Introduction: Liminality and the Search for Boundaries

Thomassen, Bjørn; Wydra, Harald; Horváth, Ágnes

doi:10.1515/9781782387671-002

Cited by 13 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…The concept of liminality is increasingly prevalent in geography and the wider social sciences, broadening its theorisation and extending its application to new areas of study (Babcock, 2001; Downey et al, 2016; Horvath et al, 2015; McConnell, 2017). However, this blossoming interest is accompanied by growing debate as to whether it is appropriate or desirable for a concept to be stretched so far from its roots and applied so broadly (Szakolczai, 2015; Thomassen, 2016).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As outlined elsewhere, the word liminal derives from the Latin limins or limen denoting a threshold between two places (Carson, 2012; McConnell, 2017; McConnell & Dittmer, 2018; Madge & O'Connor, 2005; Szakolczai, 2015). The idea of the liminal as a stage of transition associated with special acts and places in rites of passage was introduced by Arnold van Gennep and was later embellished by Victor Turner who applied Van Gennep's ideas to other anthropological practices and to cultural studies, from which point it has been explored in relation to an ever‐expanding field of academic interests and socio‐political situations (Babcock, 2001; Downey et al, 2016; Horvath et al, 2015; Leyshon, 2018; Mälksoo, 2012; McConnell, 2017; McConnell & Dittmer, 2018; Mukherji, 2013; Roman, 2015; Stoller, 2009; Thomassen, 2015, 2016; Turner, 1967, 1982; Van Gennep, 1960).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the social sciences, liminality is commonly used as an umbrella term for states or experiences of transition and ambiguity (Downey et al, 2016;Mälksoo, 2012), with its flexibility increasingly being employed in a host of academic and cultural contexts, including tourism and retail (McIntyre, 2012); performance, theatre, literature and arts (Broadhurst, 2014;Mukherji, 2013), bungee jumping (Thomassen, 2016); metallurgy (Horvath, 2015), international relations (Mälksoo, 2012), revolutions (Peterson, 2015), and modernity (Horvath et al, 2015;Thomassen, 2015Thomassen, , 2016. In geography, despite the spatial emphasis on margins, thresholds, betweenness, places of confinement and exile, journeying and pilgrimage making it a quintessentially geographical concept, disciplinary engagement with liminality has been described as curiously scarce (McConnell & Dittmer, 2018) since Rob Shields' (1991) early geographical engagement with liminality in the context of spatially and socially marginal places, such as the liminal seaside.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

From liminal spaces to the spatialities of liminality

Banfield

2022

Area

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Geographical engagement with liminality to explore and conceptualise threshold and ambiguous experience is growing, with calls being issued to attend to its spatial qualities, yet it seems difficult to move beyond the application of liminality as an umbrella term to an ever‐increasing array of spaces and places despite disciplinary uses of liminality diverging from its conceptual origins as it is applied to broader contexts. My interest is in how we can progress from identifying more and more spaces as liminal to spatialising liminality itself. Here, I engage critically yet constructively with three themes that commonly feature in work on liminality: its reliance on binary thinking, the common association of this binary thinking with hybridity, and the in/discernibility of thresholds. I propose that if we distinguish between liminality arising from a singular binary, multiple binaries and multiple (non‐binary) states, we can start to appreciate the diversity and complexity within supposedly singular liminal situations and experiences. Subsequently, by applying such thinking to three previously published papers on liminality by other authors, I propose that we can visualise multiple spatialities of liminality that can be characterised as nested, staggered, scattered and mobile. Overall, I argue that we should be more specific as to how our engagements with liminality differ from its original formulation as a productive step in moving beyond singular ideas of liminal spaces to examine liminality as both multiply spatial and actively spatialising.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

From liminal spaces to the spatialities of liminality

Banfield

2022

Area

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…For Horvath, Thomassen, and Wydra (2018), liminality is a lens applied by social scientists in understanding political and economic transformations and challenges in the social world, in-cluding economic downturns. The liminality prism has been used extensively in describing and interpreting accelerated change, modernization, and transitional periods, especially in work life.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Designated as an experience of "in-betweenness" that conjures up ambivalence, liminality has been linked to the actuation of social communication that leads to change (Giesen, 2018). Therefore, liminal states have been characterized as formative experiences and associated with narrative reconstruction of past, present, and future possibilities, while creating openings for change and transformation in the social world (Horvath et al, 2018).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Using narrative futuring as a means of facing liminal employment status and space.

Triliva¹,

Sools²,

Philippas³

2022

Qualitative Psychology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Unemployment and precarious employment have been treated as liminal states where people's everyday lives are rendered into an "in-between" position, a place where the uncertainty of meaning and decision-making prevail. Liminality has also been applied as a way of understanding a changing social world, implying a transformation in consciousness emanating from prolonged indeterminism. To develop a clearer understanding of coping with liminal status, we used a narrative futuring approach (i.e., a reflexive practice to elicit narratives from the viewpoint of a desired future). Twenty "letters from the future" were written by unemployed and precariously employed young adults with higher education degrees living in Crete. The letters engaged the participants in the process of critical reflection, where they imagined eutopian lifeworlds by attempting to place the prevalent "crisis story" in the background, embracing or confronting liminal status. Implications focus on how the narrative future-making approach can be applied to disentangle the complexities involved in understanding liminal states and their inherent transformative potential where both personal, interpersonal, and the broader social and societal context come into awareness.

show abstract

Liminality, COVID‐19 and the long crisis of young adults' employment

Cuervo

Maire

Cook

et al. 2023

Aust J Social Issues

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The COVID‐19 crisis has brought into sharp relief the precarious employment situation of young people, precipitating a raft of academic and public claims of an unprecedented crisis that has disrupted young lives. Our study contributes to research on youth labour and transitions with new longitudinal empirical analysis. Our analysis challenges the “newness” of the precarity highlighted by COVID‐19, focussing on employment. It draws on longitudinal mixed methods data from a research project tracking the transition to adulthood of young Australians. We make use of the concept of liminality to analyse the labour patterns for this group of young adults for the past 5 years. While we acknowledge the impact of COVID‐19 on young people's lives, our analysis reveals a precarisation of labour conditions for a significant proportion of participants that precedes the pandemic crisis. We conclude that the tendency in some youth research and in public discourse, to depict contemporary events as heralding “new” crises for young people, obscures the deeper structural arrangements that continually position the young to take the brunt of social and economic policies.

show abstract

Introduction: Liminality and the Search for Boundaries

Cited by 13 publications

References 0 publications

From liminal spaces to the spatialities of liminality

From liminal spaces to the spatialities of liminality

Using narrative futuring as a means of facing liminal employment status and space.

Liminality, COVID‐19 and the long crisis of young adults' employment

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About