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What is presence really? What are we talking about when we talk about presence? For a performer, it seems such an obvious thing but the closer you look, the more elusive it becomes, like one of those optical illusions which can only be perceived sideways through the eyes; looking directly makes it immediately disappear. And the whole thing becomes even more sideways when we take presence and put it in the middle of a classroom. Is it possible that we might have been over emphasising presence in the search for the elusive-mysterious? Have we been overly focused on presence in our pursuit of the qualities that make teaching and learning truly transformative? And obviously, what sort of transformative are we talking about in the fractured times that we live in? What is the other side of the story? What can Absence tell us about its polar twin? Does the absent become present by its very absence? And what or who is it that is absent? In my talk which I've framed as a set of field notes, entirely subjective observations gathered over a period of time, I am drawing upon my experience as a performer in search of the elusive-mysterious; my experience as a teaching artist in a teacher education program at Delhi University; and as a researcher investigating teacher agency in the classroom. In interrogating the binary of presence/absence, I seek to throw some light into that liminal space where these two intersect and collide, and begin to reveal the elusive-mysterious so that pedagogical practices can be reimagined and reenacted.

This paper examines activist subtitling practices in light of the two sociological concepts of narrativity and liminality. With particular focus on online contemporary activist communities that counter extremism, subtitling is studied as part of the cultural liminoid practices that produce and disseminate alternative narratives challenging the rigid frames of global jihadism. Launched as reactions to the repercussions of the Arab Spring and the establishment of the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, ضايعة الطاسة Daya alTaseh and ذا بيج دادي شوو The Bigh daddy Show are two activist online media initiatives that spread counter-jihadist narratives in Arabic subtitled in English. The study attempts to investigate the narratives mediated in the subtitles and their reflections of liminality. The subtitling in both initiatives is scrutinised and compared using a two-fold theoretical framework combining the socio-narrative theory in translation studies and theories on activist translation. Guided by this framework, the paper applies a descriptive qualitative analysis to data collected from observations and interviews. The data analysis reveals the distinct liminoid stories of Daya alTasehand The Bigh daddy Show as narrated in the English subtitles, pinpointing the similarities and differences between them. User interaction with both initiatives is also highlighted as a contributor to the development of the subtitling process.

T.S. Eliot’s 1915 poem ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ repeatedly registers the need to self-optimize in response to provocations. Yet, the narrator is never able to respond to them in a way that would either improve his personal standing or bring him favorable social recognition. As he never denies the need to improve, the inability transitions into disinterest in the question of improvement itself. This essay argues that the narrator’s (in)ability to support or oppose self-optimization in ‘Prufrock’ indicates a liminal position with respect to the problem, a position in which the self is impassive, indifferent, and perhaps even bored. However, even as this configuration of (in)capacity leading to disinterest is repeatedly brought forth in the poem, it cannot be taken to be ineffectual and pointless. Rather, the apparently endless iteration of the arrangement brings about new possibilities for the imagination of the self—possibilities of the self’s co-existence with contingencies of time, space, and expression.

The article explores the interaction between digital communication ecosystems and urban spaces, particularly those defined as "liminal". In such spaces, communicative processes can play an important role in processes of civic engagement and, more generally, citizen participation. Participatory practices are therefore also analysed here in the light of the - potentially inclusive - use of digital communication technologies, without losing sight of the potential for "absorption" of even practices of resistance by neoliberal rationality. Through an in-depth analysis of theories of liminality, media ecology and urban participation, the article examines how individuals relate to urban spaces and whether (and how) media can represent a kind of subspace of "empowerment" or at least mobilisation. The article adopts a theoretical perspective based on the empirical study carried out by the authors in some liminal spaces in southern Italy, as part of a large training project for managers of third sector organisations. The aim of the work presented here is to understand the relationship between liminal spaces and civic participation, and to analyse how the media can be used to promote forms of meaningful participation and possibly foster inclusive practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution carries out a spatial analysis of the short stories and poems collected in Giovanna Capone’s In My Neighborhood (2014), with a twofold aim: exploring the significance of physical and metaphorical liminalities in the development of Capone’s poetics and, on a more theoretical level, outlining an alternative paradigm, based on the concepts of liminality and communitas, to read Capone’s poetry, as well as other contemporary Italian-American literary texts. I identify four sites of liminality in Capone’s work and delve into their relationship with the narrative voice and the role they play in its evolution. This essay reflects on Giovanna Capone’s Bildung and her identity as a queer Italian-American author by re-reading the four spaces described in In My Neighborhood through the lens of Victor Turner’s theory of liminality and Roberto Esposito’s notion of communitas. Esposito’s development of the concept allows for an alternative interpretation of the community of Italian American queer subjectivities created by Capone in the Southwest. Finally, the connection of such community with Gloria Anzaldúa’s formulation of Borderland and ‘mestiza consciousness’ is highlighted as a theoretical counternarrative to the identification of the ethnic queer self as a member of a community defined by borders.

The article considers the consistency and distribution of the figures of cervids in Valcamonica rock art, through the systematic analysis of their presence/absence in the Palaeolithic, Chalcolithic, and Iron Age engravings. The attention for these animals unites, since the Palaeolithic, the iconography of geographically distant cultural facies. The primordial and constant presence of this family of mammals in the Alpine and Pre-Alpine territory, in particular, favours the observation of specific attributes of the animal, selected and reworked in the pre- and proto-historical imagery and culture, and potentially «veiled» by the mantle of symbolic superstructures. In Valcamonica, Pleistocene engravings of cervids relate dynamically to the surrounding post-glacial environment. In the Chalcolithic, they dominate the zoomorphic apparatus of the male statue-stelae, the monoliths-totem of the clans. The proto-historical world, on the other hand, sees them as protagonists of the initiation rituals of young warriors. Through different historical-cultural phases, semantic correspondences seem to persist between deer and the concepts of light/fire, remarked by the comparison with the recent tradition of the valley. Further considerations highlight the role of cervids/deer as animals markedly liminal that is, ideally framed in multiple spatial and «metaphysical» dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current epoch is characterised by a series of critical events that have upset fieldwork research and continue to affect it. The industrial district of the Brianza has always proved to be resilient and capable of overcoming market turbulences, but the rapid sequence of critical events in an industrial context already exposed to other frailties is producing further uncertainty and liminality. The researcher is likewise facing his own uncertainties. The time lag between the observation of the fast changing situation and the writing moment which, occurring necessarily after the observation period, seems to be unable to keep up with the shifting reality. Thus, both interlocutors and researcher are seeking new conceptual inventories in their own ways to understand the present and imagine the future in a context of prolonged liminality.

The March 2011 Tōhoku triple disaster reinforced an already liminal space inside Japan. The region of Tōhoku, historically considered at the margins, was once again framed as a marginal space separated from the Japanese ‘centre’. However, the physical area of the disaster acquired new figurative dimensions allowing for an artistic and cultural response to the events of March 2011 and to the national narrative of fast recovery. In the novel In the Zone (2016) by Taguchi Randy, the abandoned and marginal landscape of the exclusion zone assumes the characteristics of a space for survival and renovation. The human and nonhuman characters challenge their social and physical marginality through the continuous movement in the exclusion zone and across several physical and figurative boundaries. Furthermore, in this liminal space, bodily acts—such as laughing, dancing, or singing—become a way to build resilience and recover from previous traumas. This paper concludes that the novel In the Zone constructs the disaster as a positive trope engendering recovery from past traumas and confronting national discourses on the environment, women, and marginal communities.

Dramatization is an established field of research, and teaching/learning methodology to improve of social, emotional, and creative skills and for the acquisition of knowledge about subjects such as history. Nevertheless, there are few studies on children's spontaneous dramatization in educational context and its potential role in development. This paper is aimed at filling such gap. The term dramatization, as we will use here, refers to the human activity of staging meanings in narrative and ritualistic form, enacted through the whole person and multiple communication channels. The school context is a privileged arena to observe spontaneous dramatization between peers and between children and adults. Besides, school routine is often filled with staged dramatizations aimed at building for instance a collective identity or provide moral orientations. The paper discusses a new theoretical framework to recognize dramatizations in the school context and to use their transformative value for the construction of socially competent personalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The oncological disease experience is counted as a wound in the body and mind attributable to a traumatic experience that fragments and disorients the person’s biography. The neoplasia leaves marks and scars in both somatic and existential level. The illness experience suggests to patient to look for meaning that cannot be unheard. The literature associating the concept of liminality in oncological disease to understand the process of meaning making. The definition of new horizons of meaning, generated by crossing the limen, opens up a new self-awareness and worldview. The autopoietic dimension present in oncological disease reveals new scenarios of generativity and existential planning in the direction of self-realization in the cipher of the possible. The contribution presents the story of Anastasia, a 41-years-old nurse. A few months after her new marriage and close to a professional promotion, she receives the diagnosis of cholangiocarcinoma: a very aggressive, low-incidence, neoplasia, without specific therapeutic lines and with a negative prognosis. Anastasia’s words, thoughts and emotions, collected in the course of some testimonies in a university classroom, are analyzed and deciphered within the pedagogical paradigm, refering to the perspective of pedagogical problematicism and phenomenological pedagogy.

This paper is a summary of one published in Group Analysis (Cilasun, Schlapobersky, Papanastassiou e Thomas, 2021), "The Large Group in Training, revised for Gruppi for Italian readers. It explores the learning experience provided by the Large Training Group (LTG) serving students on the courses at the Institute of Group Analysis, London (IGA). We describe the LTG from the standpoint of its staff and participating students over a period of some eight years; discuss the role of the staff sub-group giving special attention to the question of leadership and the role of the convener. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author analyzes (in the perspective of ritual liminality) the iconography of the fragmentary frescoes found at the archeological site of the church in Derven (Kruja, uncovered in 2007 and lost in 2008). Once the scarcity of the apse's theme is verified (Deesis: Mary Kyriotissa and Child in her arms between Saints Peter and Paul), the author evaluates mid-fourteenth century stylistic comparisons in the Balkan area, as well as details of west-Adriatic influence. The proposed interpretation is linked to a progressive orientation of Albanian feudal lords towards Roman obedience, in light of the documents and the renewed worship of apostolic princes Peter and Paul's relics (holy heads) translated in 1369 in the papal cathedral of St. John Lateran in Rome. Pope Urban V promoted such worship - coinciding with the progressive return of the papal Holy See from Avignon to Rome - in an effort to strengthen the prestige of Petrine primacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

This article explores the memories of female Palestinian former political prisoners, via a rethinking of the interrogation moment as liminal space. This arena reveals and triggers productive processes of recognition of self and other, construction of meaning, and resistance strategies by reproducing a mode of remembering that can transcend the yoke of "victimisation" and defeat. I aim to acknowledge the terminology that prisoners use - or refuse - to describe themselves and their "being-in-the-world" and to explore the wide range of meanings involved. In this context silence, the act of not confessing during the interrogation, can be read as a microcosm of values that is not reducible to traumatic discourses, a categorisation that risks obscuring the social, cultural and political frame in which it is shaped. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While female icons are neither scant nor marginal in Dante’s Divine Comedy, with Francesca and Beatrice at the centre of the story, other women in the Commedia justify their presence as figures that enact and enable transitions, but not necessarily change: Pia in Purgatorio, Canto V, and her plea to Dante to be remembered among the living; Lucia carrying Dante in his sleep up to the threshold of purgatory (Canto IX); or Matilda waiting for Dante on the banks of the river Lethe in Purgatorio (Canto XXIX). Liminality, conceived not only as a space-between, physically and emotionally, is also a state of intercession, of anagnorisis and of renouncing the lower for the higher: a space for religious intervention, salvation and resurrection. By looking at key women characters in the Commedia, particularly in Purgatorio, the following pages will survey the significance of intercession as a point of arrival in Dante’s Commedia and Blake’s depiction of it, in which female figures, endowed with roles that often imply transition and mediation, coalesce the joint vision of both artist and poet: the transmutation of Pagan into Christian values that can only happen in the realms of the self upon overcoming duality.

Michael Ondaatje’s fourth novel, Anil’s Ghost, is almost universally deemed his “most politically ambivalent work” (Marinkova 2011:1) – and that’s putting it mildly. Since the publication of the novel in 2000, both Anil’s Ghost and its author have been accused of aestheticising terror, of an apolitical glance, an uneasy human rights discourse, and of evading the discussion of the actual causes of the Sri Lankan civil war, as summarised by Wendy Knepper (in Muhleisen and Matzke eds 2006: 45-6). While the aim of this paper is not necessarily to defend Ondaatje by refuting all of these claims individually, it nonetheless offers an interpretation of the novel, which implicitly problematises at least some of these assertions. The central argument is that the novel, while expressing unambiguous disillusionment with (violent) political struggle, is political in the sense that it unflinchingly explores state terrorism and one of its weapons, the enforced disappearance: even more so in its representation of the terror-defying potential of ethical witnessing (especially when contrasted with testifying). As the novel is explicitly set in real life “political time and historical moment” (Ondaatje 2001:2), these issues are contextualised within the history of state terror and resistance to it, on the one hand, and criticism of ethical witnessing on the other. In Anil’s Ghost, as in real life historical examples, moreover, both state terror and witnessing centre on torture, so the paper relies on insights by Avery Gordon, Elaine Scarry and Jenniffer Ballengee in particular to support the thesis that Ondaatje’s clinical and poetic focus on the bodies exposed to pain and death under conditions of state terror inevitably incites the empathetic and defiant response from the reader/viewer/the witness. It is here that the political potential of witnessing comes to the fore most forcefully.

The liminality, related to social groups on the move, recalls specific problems concerning childhood. Childhood, in antiquity, had chronological borders not anthropological limina. In the De peccatorum meritis of Augustine childhood appears an inferior condition in which children are more inept than puppies, that are perfectly autonomous in feeding and moving. This condition of childhood derived from a sin. But Adam and Christ, the two fundamental but different characters in human anthropological history, didn't know a true childhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The child is a liminal subject in Italian archaeological research, still limited and discontinuous about it. Italian archaeology, particularly of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, seems in fact to be more affected by the critical issues and difficulties concerning the analysis of this specific age, reserving for it a marginal place in studies dealing with this topic. This paper focuses in particular on studies of infant funerary practices that are considered most indicative of the child's material presence in the ancient society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Tale of the Sun God, the Cow and the Fisherman (CTH 363), a mythological Hittite text of Hurrian tradition found in Boğazköy-Ḫattuša, offers many points of interest. This essay examines the topos of the newborn - a son of the Sun God and a cow - who is exposed on a mountain and then adopted by a fisherman, as an example of childhood liminality between the natural and the cultural world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the common traits of popular folk heroes in order to demonstrate their common misconception as powerful individuals fighting against an evil threatening their community. In fact, folk heroes often prove to be tiny, seemingly insignificant aberrations the system, who gain their special status by rebelling against the rules governing their respective societies, thus becoming radical social outcasts whose characters border on the monstrous. Even when heroes are explicitly pitted against apparently evil monsters threatening their societies, their relationships with monsters prove to be highly ambivalent: they have to take on some of the monsters’ qualities in order to be able to beat them and the later occasionally even prove to be uncomfortably related to them. In order to prove its point, this paper examines two of the most popular folk heroes in Slovenia: Martin Krpan and King Matjaž as well as a host of heroes and tricksters from across the globe, paying special attention to the worldwide motif of the miser and the thief, where the roles of hero and monster hold a particularly high degree of exchangeability.

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Dark tourism is the act of travel to tourist sites associated with death, suffering or the seemingly macabre (Stone 2006, 146). This phenomenon is object of increasing attention from the scientific community, which has mainly focused on two interpretive keys. Indeed, there is 1) a more established literature that considers the dark tourism as a form of «collective effervescence», to approach the sacred and sublime dimension of death, 2) a set of contributions that have dealt with the process of commodification involving some experiences and destinations of dark tourism. It is assumed that the condition of both can be identified in the conception of dark tourism as a carnival experience of liminality and some possible research developments are proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main interest of this paper is an introductory conceptualisation of specific discourse- building processes related to the zones or entities (conceptually independent from touchable spatiality), sometimes described (in cultural and literary history) as liminal, for their notable in-betweenness and processual nature. Apparent second-order observings enabled the formation of specific self-referential perceptions and/or descriptions of liminal peculiarities. They tend to act as a constitutive part of a broader (liminal) discourse which gradually became self-centred and apparently conscious of its own position -(meta)liminal.

This paper argues for the need of a sociology of grace, based on a sociology of the Renaissance, central - among others - for understanding the modern condition. Such an approach takes its point of departure in Max Weber's comparative study of the rise of world religions and his concept of charismatic power, yet goes beyond Weber in emphasising the significance of a series of renascences, culminating in the European Renaissance starting from the Duecento. The paper starts with a short linguistic and historical background analysis. The linguistic study reveals that terms related to «grace» have three distinct meanings: theological (the power and mercy of God), aesthetic (the power of graceful beauty), and socio-anthropological (charity and gift relations). The historical analysis goes back to the axial age hypothesis but argues that - as the three great monotheistic world religions, redefined as «religions of grace» - each developed outside the time horizon of the axial age, this period, though an extremely important moment of liminal crisis, cannot be considered as the «centre» of world history. Emphasis is placed, instead, on the more or less parallel emergence of ancient Judaism and Minoan culture, each based on epiphany experiences, one male and the other female, thus establishing two distinct and unique traditions of grace. European culture, rooted in Christianity, is based on the attempt to forge a unity between these two traditions; a unity that always remained precarious and in need of constant renewals, in the forms of reforms and renascences. The most important such period of renewal was the Italian Renaissance, which started in the Duecento, combining «rebirth» and reform, and ending in the liminal crisis around 1500. Central for this project was an attempt to unify the three meanings of grace. The failure of the Renaissance as a project led to its fragmentation into Protestant predestination (Weber), court society etiquette (Elias) and the disciplinary institutions of the modern state (Foucault); or the rise of modernity. The argument implies that the crisis produced by modern nihilism can only be ended by a return to the spirit of the Renaissance project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cet article propose un exemple d’approche anthropologique de la littérature, à travers l’utilisation des outils conceptuels de liminalité et performance empruntés à la théorie de Victor Turner et appliqués aux textes des Folies Tristan. La liminalité se présente comme le champ de la pure possibilité, elle est le trait qui signale une situation sociale prête à accueillir des retournements radicaux des structures présentes, où les composantes du système culturel avec ses symboles subissent une sorte de déconstruction-recomposition ludique opérée par les êtres liminaires, sujets qui refusent le principe d’identité, leur caractère primaire étant la métamorphose. Selon Turner, la performance est le moyen de réalisation de cette réécriture des codes culturels dans la zone grise de la liminalité : c’est à travers la mise en scène de son corps que l’être liminaire déstructure le système culturel et crée du nouveau à partir de ce qui est déjà connu. En analysant la manière dont ces catégories anthropologiques s’incarnent dans l’écriture des deux textes de la tradition tristanienne, cet article se propose d’éclaircir la logique dialogique que le personnage liminaire Tristan gère dans son rapport toujours conflictuel avec tous les personnages qui l’entourent et dans son édification d’un système alternatif au système actuel.