Liminal Space Research Articles

De-/Re-Whitening Russianness: A Liminal Space of White Privileges Represented in Non-Summit

This study investigates the representations of white ethnic identities in Non-Summit, a Korean television show, to disaggregate the generalized perception of homogenous whiteness and argue for a dialectical construction of white power and domination in Korea. Specifically, it focuses on representations of Russianness in Non-Summit in relation to the US Americanness, contextualized within post-Cold War and globalized cultural politics prevalent in Korea. Employing critical textual analysis, this study analyzes verbal and visual discourses constructing Russianness and US Americanness in Non-Summit. The findings suggest, in Non-Summit, Russianness is represented as ideologically and culturally deprived, and it appears as a dispossessed white identity that does not earn hegemony like US Americanness. At times, the marginal representations of Russianness seem to weaken the power of whiteness operating in and through the show. However, an encompassing global white supremacy remains intact when Russianness is fit into the category of whiteness through a re-whitening process.

Urban/image: Conceptualizing Amsterdam as urban environment in virtual renderings

This article proposes that virtual renderings of speculative architectural projects provide a crucial entry point into the reimagination of sustainable urban life through the production of nature(s) within the city. Drawing on case studies of ‘sustainable’ building projects in and around Amsterdam, The Netherlands, I aim to trace the entanglement of virtual and real environments in imagining green futures. With the concept of the ‘render ghost’, James Bridle situates the people inhabiting virtual renderings ‘in the liminal space between the present and the future, the real and the virtual, the physical and the digital’ (2013). Similarly, the imaginations of nature within virtual renderings of sustainable buildings are situated at a point of in-between, a constant state of becoming. More than just visualizing their respective architectural design, the virtual renderings visualize these designs in a specific space, a specific environment – and how that environment could and would change through the spatial presence of these buildings. What makes these immaterial elements – ranging from computer-generated images to virtual renderings and augmented reality applications – particularly productive as research objects is the subjective nature of the atmosphere created in and through them, an atmospheric imagination of sustainable futures embedded in what Degen et al. call a ‘field of negotiation, tension and ambivalence’ (2017). Atmospheric in their imagination of urban environments, contingent in their temporality between the past, the present and the future, and ambiguous in their spatial grounding in simultaneously specific and generic surroundings, virtual renderings arguably allow for an engagement with the possibilities of alternative urban futures.

I just saved you – does it matter what I look like? Reading and discussing feminist fairy tales with a group of 12-year-old girls

ABSTRACT Using a post-structural lens which situates gender as discursively produced, this study investigates how four 12-year-old girls read feminist fairy tales and what feminist issues and concerns they discern and relate to in these texts. The study used a dialogic approach in Action Research informed reading groups to stimulate their thinking and explore their experience of gender constraints. The article explores how the girls drew on discourses and discursive practices to position themselves in relation to the texts, often breaking the frame of the text and creating ‘counter-fictionals’ and using performativity to construct their versions of femininity. The author argues that the book group acted as a liminal space that allowed the girls a safe space for exploring and subverting gender constructs and constraints.

“When I think about my future, I just see darkness”: How youth exiting homelessness navigate the hazy, liminal space between socioeconomic exclusion and inclusion

ObjectivesThe overarching objective of this mixed methods longitudinal study was to understand whether and how rent subsidies and mentorship influenced socioeconomic inclusion outcomes for youth exiting homelessness. The focus of this paper is on the qualitative objectives, which evolved from a primary focus on exploring how study mentorship was working as a facilitator of socioeconomic inclusion to focusing on how participants navigated the hazy, liminal space between socioeconomic exclusion and inclusion.MethodsThis was a convergent mixed methods study scaffolded by community-based participatory action axiology. The quantitative component is reported elsewhere and involved a 2-year pilot randomized controlled trial where 24 participants received rent subsidies and 13 were randomly assigned a study mentor; proxy indicators of socioeconomic inclusion were measured every 6 months for 2.5 years. Qualitative objectives were explored using a qualitative descriptive design and theoretically framed using critical social theory. The lead author interviewed 12 participants every 6 months for 2.5 years. Qualitative interviews were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis with an emphasis on critical interpretation.ResultsNavigating the liminal space between socioeconomic exclusion and inclusion was complex and non-linear, and the way youth navigated that journey was more strongly associated with factors like informal mentorship (naturally occurring “coach-like” mentorship) and identity capital (sense of purpose, control, self-efficacy, and self-esteem), rather than whether or not they were assigned a formal study mentor.ConclusionA holistic approach integrating coaching and attention to identity capital alongside economic supports may be key to helping youth exiting homelessness achieve socioeconomic inclusion.

Towards developing a decolonial transdisciplinary praxis that supports a socially-transformative occupational science: Emergent insights from an educational project in South Africa

ABSTRACT As occupational science develops its socially transformative agenda, the discipline must learn how to ‘do’ a science that responds to complex social issues. Developing occupational science as a ‘transdisciplinary science’ has been indicated as a potential tool to do so. As such, this paper presents the emergent insights generated through attempting to engage a decolonial transdisciplinary praxis within health and rehabilitation sciences, as a contribution to the conceptual development of transdisciplinarity within the discipline. Reflections on the authors’ experiences of engaging in a project that intentionally brought undergraduate occupational therapy, speech-language pathology, audiology, and physiotherapy students together to collectively respond to justice and equity-related needs at a low-income school in Cape Town, South Africa, were used to generate these insights. Engaging in a context shaped by coloniality and apartheid, our reflections revealed three key notions that supported the decolonial enactment of a transdisciplinary practice: ‘Exploring how to un-discipline ourselves’; ‘Embracing the vulnerability of decolonising the self’; and ‘Intentionally occupying a liminal space’. Our further interpretation of what these notions meant for our practice culminated in what we saw as critical for the enactment of transdisciplinarity: How to conceptualise and work with a ‘praxis of uncertainty’. We discuss the potential value of the praxis of uncertainty in decolonial transdisciplinary work and offer impetus for its continued conceptual development, arguing that developing such knowledge could contribute to moving occupational science towards becoming a socially transformative discipline.

The Reconstruction of the Cosmopolitan Imaginary: Chinese International Students during the COVID‐19 Pandemic1

Social and geopolitical disruptions triggered by the COVID‐19 crisis have raised crucial questions about the shifting meaning of race, citizenship, and nationality for transborder migrants amidst receding globalization, hardening borders, and geopolitical tensions. The aim of this paper is to examine the ways in which Chinese international students have viewed and negotiated their ambiguous racial and ethnonational position between nations during the global pandemic. Drawing on 16 student interviews at one upstate New York campus between 2019 and 2021, we argue that Chinese international students have occupied a liminal space between nations that shapes their understanding of race and racism through a distinctly geopolitical lens. Double‐edged exclusion and discrimination from both the US and China during the global pandemic have heightened their sense of social dislocation and withdrawal from nationalist politics in both countries. In the process, they have not so much surrendered the cosmopolitan ideals that motivated their migration but rather, reimagined them while maintaining a delicate balance between global cosmopolitan ideals and ethnonationalist loyalties. Our findings provide insights into the future political trajectory of Chinese transborder migrants amid tense US–China relations and help to explain the contradictions of diasporic Chinese worldviews on current affairs.

There Was a Woman Who Swallowed a Story

This performative piece indulges in the critical feminist pseudo-fantasies of a sleep-deprived woman in her 40’s—a woman of a certain . . . rage. This ruminative offering presents a lyrical rendering provoked by reflection on the one-note-wonders of the patriarchy, and inspired in part by Caroline Criado-Perez’s book “ Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men” and the poignant provocation offered by Bryant Keith Alexander. Playing in the liminal and critical spaces of poetic inquiry, the resulting autoethnographic essay explores the viral legacies of law and legislation, and the cures and consequences of aging as a woman in a world wrought by midnight fairy tales of crones and witches.

Untamed Storms: Cinema’s Oceanic Contingency and Mati Diop’s Atlantics

Abstract The ocean, for Jean Epstein, figures the disruption that the cinematograph offers for human perception, presenting a nonhuman view on the world. This article will critically engage with Epstein’s writings on water to reflect on Mati Diop’s Atlantics (2019) and its particular conception of the oceanic. Atlantics positions the ocean within the perspectives of its filmic subjects but also in excess of them. This perspectival nature of the oceanic speaks to a liminal space between male and female, living and dead, human and nonhuman, which mirrors contemporary debates within Black studies around the exclusion of Blackness from the normative category of the human: the contingency of the definition of humanity based on racial exclusion. As a result, it is not only the nonhuman perspective that the ocean provides in Atlantics, but a spectral haunting of those deemed other than human by global capitalism, which disrupts, as a queer prophecy, the veneer of necessity that the neocolonial order requires to sustain itself.

Evaluating emotional and social interactions in museum liminal spaces: A case study of the National Museum of the Islamic Revolution and Holy Defense of Tehran, Iran

AbstractBackgroundThis study explores which architectural features of interstitial spaces improve visitors’ interactions with the overall museum space and with other visitors at the National Museum of the Islamic Revolution and Holy Defense in Tehran, Iran. Interstitial or liminal spaces are defined as “in‐between” spaces connecting primary spaces in a building that have a key role in relating humans to places.ObjectivesThis study asks which geometric features can increase the socio‐emotional interactions for visitors.MethodsTo answer the question, observations of behavior and body language were made at the study site. These data were analyzed based on body language science and neuroscience literature. Five in‐between spaces connecting exhibition halls were selected, and visitor behaviors were observed and analyzed using the Observer XT software by Noldus.ResultsResults showed that certain types of passages were associated with the highest levels of emotional interaction, while others are associated with the highest levels of social interaction.ConclusionsThe results of this study align with earlier neuroscience findings regarding brain activities in relation to certain geometries. The methods used in this study can be applied by architects and designers in their predesign planning and post design evaluation processes to improve socio‐emotional interactions for visitors.

Semicolonial Rhetoric; or, A Rhetorical Sphere of Influence

Abstract This article explores how Persian/ate rhetorical experiences and sensibilities constitute and are constituted by semicolonial modalities of empire. Building on global rhetorical history and an analysis of the work of the social reformer, historian, and linguist Ahmad Kasravi (1890–1946), I show how critical conceptions and configurations of speech emerge vis-à-vis the semicolonial bordering and ordering of the body politic and how these rhetorical formations at once resist and reproduce empire. Hailing from the liminal rhetorical space between the colonial and the noncolonial, namely, the sphere of influence, these configurations constitute what I call semicolonial rhetoric or a rhetorical sphere of influence.

Revisiting the Experience of Art Therapists and Drama Therapists Working in Schools Two Years after the First Lockdown: A Qualitative Pilot

This paper follows a preliminary study that examined how 6 (n = 6) creative arts therapists (3 art therapists and 3 drama therapists) coped with the transition to remote therapy in schools during the first lockdown in Israel due to the Coronavirus<span dir="RTL"> pandemic. The preliminary research explored the therapists’ experiences and views about working online upon returning to regular in-person meetings. The current paper adds a follow-up interview examining their perspective on this period, two years later. The 1<sup>st</sup> set of interviews was analyzed using the Six-Key Model, which shed light on the various aspects of the therapists’ clinical experience as creative arts therapists. The follow-up interviews were analyzed through thematic analysis and informed by Lakoff’s views on metaphor. The results suggest that, at the time, the therapists were preoccupied with the viability of the treatment, considering their little experience in remote therapy and the need to incorporate their specific art medium into the therapeutic setting. The results also highlight specific similarities and differences between art and drama therapists. The follow-up reinforces the preliminary findings, reiterating the framing of this period as a liminal space, from which the therapists emerged personally and professionally transformed, and more resilient.

Vulnerable advantages: Re-searching my self while navigating queer identity, research ethics, and emotional labour

Using an autoethnographic approach, I reflect on and unpack my journey towards my doctoral research on queer South Africans of Indian descent. I demonstrate how my decision to become an insider-researcher forced me to confront personal resistances towards turning the academic gaze upon myself. Although my journey towards intersectional LGBTQ+ research began with a yearning for epistemic visibility, prompted by a curious search for psychological literature about people like me, I now grapple with a flip side—doing the emotional labour of visibility and managing my vulnerabilities. Drawing on Gloria Anzaldúa's feminist theory of Borderlands, I (re)conceptualize these vulnerabilities as vulnerable advantages, that is, liminal spaces of heightened reflexivity that can ignite psychopolitical potential in scholar-activism. I discuss and theorize the productive possibilities of these emotionally complex spaces by drawing on four interconnected life experiences related to the epistemic, ethical, artistic, and activist dimensions of vulnerabilities. I consider the emotional labour embedded in researching insider communities, and my anxieties about traversing through these psychosocial conflicts. I argue that reflecting on one's own vulnerabilities can provide researchers with unique perspectives as scholar-activists. These vulnerable advantages exist because of—not in spite of —one's initial trepidations as valuable psychopolitical and decolonial resources.

Barefoot entrepreneurs trapped in liminal spaces: the case of homeless youths in New York City

ABSTRACT The barefoot entrepreneurship literature rarely acknowledges the role of space in the development of informal economic activities. However, the concept of liminal space, defined as a place of transition and largely discussed in geography, can provide a new conceptual lens through which the trajectories of barefoot entrepreneurs can be viewed. This interdisciplinary research leverages this perspective to raise the following question: How do barefoot entrepreneurs experience liminal spaces to engage in informal economic activities? To answer this question, this article explores how 10 homeless youths in New York City panhandle, steal, deal and prostitute themselves to survive. Drawing on a four-year ethnography and the use of geographic methods, we explain how these barefoot entrepreneurs experience liminal spaces. More precisely, we underline how these spaces are ambivalent places of becoming: on the one hand, they support the development of barefoot entrepreneurship; but on the other hand, they lead to ‘entrepreneurial traps’ in the sense that these activities tend to increase the entrepreneurs’ marginality. Based on these results, we contribute to the literature on barefoot entrepreneurship, and to a better understanding of the implication of liminal spaces in entrepreneurial dynamics.

Literal or metaphorical? Conventional or creative?

AbstractMetaphor has long been considered a ‘way in’ to people’s experiences, with metaphor analysis being used to gain insights into a range of psychological and physiological phenomena. However, a number of challenges arise when analysing metaphor in such contexts. We reflect on the challenges we have encountered in our research into intensely emotional and/or personal experiences related to bereavement and religious belief. Both areas showcase metaphor operating in the ‘liminal spaces’ of human experience. The spaces between life and death, personhood and non-personhood, and belief and non-belief prove rich ground for metaphor, but the qualities of these metaphors are as complex and elusive as the concepts they are being used to describe.We explore how metaphoricity in general, and creative use of metaphor in particular, in these contexts are flexible phenomena, opening up new questions as to what ‘counts’ as a (creative) metaphor. We propose three levels at which people use or experience metaphor, show how these interact, and propose a number of methodological factors to be taken into consideration when conducting metaphor research in such complex areas of human experience.

The Intimacy of Neglect: Thresholds, Interconnectedness and Unexpected Glimpses

AbstractArchitects Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu situate the output of their practice, Neri&Hu, in spaces of liminality, subverting traditional typologies of buildings and the city, and blurring the boundary conditions. Their spatial and material investigations use Shanghai as a palimpsest microcosm, its historical, cultural and contemporary architectural accretions there to be reimaged and manipulated.

Balancing Dualities and Fusing Opposites: Reading Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreters of Maladies

With a focus on Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, this research investigates the intricate existence of Indian women caught up in the conventional marginalization at the hands of patriarchy in their home country and repressions of otherness across new borders. By employing Gloria Anzaldua’s concept of “balancing dualities and fusing opposites”, I analyze Lahiri’s text in order to explore how, oscillating between displacement and resettlement, gendered identities are formed in the in-between space of acceptance across borders. Border crossing is mostly embedded in the experiences of displacement, alienation, and longing for belonging. Diasporic experiences are heterogeneous in articulating the loss and pains of dislocation, uprootedness, and struggles of immigrants to territorialize across new borders. This study explores the diverse experiences of diasporic women in the confrontation of the opposite borders of old and new and scrutinizes how they make their lives meaningful in their respective situations. In this paper, I argue that life across borders offers an in-between space for doubly marginalized women by resisting the hierarchical patterns at home and abroad and balancing these dualities in the liminal space between two cultures. Moreover, this cross- border life also strives towards fusing cultural opposites in the space of un/belonging through strategic resistance and resilience.

In search of Paulus Vladimiri: Canon, reception, and the (in)conceivability of an Eastern European ‘founding father’ of international law

AbstractWhile many international lawyers are familiar with Francisco de Vitoria (1483–1546), very few have even heard of Paulus Vladimiri (1370–1435) – a Polish priest and jurist who made striking similar arguments to Vitoria on legal universality and the rights of non-Christians a full century before Vitoria. This divergence of consciousness, I argue, provides a unique opportunity to explore questions of canon, reception, and the role of ‘founding fathers’ within international legal thought. Centring Vladimiri as an ‘Eastern European’ figure, I argue that his non-reception is largely the result of how Eastern Europe implicitly functions as a distinctly liminal space within international legal thought that makes any possible ‘founding father’ from this region immensely difficult to imagine. I examine this dynamic through the differing postwar efforts of the Polish jurists Kazimierz Grzybowski and C. H. Alexandrowicz to include Vladimiri within the international legal canon. In examining the background structures of twentieth-century international law, I conclude that, in a manner directly connected to the liminality of Eastern Europe, neither Soviet nor Third World nor Western imaginations could easily receive Vladimiri within their fundamentally political narratives of normative order that shaped their international legal approaches. However, despite this historic non-reception, I argue that Vladimiri, and the question of Eastern Europe more generally, holds great promise in our current global moment. Particularly, engaging Eastern Europe’s liminal character offers a more sociologically grounded alternative to the reductionist Schmittian view of international law as a product of inescapable conflict in a world of exclusionary ‘greater spaces’.

Między polityką zaangażowania a pozytywną neutralnością. Libia i Tunezja wobec kwestii Sahary Zachodniej

BETWEEN A POLICY OF ENGAGEMENT AND POSITIVE NEUTRALITY: LIBYA AND TUNISIA ON THE ISSUE OF WESTERN SAHARA The unresolved issue of Western Sahara has been causing serious divisions in the Maghreb region for 48 years, which affects not only political relations, but also economic cooperation. The division into states supporting the independence of Western Sahara and those backing Morocco’s position has very strongly polarized the Maghreb region, as well as practically all states of the African continent. Moreover, during the Cold War, this dispute fed into division between states in the Western camp and those identified with the Eastern bloc and socialism, such as Libya. Tunisia was the only country in North Africa, which consistently tried to implement a policy of positive neutrality and because of that it was doomed to occupy a liminal space not only in the region – between Algeria and Morocco, but also in the bipolar world – between the West and the Eastern bloc. This article aims to present the two countries of Tunisia and Libya from the perspective of 48 years of the Western Saharan crisis. Both states, although they do not have a direct border with the territory of Western Sahara, are sometimes involuntarily, as in the case of Tunisia, involved in the largest regional dispute, which to this day casts a shadow over relations in North Africa.

Community‐driven science and science education: Living in and navigating the edges of equity, justice, and science learning

Community‐driven science and science education: Living in and navigating the edges of equity, justice, and science learning

The FBI’s Border Coverage (BOCOV) Program and the Ambiguity of Intelligence Missions

Intelligence services must routinely operate in liminal spaces, both operationally and bureaucratically. The Border Coverage (BOCOV) Program of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was a Cold War example of an agency seeking to address the vulnerability inherent to a geographic liminal space. Its implementation of the program illustrated the impact of bureaucratic borders—between the FBI and Central Intelligence Agency and between Intelligence Community (IC) and non-IC agencies. Lessons learned, through the implementation of BOCOV, about interagency relations continue to be applicable as the United States contends with the cyber environment, an even more porous space than the physical U.S.–Mexican border.