helps Banerji in constructing an identity that takes the whole gamut of her experiences into account. The recipes show her journey from dislocation to relocation and provide the scaffolding for the construction of a self that is reconciled and empowered. Banerji’s recipes articulate the way in which food anchors her, provides the impetus for her growth and gives her the means to reflect on life with a certain resolve tempered with a hint of nostalgia. Through her narrative we see how a recipe borrows as well as adapts, preserves as well as modifies. There is replication as well as recreation in a recipe, which is similar to a diaspora individual balancing assimilation with adaptation. Every recipe reveals a new facet of her identity and is crucial in her understanding of the self in relation to others.

Who's in control? Situating expertise, (mis)trust, and power among the Latine/Hispanic community in COVID-19's liminal moments

BackgroundResearch has established the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on Black, Indigenous, and People of color (BIPOC) communities, and the barriers to vaccine trust and access among these populations. Focusing on perceptions of safety, access, and trustworthiness, studies often attach barriers to community-members, and discuss vaccines as if developed from an objective perspective, or “view from nowhere” (Haraway). ObjectiveWe sought to follow Haraway's concept of “situated knowledges,” whereby no one truth exists, and information is understood within its context, to understand the exertions of expertise surrounding vaccines. We focused on perceptions of power among a BIPOC community during a relatively unexamined moment, wherein the status of the pandemic and steps to prevent it were particularly uncertain. MethodsWe report the findings of ten focus groups conducted among members of Rhode Island's Latine/Hispanic communities between December 2021 and May 2022. We called this time COVID-19's liminal moment because vaccines were distributed, mandates were lifted, vaccine efficacy was doubted, and new strains spread. We translated, transcribed, and analyzed focus groups using thematic analysis. ResultsCommunity-member (n = 65) perceptions of control aligned with three key themes: (1) no power is capable of controlling COVID-19, (2) we are the objects of scientific and political powers, and (3) we, as individuals and communities, can control COVID-19 through our decisions and actions. ConclusionsBy centering the perspectives of a minoritized community, we situated the scientific knowledge produced about COVID-19 within the realities of imperfect interventions, uncontrollable situations, and medical power-exertions. We argue that medical knowledge should not be assumed implicitly trustworthy, or even capable, but instead seen as one of many products of human labor within human systems. Trust and trustworthiness must be mutually negotiated between experts, contexts, and communities through communication, empowerment, and justice.

Seduction of far-right actions: A pathway to an authentic self?

Far-right civil movements have emerged as a significant predicament in numerous regions worldwide. Despite abundant research on the tactics employed by far-right groups to instil ideologies, behaviours and sentiments in their followers, such as street demonstrations, investigations into the meaning-making of far-right actions in relation to the trajectories of the participants’ lives remain scarce. The present study uses the analytical tool proposed by Katz to explore how far-right activists obtain a sense of moral transcendence through their activism, including participating in the liminal moments of far-right rallies, revelling in unrestricted speech, discovering new abilities, acquiring knowledge and engaging in self-expression. We contend that these experiences engender in participants the sense that they are acquiring that which is absent from their lives and recovering their ‘true selves’. The study maintains that to comprehend the allure of the far right, it is essential to contextualise far-right actions within the participants’ lives, the societies that they inhabit, and the circumstances that surround them. In short, the sensation that one is rediscovering one’s ‘true self’ may encourage activists to pursue the more remote objective of reclaiming what they perceive as their nations’ lost ideals.

JUSTICE IN THE LIMINAL: THE COUNCIL OF EUROPE AND THE RIGHT TO A HEALTHY ENVIRONMENT

AbstractAs the human right to a healthy environment is codified around the globe, some systems still lag behind. One noticeable straggler is the Council of Europe, which is currently undergoing its fourth attempt to recognize the right. This article examines the proposals tabled within this system in light of overarching debates about climate justice and environmental rights, before focusing specifically on the spatial and temporal limits of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the institutional features of its Court. First, the article describes what the author sees as the current liminal moment in the development of human rights law, a time of transition in which established legal concepts can be questioned or reaffirmed. Second, it sketches recent proposals for locating and conceptualizing the right to a healthy environment within the Council of Europe. Evaluating different options, it makes the case for including this right in the ECHR. Third, the article discusses the right's potential to reshape the spatial and temporal limitations on legal subjectivity and Convention protections. These proposals come at a crucial time when the system's ability to protect human rights from environment-related impacts is being tested by climate litigation. The article understands these developments as interrelated and discusses whether current proposals could deliver on demands for climate justice by extending protection to future generations and for extraterritorial environmental impacts.

How water features: negotiating and reassembling the sociomaterial politics of central Californian groundwater

ABSTRACT This article explores responses to the California Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) to challenge post-political and governmentality perspectives on environmental management. I chart how SGMA reconfigured sociomaterial orderings in the Central Valley region, enacting a liminal moment for groundwater culture, between a historically entrenched libertarianism and an emergent communitarianism. Local organizations functioned as boundary organizations, re-shaping groundwater assemblages by negotiating boundaries between authority and marginalized communities. I argue that the structures and institutions typically critiqued in post-political and de-political theorising can be more fruitfully conceptualized as part of sociomaterial assemblages within which there lies potential for transformative groundwater politics.

Making the Fantastic Real: Exploring Transmedial Aspects of Cosplay Costumes

Abstract Cosplayers create elaborate costumes with fantastic details and effects imitating the visual and material culture artifacts and features of fictional characters. As such, cosplay costumes balance wearability for the cosplayer and accuracy to the selected character’s appearance. Further challenges to accurate portrayals are costumes that need to be animated or made from materials resembling the visuals originally created using animation or CGI. This article employs Tzvetan Todorov’s theory that suggests the fantastic is a liminal moment of hesitation between belief and disbelief. The author also draws on the concepts of Steven Shaviro’s “tactile convergence” and Sarah Gilligan’s “tactile transmediality,” where the material real-world qualities of cosplayers’ costumes cross between the fictional imaginative space of the story and the lived material body. This analysis further highlights how cosplayers spend extraordinary amounts of time and money on their costumes to portray fantastic characters with transmedial qualities and narratives regarding the character’s appearance.

Does the Field of Social Work Have Debts to Pay?

In the last issue’s editorial, Anna Scheyett asserted that social work is occupying a liminal moment; liminality, a term borrowed from anthropology, means existing on a threshold between two worlds. Scheyett (2023) wrote, “We are challenged to give up who and what we have been and how we have worked and to move forward to a new and as of yet not fully defined future” (p. 101). While much of Scheyett’s editorial was future facing, she did pose a very tough question about our field’s past, one which I would like to address here in this guest editorial. She wrote, “The profession is beginning to acknowledge the harms it has caused in the past, our racist roots, our alliances with oppressors… . What we will be and do instead of our past harms is not yet clear” (Scheyett, 2023, p. 101). I was watching the first season of True Detective the other day, and at a pivotal point, the characters realized that in not fully solving a previous case, they had incurred a debt, one that, without payment, would haunt them, even though no one else would ever know about it.

Holding on or letting go: Inheritance as a liminal experience

Marketing and consumer research has drawn attention to life transitions as critical sites of consumption but has insufficiently explored bereavement, a universal life transition that can involve (un)wanted inheritance, initiating a potential cycle of retention, reimagining or disposal. Life transitions represent potentially transformative moments of consumption when individual consumption can be more positively redirected towards sustainable choices. Using semi-structured interviews and qualitative data, this study critically investigates the cycle of inheritance consumption, informed by Evans’ understanding of consumption with an emphasis on both acquisition and disposal. The study uncovers three liminal stages: separation and detachment; instability, ambiguity and prolonged liminality; and stability and completeness. First, we expand the scope of empirical consumer research by conceptualising inheritance as liminal. Second, we illuminate the inheritance consumption cycle, showing liminal inheritance stages are critical transition moments that trigger complex positive and negative emotional responses, with implications for whether goods remain suspended or pass into further utility. Finally, we extend liminality theory by conceptualising bereavement as a liminal life transition, and call for researchers to study inheritance beyond acquisition, since how inherited goods are retained or divested in liminal moments can have implications for sustainability and may provide opportunities to steer more responsible and fulfilling consumption with an emphasis on limits rather than excess.

A Liminal Moment in Social Work.

There is a concept from anthropology that I have found very useful throughout my career, and that has been on my mind a great deal lately—the concept of the liminal moment (Van Gennep, 1909). The term comes from the Latin limen, which literally means a threshold. Liminal moments are times of transition, specifically the time when it is realized that the way things were are over, but the way things will be are not yet clear. As beautifully described by Malksoo (2012), liminal moments are in-between situations and conditions where established structures are dislocated, hierarchies reversed, and traditional settings of authority possibly endangered… . It is thus a realm of great ambiguity, since the liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial. Yet, as a threshold situation, liminality is also a vital moment of creativity, a potential platform for renewing the societal make-up. (p. 481)

Light on loss in new works by Paul Emmanuel

Veil 1954 and Carbon Dad 2017, two new works from South African artist Paul Emmanuel's most recent exhibition Substance of Shadows (2021), are examined as depicting rites of passage of memory and mourning, following the recent loss of both Emmanuel's parents. They are discussed in dialogue with the five untitled incised drawings from Emmanuel's 2008 Transitions exhibition, which addressed significant male rites of passage that were also liminal moments in male lives. In rites of passage, the citations, quotations and traces that form a subject's socially constituted body are undone and rearranged. Transitions (5), however, represents the quotidian liminality of commuting and while it is fruitfully interpreted as a metaphor for death, a deeper exploration of this particular rite of passage is held over, this article argues, until Veil 1954 and Carbon Dad 2017. These two works are therefore examined as a continuation of the works of Transitions. Crucially, however, it is proposed that Emmanuel's principal memory engagement in these two works is enacted materially, through his medium of obsolete carbon paper, rather than the exposed photographic paper of Transitions. The ways in which Emmanuel works with carbon paper allows a sensitive embodied exploration of aging and frailty to emerge.

Sectarian, recreational, or anti-social? Interpreting juvenile violence in post-conflict Belfast

ABSTRACT In North Belfast, in 2018 and 2019, street violence involving groups of teenagers from unionist and nationalist communities resurfaced. To explain the persistence of this problem in contemporaneous Northern-Ireland, I focus on the obstacles local actors face when assessing the nature of this public problem. I return to the notion of ‘recreational rioting’, and how its critique led to debates on whether those behaviours were political or not: this unsettled controversy characterises the stalemate in the management of juvenile violence. I argue that this situation reveals a liminal moment in increasing interdependencies between unionist and nationalist communities.

The Queer Glow up of Hero-Sword Legacies in She-Ra, Korra, and Sailor Moon

Abstract The narratives within Sailor Moon Crystal, The Legend of Korra, and She-Ra and the Princesses of Power enlist gender fluid and queer protagonists to spearhead rebellions against the heteronormative domains of colonizers, imperialists, zealots, and hypercapitalistic military–industrial complexes. Magic is commodified by each villain; used to crown their exaggerated conquistador reputations and power their nuclear weapons. To defeat them and the toxic sociopolitical narratives and power paradigms they have spawned, Sailor Moon, Korra, Adora, and others must confront how these ideologies have stunted their power, corrupted their ethical systems, and distorted their understanding of their identities. By achieving self-actualization/self-acceptance and collaborating with their allies to do the same, they co-create new endings for themselves and reclaim a broader spectrum of gender and sexuality. Within the liminal moments of these reflective identity battles, protagonists and their allies enter a magical communal space, a social network for a Jungian collective unconscious. Here, they exchange their evolving powers, ideologies, and emotionally charged memories (her stories) and collaborate to liberate their communities. These champions, ambassadors of their (our) collective unconscious, urge us to commune within the liminal spaces of our social networks to self-actualize and collectively unearth a neohuman identity and system of governance.

Self-censorship and Shifting Cognitions of Offence in the Stand-up Acts of Basket Mouth and Trevor Noah

ABSTRACT With social media taking stand-up routines beyond their hitherto localised environments, there is growing irritation and backlash against comedians who supposedly tell unpleasant (or offensive) jokes. The ensuing decontextualisation creates a crisis wherein new media enables the kind of viewership that is less participatory, and thus more critical. As a result, jokes which ordinarily are framed within liminal moments of permissibility are increasingly exposed to various sensitivities and appraisals where they are evaluated by political correctness measures other than suspension of offence. This essay assesses the acts of Basket Mouth and Trevor Noah for the adaptive mechanics they deploy towards countering shifting cognitions arising from the transposition of stand-up routines from what used to be localised arenas to more global spaces. My inquiry interrogates newer ways in which the target comedians navigate the treacherous terrain of laughter evocation through anticipatory acts of self-censorship that work for both their immediate and mediatised audiences.

Using the ‘in-between’ to build quality in support relationships with people with cognitive disability: the significance of liminal spaces and time

ABSTRACT In a policy context of personalisation, disability support organisations recognise the increasingly contentious nature of clustering people according to disability. Instead, they are placing more emphasis on activities that promote community inclusion. Accordingly, the work between people with cognitive disability and their support workers is increasingly mobile. In this context, drawing on research using a conceptual framework based in recognition theory and social geography, this paper explores how the experience of liminal space-time influenced the working relationships between young people with cognitive disability and their support workers. It found that the pairs used liminal spacetime to build their relationships, creating conditions for mutual recognition to occur, whereby they experienced feeling cared about, respected and valued. These activities and negotiations were mediated at the institutional level by the policies and practices of the disability services. The significance of liminal moments were noted at the interpersonal level, both explicitly and tacitly; but not well taken account of at the institutional level. This disjuncture opens both opportunity and risk to young people and support workers. Appreciating the richness of liminal space-time for identity development opens the way for young people and support workers to use its productive potential.

Back to the Future

When speculating about the state of moving image in 2021, it might be instructive to explore the ‘pre-history’ of the current streaming era – and therefore this paper will initially focus on a particular cultural/historical moment, the year 2000 (and the very early 2000s); the start of a new millennium and the peak of the ‘dot com era’. This period was characterized by a huge burst of creative and technological energy related to moving image on the web, manifested in the emergence of specialised web portals such as Atomfilms, Shockwave, Heavy, Brickflims; independent creators such as Evan Mather and hi.res; a global plethora of Fanfilms (particularly based around Star Wars); as well as digital moving image festivals such as One Dot Zero (UK) and Res.Fest (US), which purported to be a window into the future, or at least the ‘bleeding edge’ of new media aesthetics intersecting with cinema. In this pre-Broadband and pre-YouTube period, the web was a ‘clunky’ and unreliable platform for a variety of technically complicated moving image files. However, it is possible to look back on the early 2000s as a liminal moment between the celluloid/video/physical media era and our remotely hosted, high-definition present. This paper will describe it as a fertile and open space, where artists and curators had the opportunity to dream of what the future might become, grappling with how moving image on the web (and their narrative language and aesthetics) could be envisioned differently from what had come before. If the Internet was a ‘site’, what types of moving image work could be ‘site-specific’? The paper will offer up key examples from that period and then jump forward in time to apply a similar framework of speculation to moving image online in the year 2021, and in the latter stages will explore what if any radical new ways of storytelling might arise as we move forward into an uncertain ‘future’.

Echo of Creation

The article explores the idea of an echo, both literal and structural, that connects Old Norse cosmogony and eschatology. The motif of a bellowing sound or cry appears in cosmogony in the figure of Ymir, “Crier”, who is killed by the Æsir, and from his body the world is created. During the eschatological events the booming sound recurs when Heimdallr blows his horn shortly before the Æsir themselves are killed by their adversaries. A cry is also emitted by Óðinn when he sacrifices himself on the Cosmic Tree. The booming bellow is thus associated with death, especially in the context of implicit or explicit sacrifice. The structural resonance between cosmogony and eschatology is composed of a series of five motifs that reappear in the same sequence at both liminal moments. The eschatology seems to be structurally a repetition of the cosmogony, but with inverted roles: the victims are the gods and the sacrificers are the giants, which is the inverse of the situation during cosmogony. The present analysis sheds light on the sacrificial pattern hidden behind the two events, and helps contextualize the motif of the mighty sound that reappears at both moments in the cosmic history.

Embracing Liminality and "Staying with the Trouble" on (and off) Screen

Embracing Liminality and "Staying with the Trouble" on (and off) Screen

“The London Resistance Movement”: Plotting Postwar Dissent in Rose Macaulay’s The World My Wilderness

This article argues that an ethos of resistance permeates Macaulay’s The World My Wilderness and develops a feminist-historical lens to read the novel as a social critique of wartime myths around collaboration and resistance. Resistance operates at the level of plot and thematically; it also marks the novel’s form; and it describes the book’s status within scholarship, as it straddles traditional timeframes and schools of criticism. The article excavates the novel’s major preoccupations with ruins as sites of resistance to consensus, and collaboration as a problematic but plausible means of wartime survival under occupation. Macaulay’s novel ‘makes history’ in all senses of the phrase: it looks back on the recent past to capture a liminal moment in British history before it solidifies into myth; it reflects in fictional form real tensions in postwar society; and it provides today’s readers with a complex understanding of a period still easily reduced to clichés.

What ritual teaches about life, humor and ageing. Or vice versa?

ABSTRACT Reflective practice, based on narrative case studies, highlights the need for practitioners to observe and integrate their own lifecycle rituals and thus become more open to collaborative ritual-making. This paper reviews 40 years of texts and research that have resourced and informed ritual practice that addressed later life, ageing, life review, spiritual reminiscence and dying. The pastoral and spiritual care formation of the author owes much to patients and parishioners who joined with him in the communitas of liminal moments where ritual transforms and transcends the hierarchy of caregivers in the community of caregiving.