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The continuous professional learning of academics as university teachers is a national imperative in South Africa. At our university, a Postgraduate Diploma in Education (Higher Education) was introduced in 2015 with the aim to professionalise university teaching through a formal qualification. Students (i.e., candidates) must transition in two ways: firstly, from being disciplinary specialists to being students again; and secondly, into the community of scholarly teaching in higher education. This article examines the liminality experienced by candidates as they navigate the programme and learn to belong to a new scholarly teaching community. Drawing on empirical data collected from graduates and programme coordinators, the authors track candidates’ shifting identities and showcase how, though initially turbulent and unsettling, the process of learning to belong to a new teaching identity can be rewarding and enriching. The authors conclude by discussing the conditions required to enable candidates to acquire a strong university-teacher identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the process of text transmission between Afrikaans and Dutch, many actors and agencies play a decisive role. One such figure is Alfred Schaffer, whose diverse identities and occupations as poet, translator, reviewer, lecturer and organizer, initiate a multifarious engagement with the inter-linguistic transmission process. This contribution draws on the concepts of liminality and the liminal state to consider Schaffer as "in-between" figure, both from an institutional and a poetic perspective. Schaffer's poetry searches for liminal personae and revisits the experience of moving in the transition zone between the pre-liminal and post-liminal phase. The article considers these articulations of transience alongside data on Schaffer's various literary-institutional activities and his presence in the Low Countries and South Africa. Proceeding from close reading of a selection of genre-hybrid texts, the article argues that Schaffer's problematization of identity and his awareness of functioning at the intersection of two literary poly-systems, creates a sense of being both somewhere and nowhere. This ultimately sheds specific light on the agency of the poet as bridgehead or cultural mediator. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2000, large numbers of undocumented Zimbabweans have settled in South Africa in search of better living opportunities. In 2010, the South African government approved an immigration amnesty known as the Dispensation Zimbabwe Permit (DZP). This article argues that DZP applicants were liminal beings who were unclassifiable, situated between legal and illegal, legitimate and illegitimate status. As people with yet undefinable political belongingness, they repeatedly travelled to queues at Home Affairs offices where they experienced direct and indirect violence as well as harassment and victimisation by criminals and security officials alike. Based on data gathered through interviews in Cape Town, this article concludes that DZP applicants endured waiting because of the desire to end the legal and juridical ambiguity of an undocumented status that inhibits access to rights and protections encoded in domestic and international law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we explore our experiences as early career academics (ECAs) and examine how we forged a collaborative, critical friendship to navigate the challenges that we faced in a South African higher education institution. Our inquiry is guided by the following question: "How are we learning to navigate the organisational academic space through critical friendships?" Grounded in the self-study methodology, we use personal narratives to share our experiences of marginalisation. We use liminal and intersectionality theories as lenses to highlight the formation of our critical friendship. The narratives suggest an organic formation of our critical friendship, which has become a life jacket to enhance ourselves and our practice. Through exploration of our critical friendship, we elaborate on the pleasure, power, and possibilities of collaboration among ECAs that might open up opportunities for professional development leading to social change and academic success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The townships of South Africa are peri-urban neighbourhoods defined by racial segregation, economic disparity, and geographic isolation. A product of the racist policies of apartheid, these spaces exist as exclusively black or 'coloured' neighbourhoods that present limited opportunities for mobility for residents. Since the end of apartheid, townships have increasingly come up under the tourists' gaze as sites/sights of resistance, difference, and, urban adventure. While much of tourism scholarship on liminality to date has focused on tourism landscapes creating liminal opportunities for tourists, this paper details how tourism encounters may also become liminal opportunities for tourism hosts under certain conditions. While the tourism encounters take place in the familiar landscape that is home, they become liminal occasions in which to come face-to-face with the previously inaccessible Other and transform one's relationship with them, with themselves, and with their home space. In conducting a critical discourse analysis with the texts of interviews with 16 township residents, a number of liminal moments were identified in participants' descriptions of tourism encounters. Themes identified in this research include: (1) Pertaining to a change in social standing, economic state, relationships to/with the other; (2) Desire for engagement, transformation through encounter; (3) Transformation of one's understanding of the physical landscape, and; (4) Transformation of one's understanding of self. These themes are elucidated through the use of creative analytic practice (CAP) and demonstrate that while tourism encounters in the spaces of home do not involve a physical relocation, they can have a transformative effect in people for whom such encounters with the Other were previously forbidden. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of liminality informs the experience of tourism, yet little is known about how liminality is performed in the context of 'cruises to nowhere' that sacrifice terrestrial destinations for endless 'seascapes' of liminality. Fuelled by alcohol, round-the-clock parties and endless buffets, cruises to nowhere are an increasingly popular addition to the Southern African cruising season. Understood through a sample of South African based multi-day ocean-going cruises without a destination, results take literally the notion that tourist liminality involves boundary crossing into the unknown on the limitless horizon of the high seas. Using netnographic methods, boundary crossings are traced through the intended and practiced activities on-board cruise-to-nowhere experiences. Involving a mix of sun, sea, sex and especially alcohol, cruises to nowhere engineer the destination-free seascape as a liminoid playground. Reflecting on South African-based cruises to nowhere offered during the southern hemisphere summer cruising season, the findings of this research call for a more deliberate focus on the liminal aspects of ship-based tourism. At the same time, conclusions chart a course for what may be termed debauchery tourism. Building from work in cruise tourism geographies, alcotourism and party tourism, findings do not intend to moralise debaucherous shipboard tourism, but rather to explore the liminal setting of the cruise ship and the sea where cruises to nowhere offer round-the-clock drinking and partying as a liminal destination in and of itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academics without PhDs are common in developing countries and among lecturers from marginalised communities, yet the literature on doctoral education largely ignores them. This qualitative study aimed to address that gap by interviewing academics without PhDs in South Africa and Australia. Their narratives of betwixt and betweenness contribute to theories of liminality as well as doctoral education. Liminality is traditionally conceptualised as a linear, vertical process with clear rites of passage. However, in our study, the interviewees were not only facing a vertical trajectory between non-PhD and post-PhD status but also a lateral trajectory between staff and student identity. The research confirms the importance of distinguishing between transient and permanent liminality in an occupational context. For those who had given up studying, liminality was permanent. Liminality was also affected by dynamically interconnecting factors including age, gender, race, ethnicity, relations with supervisors, time and location. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The historical continuities of the Zimbabwe–South Africa crossborder migrations provide a context in which such movements have continued, despite securitized borders, in post-apartheid South Africa. Based on a qualitative study of undocumented Zimbabwean migrants in three places; namely, the Beitbridge border, South African border town of Musina and the city of Johannesburg, between December 2014 and March 2015, I argue that, securitizing the border between South Africa and Zimbabwe leads to human smuggling, which places smuggled migrants in liminality and marginality, which in turn militates against the goal of free human mobility in the Southern African Development Community (SADC). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neoliberal performativity imperatives that drive the strategic vision and mission of many higher education institutions in South Africa have begun to shape the higher education project in particular ways. While research and knowledge production will always remain the defining hallmark of a university, the fragility of the system to deliver on this objective in substantive ways remains a challenge. Graduate supervision capacity and competence continues to be a serious obstacle for many higher education institutions in South Africa. Of concern for this article, is that in the quest to rapidly develop supervision competence amongst faculty, to what extent will fast tracking be at the expense of learning as 'process' and deep conceptual development of the young academic. How do novice supervisors negotiate liminality as they learn to be researchers while simultaneously teaching the craft to their assigned research students? In this article, I reflect on my experiences of teaching a structured, accredited postgraduate supervision programme at seven merged higher education institutions in SA from 2014 to2016. I argue that high-level research supervision depends on having certain minimum threshold research supervision competences, the achievement of which necessitates a process approach. Young novice faculty however, have to negotiate a precarious liminal space in which they learn the research 'trade/craft' as apprentice whilst simultaneously teaching the research 'trade/craft' to research candidates they supervise. I engage the implications of this risky and contradictory agenda for novice faculty and a discussion of how this 'parallel learning', which entails learning the research craft and simultaneously learning how to teach the research craft is likely to play out in the South African higher education research context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Missiological Spirit is a multidisciplinary approach to ecclesiology grounded in an understanding that all human knowledge, including secular disciplines, holds a degree of redemptive possibility because the Spirit of truth is actively engaged in every dimension of human existence. Particularly in this article, the approach intersects with anthropology, sociology, theology and ritual studies to explicate how these disciplines can interact to transform the Church in South Africa through reconceptualising some of the key Christian doctrines in the light of liminality theory . Through a case study of 2015 xenophobic attacks in South Africa that exemplifies the affinity between public speech and public violence, the article shows how a Missiological Spirit framework can inspire and empower South African Christians to respond adequately to the plague of xenophobia through consciousness-raising as prophetic resistance to violence [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the author critically reflects on his experiences while conducting qualitative liturgical research in local communities in South Africa. After a brief sketch of the context and introducing his approach, three types of examples are presented and reflected upon critically. In conclusion, an argument is presented for a specific kind of spirituality that is needed in order to undertake ethnographic-style participatory observation for liturgical research on African soil, namely a spirituality of liminality. For a researcher who is not a member of the tradition and culture in which the research is being conducted, this spirituality of liminality is necessary in order to develop an emic perspective without defining the people whose worshipping tradition is being researched as 'other'. This spirituality of liminality is an important characteristic for a researcher who engages in qualitative ethnographic-style liturgical research in a postcolonial context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While many persons within westernised or westernising nations such as the United States of America and South Africa continue to place importance on matters of faith, a growing number of those persons approach matters of faith informally rather than formally and individually rather than institutionally. The implications of this are that among 21st century populations informal religious formation may be as important as or more important than the formation taking place via formal religious channels. A central emphasis of this article is that this is especially true among more socially marginalised populations, not simply because they may not enjoy the same level of access to formal institutions, but also because they may regard those institutions as spiritually and culturally restrictive and exclusionary. The contributions of the article are, firstly, its use of original and unique survey data generated from neighbourhood studies the author directed in low-income contexts within several US cities and within Pretoria, South Africa, and, secondly, its analysis of informal ways the urban poor engage Christian ideas and practices - an aspect of urban religion that has not received adequate scholarly attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Migrant labour practices in southern Africa pulled large numbers of men into the cities and onto the mines, leaving women at home to tend the fields, bring up the children, care for the elderly and, most importantly, to keep cultural identity alive. At the same time, migrant labour provided cash for those left behind, facilitated the passage of trade goods from cities and trading stores into rural settlements and thus saw to the transformation and sometimes the death of local traditions of making. The introduction of increasingly large quantities of glass beads into southern Africa from the early nineteenth century saw the emergence of new forms of dress and regalia, made by the women left at home in rural villages, and worn by men and women as forms of indigenous dress. Although beads were used as a currency by the Mpondo peoples and were highly desired by many other East Coast peoples, they were, in fact a luxury, very expensive, and could from the 1850s only be acquired with cash. This article looks at the emergence of particular techniques, designs and forms of beadwork in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as part of an emerging code of dress. Using photographs to establish the swift emergence of a hybridity in the dressing of the body among South African black peoples, the article, nevertheless, maintains that beadwork was something particularly associated with the rural home. It argues, in relation to selected items of men's beaded garments, that, in their use of imported beads, thread and needles provided by traders, and objects brought home by migrant workers, or obtained with the cash provided by them, women created beadwork forms that are now considered ‘traditional’, but which were equally ‘modern’ in their engagement with the wider contexts of migrant labour. In their hybridity and modernity, the beadwork items allowed indigenous cultures to establish modes of resistance in new ‘traditions' that challenged dominant, particularly western, controls of dress and appearance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Comrades Marathon is a dominating event on the annual sport calendar in South Africa. The race challenges its participants in terms of a combination of constraints, such as the spatial, physical, temporal and the psychological. An auto-ethnographical research methodology is applied in combination with literature on ritual and sports, such as distance running, karate, the Olympic Games and triathlon. It is argued that the historical Comrades event is rife with elements of a ritual nature and ritual engagement. Throughout the race, participants in the world's greatest ultra-distance race experience notions of isolation and liminality, emotional and psychological instability, inscription and mental growth, a sense of profound camaraderie, symbolic awareness and the euphoria of the final reward. It is argued that these notions are typical of ritual action and that the Comrades race acts as a vehicle for such ritual transformations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that post-apartheid South Africa destabilised what it means to be white and Afrikaans in South Africa. In particular, it explores the emergence into visibility of so-called ‘zef’-culture as mediated through musical acts like Die Antwoord and Jack Parow and to a lesser extent websites such as Watkykjy. The authors argue that the reconfiguration of white Afrikaans identities as mediated through ‘zef’-cultural artefacts is deliberate in that it speaks to the perceived sense of marginal and liminal experience of white Afrikaans youth in post-apartheid South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Experiences of patients attempting to gain access to dialysis in state health services in the Western Cape provide examples that illustrate the usefulness of Turner's work on liminality in relation to the South African healthcare system. The ritualised routines of hospitalisation, and sufferers' encounters with the health services, have frequently been described as rites of passage - from separation to reintegration with a new social status - eg. as a healthy person after surgery or a new mother after giving birth. For people with final stage kidney failure, however, the situation can be more ambiguous as they move through different levels of care, or are expected to wait eg. for a kidney transplant and/or dialysis. The article focuses on the interstitiality of space, time and experience, while these sufferers remain in limbo, between medical conditions and diagnoses, services and facilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South African higher education is going through a transitional phase of transformation in which existing cultures and identities are strongly contested. The ambiguity and insecurity that come along with such a process are demonstrated in this article through presentation of two rival 'narratives of change' that can be found packed into a number of reports concerning the merger of universities that now form the North West University. Following Victor Turner's vocabulary, this transitional phase of social, political, and organisational restructuring is labelled a social drama. This is because the changes in the higher education sector starting in 2004 have meant a breach in the normative order at various higher education institutions, a breach that has caused feelings of insecurity and crisis which the South African government has tried to deal with through a series of redressive actions. The different narratives dealing with the particular institutional transformation, the outcome of which is North West University, are a clear demonstration of what Turner refers to as the liminal and indeterminate aspects of social drama. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores interpretive possibilities offered by the concept of liminality in the context of identity politics in South Africa in an attempt to build on the rich and stimulating work of Victor Turner towards a comparative and contextual analysis. Degrees and variations of liminality are identified; I am interested, for instance, in whether it is part of hegemonic domination or tactical resistance, historically structured or innovative, and how it is related to class, gender and race in order to go beyond structural positions and social categories. After holding at the current South African transition as a liminal phase, manifestations of Afrikaner/Afrikaans cultural politics are investigated on the level of individual and collective liminality, drawing from the literature, fieldwork and personal experience. With regard to individual and social identity based on Afrikaans, liminality appears, under certain conditions, as either a form of defensive victimhood or as social connectedness and creolisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In enacting his ritual of kingship, the Xhosa imbongi (praise poet) in South Africa is marked by his accoutrements and his artistic performance as separated from society; he assumes a sacred stance in a transitional position and effects the social incorporation of his audiences; he mediates between chief and subjects, serving as both upholder of the chief's status and as social critic. His liminal location invites comparison with other trickster figures of African mythology and folklore like Ananse and Legba. This perspective explains the occasional self-belittling assertions by the imbongi, as well as the imbongi's license to criticize and use ribald language with impunity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whilst the notion of children's movement has been examined across diverse settings in the minority world, explorations within majority world contexts have remained more sporadic. This paper contributes to an emerging body of literature offering new perspectives on mobility which crossover with, and in some instances challenge, those understandings drawn from the minority world. The manipulation of mobility, central to the existence of the apartheid state in South Africa, has left an indelible mark upon the landscape of this emerging democratic society. However, through an investigation of children's independent outdoor mobility within a suburban area of Cape Town, this paper argues that the legacies of apartheid should not be considered as the seminal factor shaping geographical movements throughout neighbourhood space. Rather, it should be positioned alongside a range of different concerns, such as the mobility of baboon troops, domestic 'guard' dogs, traffic and family composition. Thus, for these children growing up in a post-apartheid context, the influence of apartheid upon their outdoor mobility was both nuanced and inconsistent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prehistoric sites with depictions of trees are fewer and farther apart than those exhibiting their animal and human counterparts in southern African rock art. Even so, this arboreal subject matter occupies a unique position in hunter-gatherer belief and folkloric systems. From extant ethnographic testimonies concerning trees, this report assesses the graphic features and associations of these depictions and recognizes their peculiar ontological and unifying force at the interface of the animal and human worlds. The significance of this oddity is inferable primarily from their generic physical form, which leads to their elevated metaphysical status in hunter-gatherer folklore, cosmology, and belief. While the outward arboreal appearance may be the most obvious in registering peculiarities that were in turn granted liminal status in hunter-gatherer cosmologies, it appears that some of this uniqueness may have derived from their invisible chemical properties of which very little is known in southern Africa at present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]