(Un)felt ferments: Limning liminal professional subjectivities with pragmatist–posthuman feminism and intimate scholarship

The purpose of this paper is to illuminate liminality as processual experiences and to disrupt (hetero)normative paradigms of organizational liminality identity work. I present an intimate inquiry of liminality from within lived liminal experience. My empirical focus is on personal liminal subjectivities as they unfold in specific, psychosocial time, and spaces—my situated, changing lives as a woman executive, mature doctoral candidate, and emergent academic. The posthuman calls for multi-directional, transdisciplinary openings, and experimental forms. In this paper I make four interweaving research contributions: (1) braiding philosophies, I conceptualize a pragmatist–posthuman organic theory of liminal subjectivity; (2) I illuminate my lived liminal experiences as affectual, conscious, and semi-conscious, where my identities are unbounded from self and recast as sociomaterial, entangled productions; (3) I innovate “methodologically” with an embrocation of Dewey’s experiential and esthetic philosophical methods, a flowing mixture of sensate scholarship and the adoption of radical–reflexivities; (4) I call for a community of inquiry into liminality as part of a quest to develop knowing democratically, in partnership with practitioners and all matter. My unfinished adventure is to perform scholarship useful to academics and practitioners, which can help make our practical lived experiences of liminality more bearable and fruitful.

Negotiations of a Woman’s Self: Liminal Experiences and Dialogic Reconsiderations in Anna Banti’s Un grido lacerante

This article focuses on the authorial figure in Anna Banti’s last work, Un grido lacerante. An introspective portrait of an aging author whose life and career have been shaped by remorse over a lost vocation, the novel has traditionally been interpreted as an expression of the autobiographical and historical dimension of Banti’s work. Moving away from notions of self-confessional narratives in favor of an analysis of textual strategies, this study investigates the role of the protagonist within a self-research that opens up to shared experiences and problems of existential, interpersonal and socio-cultural importance. This universalist focus engages in particular Bakhtin’s concepts of dialogic construction and narrative space-time. While the “chronotope” of the threshold encloses the liminality of the protagonist between contradictory identities and inclinations, the idea of a “dialogic self” accentuates the function of this unresolved intermediate position in promoting a subject that is negotiated in relation to internal and external constraints. By formulating an unconventional idea of self and a narrative that develops in a fragmentary and contradictory way to overcome the limits of its own fiction, the novel confronts the constraints women face in pursuing their inclinations and aspirations and addresses issues of a more humanistic nature concerning the right to construct and define one’s own identity independently of conceptions and norms of gender behaviour.

From Liminality to Communitas: The Collective Dimensions of Transformative Learning

This article addresses a significant gap in the transformative learning literature as it relates to collective transformation, a transformation that is a level beyond individual transformation and is differentiated from the designed and imposed forms of social or organizational change. We consider collective transformation as an emergent and shared worldview shift that is grounded in a shared experience. The participants might not be fully aware of or even able to describe this experience until they engage with it at the interpersonal level. In prior research and practice, the five authors have independently observed and documented the phenomenon of collective transformation among members of marginalized populations who have undergone liminal experiences—forms of disequilibrium that leave individuals betwixt and between. The common thread in these experiences is the emergence of a shared feeling called communitas, which is a deeply felt (yet often temporary) sense of belonging and community. This study’s purpose is to further explore the roles that states of liminality and communitas play in creating the conditions for collective transformation. We draw on several theoretical and practice-based areas of literature and on five particular types of experience. We then examine each case for shared experiences of liminality and communitas as well as for the underlying qualities of self-understanding, relational ability, and a collectively felt sense of new possibilities. This study also includes suggestions for the application of these concepts to other social groups and in other contexts.

Thinking Through Translation with Theodoros Angelopoulos: Journeys, Border Crossings, Liminality

In this paper, I propose to examine the question of journeys, borders, and translation in Theodoros Angelopoulos’ Trilogy of Borders: The Suspended Step of the Stork (1991), Ulysses’ Gaze (1995) and Eternity and a Day (1998), winner of the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. It is my aim to contribute, in a small way, to the ongoing discussion about the role of translation in creating understanding, using as a case in point the work of a major contemporary poet of the screen who created his own aesthetics of the journey and whose films are vehicles of discovery, taking the viewer across many borders, on a fabulous – but often unsettling and perilous – voyage which challenges long-held assumptions about self, others, and translation. I suggest there is a plausible link between translation and liminality, a concept introduced in anthropology by Arnold van Gennep in the beginning of the 20th century and later brought to the fore by Victor Turner. I contend that, since in translation there is a tension between the (permanent) source text and the potentially unlimited number of translations, insights from anthropology can shed light on this complex relationship which resembles, in more ways than one, that between liminal experiences and the establishment of permanent structures (which are, usually, born in liminality).

Understanding waiting and wellbeing through liminal experiences of Syrian refugees

Using the anthropological concept of liminality, this paper describes an ethnographic study examining the wellbeing of Syrian refugees as they recount narratives of forced displacement and resettlement. The author observed 37 Syrian participants who had been relocated to Austin, Texas, United States, and interviewed 15 Syrian participants about their migration experiences. Through observation, interviews, and field notes, the author examines the refugees’ ideas of wellbeing during periods of peace, war and displacement, and resettlement. Throughout the displacement journey, Syrian refugees implemented resilience tactics to escape instances of waiting in order to reach their desired destination—resettlement.