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Although liminal theory explains transitional periods in consumers' lives – such as preadolescence – the impact of these transitions on emotionally connected actors and the transformations that the latter endure have been largely overlooked. Through a qualitative study of the mothers of preteen girls, we show that liminality spills over and that mothers transform from fully needed to authoritative-friendly moms. During this process, these mothers engage in spilled-over liminal consumption (SOLC), which comprehends concomitantly loosely and creatively crafted rituals and new and re-signified routines. However, amid the process of assuming a new mother's role and helping their daughters' transformation, these mothers unreflectively reinforce traditional gender norms. Based on our findings, we discuss the process of SOLC and how it ends in reproducing gender and class-based stereotypes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the ‘necro-politics' or the fascist politics of death as it unfolded from the funerals of the squadristi - the members of the fascist paramilitary squads who carried out attacks and violence throughout Italy before Benito Mussolini came to power in the autumn of 1922 - to their exhumation and reburial in ‘shrines’ during the 1930s. Adopting an anthropological perspective, it considers the funerals, exhumations and reburials of fascists as rites of passage that dynamically came to shape political meanings. As the article will show, while the funerals of the early 1920s became crucial vehicles for the revolutionary mobilization that brought fascism to power, the reburials from the early 1930s served to normalize the politics of the squadristi and obliterate the dangerously disruptive repercussions of their revolutionary origins. At the conceptual level, the article foregrounds the dynamic and shifting relationship between power and ritual that shaped fascist political culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The conflict between the Perso‐Shiite state and its opposition, especially Kurdish political organizations in Iran/Eastern Kurdistan, and their subsequent suppression, has led to the migration of many Kurds since the early 1980s. This exodus has affected their political identification. Here, changes toward nationality and citizenship in the attitude of the first‐generation Kurdish immigrants with a leftist political background living in Germany, The Netherlands, Sweden and France will be analyzed. From the perspective of the relationship between individual and political organization, state and society/community, it seeks to uncover that how these migrants think about different collective political identities, how their views have changed, and which collective social identity has had most impact on shaping their political view. Following a qualitative approach, data were collected through in‐depth semi‐structured and focus group interviews. The findings show that the interviewees within the extra‐organizational Kurdish convergence in Europe have tried to reidentify themselves politically by moving away from the political climate of Iran, while Kurdishness shapes their view on nationality and citizenship. Although the European states officially recognize them as Iranian nationals, they themselves see this as an imposed citizenship. In their current situation, many of them, while emphasizing their Kurdish nationality and wishing for Kurdistani citizenship, prefer to be recognized only as citizens of European countries and not be attributed to Iran. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globally, schooling continues to be a precarious space for gender and sexuality diverse (GSD) youth, where students are more likely to experience transphobic and homophobic violence at school than at home or in the general community. While there have been moves to provide learning about GSD in preservice teacher education, limited attention has been given to how postgraduate programs might better equip inservice teachers to support GSD students. In this paper, we argue that Master of Education (MEd) degrees, that serve teachers and school leaders, represent a space for transforming teacher attitudes and practice. Our research in a large, metropolitan university in Australia explored the use of reflective online writing in an MEd by coursework critical sociological studies course. Threshold concepts and liminality were used as a theoretical framework to explore how nineteen inservice teachers engaged with content on GSD and education. Our research findings suggest that while some students may feel discomfort as their existing knowledge is challenged, providing a safe space for critical reading/thinking and for connecting theory with personal and professional experiences enables students to move through phases of liminality. This opens up opportunities for teachers and leaders to challenge cis-heteronormative attitudes, practices and policies in education.. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the concept of liminality in combination with ontological security through an overarching postcolonial lens, this article shows how Ukraine as a liminar on the East–West spatial-ideological axis has successfully claimed agency from the European Union (EU) and Russia in the wake of Russia's full-scale invasion. We argue that the latter has acted as a critical juncture for Ukraine, to the point that agency has emerged from a state of ontological anxiety. Provoking the need to fight for the survival of the Self, Russia's invasion has strongly accelerated the transformation of Ukraine's liminal identity, uniting the country around a new asserted Self. Russia's aggression has pushed Ukraine to definitively reject the narrative of a common identity promoted by Russia and claim its rightful belonging to Europe, thereby unleashing unprecedented agency vis-à-vis its significant Others, i.e. Russia and the EU. From the EU's side, Ukraine has finally been embraced within the European family by receiving candidate status. From Russia's side, Ukraine's successful application for EU candidate status has consolidated Ukraine's departure from Russia's perceived sphere of influence. Along with Ukraine's nationwide resistance against the invasion, this destabilises Russia's projected identity discourse around the Slavic brotherhood and the "Russian world". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article employs a sociological and dialogical information perspective to identify what shape information literacy practice takes for people who are hesitant about the COVID-19 vaccine. An information perspective places information and people's relations with information at the centre of the inquiry. The study carried out 14 semi-structured interviews with UK adults who had not yet received or taken up their invitation to have the COVID-19 vaccine. Outcomes of this study suggest that information literacy practices related to vaccine hesitancy emerged through the liminal space and in relation to agentic performance, which was catalysed through engagement with experiential, corporeal and social information. This study has implications for the teaching of information literacy, in particular, the idea that being informed is an affirmative action that will automatically empower learners to make appropriate choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines diverse infrastructural interventions in the making of Ardhisasa, the Kenyan state's digital land information management platform, as a space of contestation, negotiation, and experimentation. We analyse the platformisation of governance through theories on liminality to explain the agency of various actors in shaping the digital state. We particularly zoom into the influence of two actors: the private actors in the land sector and the civil society organisations representing informalised residents, and how they exercise agency in the development of Ardhisasa. Drawing on interviews with state and non-state actors, secondary literature, and extensive experience within Kenya's land administration system, we trace the overt and covert exercise of power in the platformisation of land administration of Nairobi. Our central thesis is that, despite its progressive development, Ardhisasa follows the tradition of a long line of large-scale infrastructural or developmental projects that rarely deliver on their promise for improvement but rather further entrench marginalised groups due to its exclusion of the already existing, albeit informalised, land administration and transaction practices that meet the needs of the urban poor. We argue that Ardhisasa's perpetual state of becoming leads to the spatialisation of liminality itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spain's berry industry relies on the agricultural labour of both local and seasonal migrant workers. A significant part of this migrant workforce comprises Moroccan mothers who leave their children with relatives in order to perform this wage labour. The bilateral recruitment regime favours the employment of Moroccan women with children for this labour to ensure that workers return home at the end of the harvesting season. Drawing on multi‐site ethnographic research in Spain and Morocco, this study revealed the effects of this bilateral labour regime on the intimate lives of migrant workers. We argue that the geopolitical prescriptions of this labour migration regime, along with the working and living conditions of migrant workers in Huelva, result in experiences of intimate liminality. We examined these experiences by exploring: (1) how the role of female workers as mothers becomes liminal as transnational labour agreements marginalise and outsource care obligations, (2) how governmental neglect of migrant workers' occupational health exposes them to reproductive health risks and (3) how this neglect places them in a liminal space in terms of access to healthcare, and (4) how, despite their liminality, migrant workers contest precarious conditions through everyday solidarity practices. We advance a feminist approach to liminality, emphasising the importance of an embodied, intersectional, and multiscalar perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we explore how migrants establish and operate small and medium-sized enterprises in the host country while navigating liminality and developing appropriate entrepreneurial strategies. We use a multiple-case study of Russian-speaking migrant entrepreneurs in Germany to explore how the integration of entrepreneurial migrants into the host country depends on their agency, ability to enter new contexts, adaptive strategies, perceived country of origin, and connections to diasporas. The study contributes to migrant entrepreneurship by explaining how migrants strategise and diminish their liminality by leveraging their portfolio of capabilities and resources to establish, grow, and transform entrepreneurial ventures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data collected from 9,508 volunteer tourists, we employ Critical Incident Technique to identify and explore the volunteers' experience and how this affects the liminality of their journeys. What becomes apparent is that the liminality of the experience can have uncertain outcomes as volunteer tourists have to navigate living conditions, culture, operational differences, and feelings of marginalisation and vulnerability, all while feeling powerless to make meaningful change. As such, volunteer-sending organisations should be mindful of the use of transformation within the marketing of their programmes, given the highly individualised experiences of volunteers. The use of transformation should be fine-tuned to the individual, their expectations, and the contribution they wish to make. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: This research delved into the experiences of couples and therapists in online couples therapy with an emphasis on therapeutic boundaries. Background: Although the popularity of online therapy has surged, limited understanding exists about the meanings and experiences tied to therapeutic boundaries in this context, underscoring the need for its examination to enhance online therapy's effectiveness. Method: A purposive sample of 51 participants, including 36 individuals (comprising 18 couples who underwent separate interviews), and 15 couple and family therapists were interviewed in four online focus groups. Constructivist grounded theory guided the data analysis to discern therapeutic boundary dimensions. Results: The analysis identified three dimensions of therapeutic boundaries: (a) boundaries between the therapist and couple, (b) boundaries between the couple and their family, and (c) boundaries between the therapists and their own families. Conclusion: The study offers insights into the nuanced concept of liminality within therapists' and couples' transition to online couples therapy, particularly emphasizing disruptions in conventional therapeutic paradigms. Implications: To uphold the integrity and bolster the therapeutic alliance in online couples therapy, there is a compelling need for therapists to transition toward novel means of establishing boundaries, moving away from traditional constructs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines some of the cultural symbolism and narratives supporting the tourism activities along the New Jersey coastline. Existing in part as a series of coastal barrier islands in need of regular maintenance, the Jersey shore hosts entertainment activities on strips of sand just off the mainland, including boardwalk rides, foods, games, and a general atmosphere of the carnivalesque. This liminal zone between the water and the land offers a sense of tension and uncertainty from its location, as well as a local history of fires, floods, storms, and shipwrecks. Some area attractions with nautical themes resonate with the tension; others offer subversive dissonance against it, such as thrill rides and haunted houses. This juxtaposition of unstable landscape and amusement activities is not unique to the Jersey shore, as there is no causal or deterministic relationship between physical geography and cultural symbolism. Yet places do collect meanings over time, symbols and stories, forming a symbolic landscape overlaid on local geography. New Jersey claims credit for inventing the boardwalk, and its shore remains a point of state pride and identity, representing an exemplar of both coastal conquest of rough frontier terrain via civil engineering technology, and the American seaside vacation experience. The carnivalesque subverts the liminal tension and serves to create emotional attachment memory that helps drive visitor motivation across generations. In particular, the pace of continual change creates nostalgia for older attractions, and creates a sense of loss, which serves as a seldom-acknowledged driver of visitor activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractThis paper explores the historical origins and enduring significance of the debates surrounding the color black and the appropriateness of dress length in Azerbaijani society. By combining archival research, fieldwork, interviews, and visual analysis, it was possible to explore the relationship between fashion choices and socio-economic and cultural dynamics. This paper suggests that the preference for black attire and debates surrounding the length of dress are associated with the particular socio-economic and cultural dynamics of the 1990s, set against the backdrop of Azerbaijan’s post-Soviet context. This time represents a liminal period in the country’s recent history, characterized by ambivalence that enabled a renegotiation of gender roles and dress norms. There is limited existing literature on Azerbaijani dress and this study offers a socio-semiotic ethnographic approach to understanding the complex relationship between fashion, and social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractThis article examines various stages of Kurdish refugees’ protracted exile in Rome. Protracted exile is characterized by refugees’ experiences of displacement, permanent abandonment, a futureless life and pariahdom. I argue that governments’ approaches, policies, and measures shape refugees’ protracted exile. Additionally, this study focuses on how refugees, as active pariahs, exercise agency to navigate through protracted exile. Informed by the concepts of permanent liminality and pariahdom and based on data collected from ethnographic fieldwork and 24 in-depth interviews, the study explores how refugees’ contextual and causal conditions generate protracted exile. It also illuminates how refugees, as active pariahs, negotiate their everyday protracted exile circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I ask to what extent and through what semantic means Polish theatre artists use the concept of liminality as a preferred theatrical strategy for addressing issues related to the cultural diversity of contemporary society. Particularly, I look at the rigidity and impermeability of (mental) borders in Europe, the typically difficult (or impossible) process of arriving in a new place, and the often related experience of marginalization. I analyze "staged liminality" on three levels: the personal one (the state of liminality as the mental condition of individual characters), the semantic one (the state of liminality as a metaphor for the fate of migrants and the associated sense of ambivalence and ambiguity), and the spatial one (the theatrical "representation"/"staging" of urban space as a transitional space). In doing so I highlight three constitutive elements of Polish migrant theatre by artists of the younger generation of immigrants in Germany: First, their works reflect on the issues of identity and belonging related to the concept of liminality; second, they thematize the socio-political stigmatization of migrants and refugees and the resistance it generates; and finally, the artists attempt to overcome such a state of affairs by treating theatrical activity as a kind of intervention. Turner's concept of liminality, with its three phases, offers a productive framework to reflect on the specificity of the theatre of Polish migrants in the context of postmigrant theatre and the German theatrical landscape more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The symbolic nature of taboo is examined as a container that differentiates developmental stages between the social values order/disorder through a ritual, liminal process of separating order as clean/blessed/safety and disorder as polluted/disassociated/risky. Unconscious/conscious taboos embody that perilous journey across margins in rites of passage and their emotional value and intensity in the form of symptomology varies cross‐culturally. Two clinical cases are presented to illustrate the influence of taboo on obsessive compulsions and anorexia nervosa. Particular attention is given as to whether dirt as disorder/rubbish can be recycled at the margins between safety and risk and value redistributed to the intrapsychic and psychosocial anomalous bits and pieces that are discarded as rubbish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper, based on my doctoral ethnographic research amongst the Miya community in one of the chars of Western Assam, shows how a particular category of identity documents shape their subjectivities, experiences, and aspirations. I focus on the identity documents which have errors, like mistakes in names, dates of birth or addresses, and badly angled photos. I refer to them as thin documents. Because of the thin documents, the Miyas find it difficult to assert formal citizenship rights, which they could normally assert based on accurate documentation. For the thin documents to help prove the Miyas' citizenship, they must be further supported by an additional set of documents. The process questions the Miya's formal citizenship rights. I present narratives of the Miya people living with thin documents to illustrate how the materiality of the identity document binds the Miya people to a state of liminal citizenship. I ask: what do these errors in the identity document or thin documents tell us about citizenship, particularly liminal citizenship with reference to the Miya community of Assam? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Immigrants need to constantly manage their legal status while straddling uncertain life circumstances and shifting policies. U.S. immigrant policies treat immigrants based on U.S. internal and international political needs. This practice is only further heightened during a global crisis such as the recent COVID‐19 pandemic. Immigrants' existing citizenship contributes to the constraints they experience. Using Chinese international students studying in graduate programs as an example, this paper studies the dual liminality highly skilled immigrants experience in sustaining their legal status and developing their careers. Adopting a life course perspective, this paper reveals that liminal legality constrains immigrants' career choices as they transition from students to full‐time professionals. Acquiring legal status takes precedence over their career goals. They may forfeit career opportunities to secure legal status. Moreover, their Chinese citizenship hinders their career advancement. In recent years, United States–China rivalry in international politics and intellectual competition has intensified. Combined with a racialized construction of U.S. citizenship, highly skilled Chinese immigrants experience a heightened sense of vulnerability vis‐a‐vis institutional scrutiny and mistreatment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Worker mothers still struggle to find a good balance between their care and work identities. Most research on motherhood at work focuses on how organizational structures can enable professional women to find a balance between caring and work identities neglecting their personal experiences and how they understand themselves in relation to both motherhood and work. We propose to use a liminal identity work perspective to explore the identity tensions that professional women experience during their transition into motherhood and how they manage it. To explore this question, we conducted a qualitative study over 2 years with worker mothers in Latin and North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Africa. The thematic and narrative analysis of 80 individual narrative interviews shows the emergence of two coexisting identity narratives. The first narrative understands motherhood as a linear process, where women experience liminality, uncertainty, and identity loss but eventually return to work after having aggregated their new worker mother identities during maternity leaves. The second coexisting narrative challenges this linear and finite view by highlighting the transition to motherhood as a continuous, liminoid, and never‐ending process. The two narratives are contextualized and managed differently according to the different cultural, historical, and social contexts where they are developed; the overall results present motherhood as a 'liminoid' experience that requires constant identity work to navigate the tensions emerging between potentially new and customary identities and behaviors in work contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on how expatriate adventure drama series on early 1960s American television served as harbingers of change in network television's content. Through examination of the context leading to those series and an in-depth analysis of two series, Adventures in Paradise and Hong Kong, it demonstrates how American expatriates served as liminal and transitional figures in geographic settings that themselves were also liminal. As such the series fit into a niche unique to the time of the late turn of the 1960s, when broader social attitudes were also in transition. Drawing upon Victor Turner's work and Bjørn Thomassen, who has brought a reevaluation of Turner and the concept of the rites of passage as developed by Arnold van Gennep, the article documents how turn of the 1960s adventure dramas already contained disruptive storylines undercutting existing social attitudes even while continuing to reinforce systemic racism and fixed sexual identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Drawn from grounded perspectives of a Bangkok night market that is part of a franchise known as "Talad Rod Fai" (or "Train Station Market"), this article argues that the market's popularity rested originally on its liminoid character, enabling the construction of an alternate public space that can be transgressive of the city's highly urbanized landscape. Its long-term sustainability, however, appears to be at the cost of its original objectives, due to the onset of global tourism, which has increasingly converted and transformed its spaces into a site of commercialization and formalization. This has impacted the nature of the goods and products sold, and contributed to the growing precarity of many of its tenants, along with significant loss of local interest in the market. Such insights raise implications about the potentially contradictory nature of tourism on local street-level economies, and its impact on the construction and subsequent consumption of public spaces in urban settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Education as a journey of human becoming involves commitment to one’s ethical life project as well as learning to live well and actively participate with others in an ever-changing socio-cultural, political and material world. This paradoxical journey is at the heart of our philosophical criticism of contemporary policy impulses to formulate risk averse pedagogies which centre on a product model of outcomes. We draw from philosophical perspectives of liminality and the Productive Pedagogy study from Australia to inform our position by indicating how students make sense of pedagogical experiences in unique, deeply personal, corporeal and limitlessness ways. We use Aquatics Education as a useful symbolic representation for the immersive, embodied and relational practices involved in human becoming; practices that we aver need to be acknowledged, while never fully defined. These practices require teachers’ localised autonomous judgements in evaluating risk for dilemmas encountered. Holistic experiences, provided by games with gravity, are consistent with such ‘aesthetic experiences’ for primacy of the subject/subjective. Our affirmative critique reveals how immersive experiences occupy a defensible position for our concept of a Productive Pedagogy of Liminality, which aims to open affordances for each student’s ethical life project by heightening subjective awareness between body and spirit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With emphasis on naming conventions, this article examines on‐the‐ground bureaucracy and its impacts on the lives of undocumented migrant children who attend state schools in Thailand. Names of migrants from Myanmar do not typically include a family name. As a result, when their children are placed in the Thai documentary system, which was designed for individuals with a first name and a last name, schools add Thai phrases literally meaning “without a surname” after each child's proper name. This study demonstrates that a particular form of liminal subjectivity is forged through school‐based socialization into bureaucratic culture and institutional routines of official naming. While the anthropological concept of “liminality” is typically understood as temporary phases of transition, school practices give rise to a prolonged state of in‐betweenness and constitute the children's political being in a negative form. The name “Without‐A‐Surname” denotes via negation, pointing to the quality of stateless state‐belonging. This label becomes indexical of the ambivalent state of migrancy, which marks migrant schoolchildren as state subjects whose pending status lies between that of insider and outsider. School‐level bureaucracy, therefore, defers a postliminal state—namely, the children's full incorporation into the Thai state and society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Writing differently presents numerous challenges, impossibilities, and anxieties. While literature underscores the significance of cultivating new writing forms, the actual experience of writing differently remains obscure. This paper seeks to better understand how alternative forms of writing can be enacted. More specifically, it aims to explore how writing differently affects the process of becoming an academiX, by analyzing our collective and individual experiences within Compo·X, a collective of PhD students. We perceive our doctoral experience as a liminal one, a transitional phase that reshapes our identities. We illustrate how our distinct writing practices facilitated the development of a shared identity and an environment for growth in academic world often known for its lack of inclusivity. At the end, we show how writing differently and collective writing helped us to swim against the tide and served as a platform for micro-revolutions within us and academia’s competitive and normative culture and organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For what reasons may NDAs continue to be an attractive measure to conceal severe misconduct in organizations, despite high-profile criticism? I theorize severe misconduct as a critical moment of separation of victim-survivor, perpetrator, and the social order of the organization. This provokes liminalities and I read Giesen's four liminal phenomena (victims, monsters, garbage, and seduction) as imagination devices in the analysis of the accounts of those who have experienced severe misconduct. In doing so, I show that the multiplicative effects of these liminal phenomena intersect in such a disruptive manner that NDAs offer an attractive ceremony towards transition; a seductive way for organizational actors to transform/adjust the presence of victims and monsters, hiding and/or recycling their garbage. I contribute by theorizing meta-liminality and intersecting liminal phenomena emerging from severe misconduct in organizations, showing empirically examples of why NDAs may be used to ceremonially manage the transition in these cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we conceptualize the days of mourning that followed the passing of Queen Elizabeth II. as constituting a liminal occasion, a moment of in‐betweenness through which we can explore sense‐making in times of transition. How do people navigate through liminal occasions, and are they always transformative? Through a rapid response ethnography (Ninterviews = 64, Nparticipants = 122), we were able to capture the raw moments within which a collective comes together, as part of a national ritual, to transition from ‘here’ to ‘there’. In our data, liminality prompted participants to strategically define British national identity and its future by positioning the Queen as representative of Britishness, her loss as a national identity loss. No longer taken for granted, participants reasserted the value of the monarchy as an apolitical and unifying feature in an otherwise divided society, characterizing the continuity of the institution as an essential part of British identity and society. The analysis illustrates how liminality offers a useful conceptual tool for addressing how temporality and change are negotiated in relation to a shared identity, and how navigating transitional moments brings with it political implications for the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks into the life and ethnographic work of Leonore Kosswig (1904–1973), who lived in Turkey as a German exile from 1937 until her death in 1973. While her husband, Curt Kosswig was invited to Istanbul University as a full professor, Leonore had no institutional affiliation. However, she traveled with her husband around Anatolia and joined his fieldwork, during which she developed an interest in local customs and the daily life of villagers and nomadic tribes. Leonore decided to stay in Turkey after Curt’s return to Germany in 1955. Her excellent command of Turkish and former experience in fieldwork allowed her to become one of the first women to conduct ethnographic research in Turkey. Until her death, she pursued several pioneering research projects on wedding customs, tablet weaving, nomadic life, and ownership signs. Relying on her research publications and ego-documents, we employ a biographical approach to articulate upon her liminal existence in exile. In dialogue with research on twentieth century forced migrations that engage with the concepts of in-betweenness and liminality, we address Leonore’s liminal existences on the edge of two worlds on numerous planes. In particular, we argue that Kosswig’s liminality was reflected on her exilic existence in Istanbul as a foreign woman; her ethnographic research agenda into liminal geographic locations, marginalized communities, and disappearing cultural artifacts; and her gendered navigation of foreignness and nativeness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper probes the relationship between nationalism and belonging. In the context of the enactment of the 'Nation‐State Law' in Israel, it addresses a twofold question: how do members of the Druze community articulate the minority group's sense of belonging to the national community, and what do their constructions of belonging suggest about how Druze might shape and secure their belonging in the Jewish nationalist project? Our analytical approach draws on theoretical accounts of the politics of belonging and nationalist projects centred on culture and political values; civic identifications and attachments; and the racialized positioning of social groups. The analysis of 18 semi‐structured interviews evoked four metaphors through which we elaborate the impact of the Nation‐State Law on Druze belonging and explore the implications for Druze engagement with this Jewish nationalist project. We envision the possibility of Druze pursuing a transversal intersectional political project of belonging as non‐Jews in Israel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A unique mudbrick installation with a plastered double basin on its top was uncovered in the latest Iron I stratum (A2) at Tel Abel Beth Maacah (Tell Abil el-Qamh), a large site in the northern Hula Valley, Israel. The installation was discovered in a unit that was part of a large, elaborate public complex with an exceptional architectural plan, located in the centre of the site. The installation under discussion appears with other features that bear cultic associations, along with some that can be considered mundane. This article presents the context, focusing on the installation by itself and in tandem with the other features, with the goal of exploring the possible cultic function of this space and of the unit as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early career professionals actively seek career advancement opportunities while undergoing socialization within their organizations. This study employs the concept of liminality to examine their experience of in-betweenness in dual socialization — simultaneous organizational socialization and vocational/organizational anticipatory socialization for the next career chapter. We conducted repeat interviews with 22 U.S. early career professionals (n  = 65), employed full-time. This longitudinal study uncovers how participants construct liminality as either a planned or an emergent phase; factors contributing to their discursive tension in liminality over time; and how they communicatively manage the tension to move forward. We propose a refined model of socialization [ Jablin, F. (2001). Organizational entry, assimilation, and exit. In F. Jablin & L. Putnam (Eds.), The new handbook of organizational communication (pp. 732–818). Sage], which integrates liminality as a phase in which individuals feel neither fully "in" nor "out" of their organization. This enhanced model theorizes dual socialization as dynamic and interconnected processes through permeable organizational boundaries, addressing the contemporary career landscape with an increasing number and types of employment options. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a change in the conceptualisation of home, as part of a wider paradigmatic transformation in the understandings of the boundaries between humans and animals, and nature and culture. A new concept of multispecies homescapes is suggested, building on recent work on human–animal relationships as well as writings on the home in human geography. Multispecies homescapes are approached as imaginary spaces, including experiences of sharing home with other species, the limits and liminalities of homeness, and the loss of a multispecies home. Imagining home as multispecies will widen the scope of research beyond anthropocentric understandings of domestic space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Victim support police work involves a wide range of relations within a police force, including expectations that set this occupation as a hybrid or liminal position, between what's commonly considered classic policing and social work. Between victims' and other police officers' expectations, their experience is dramatically affected by liminality, with deep effects regarding group identity, satisfaction, and wellbeing. Drawing from qualitative research among victim support officers from Catalonia's Mossos d'Esquadra corps, this article analyses how victim support officers find themselves between specific police fields and expectations, and how this defines them as liminars or subjects of liminal positions, roles, and actions. This, in turn, we argue, makes them an uneasy object and subject for victims, other officers, and for their institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a narration about the contradictory feelings of occupying a space of transition between carrying a gun, and building 'a new life', as women ex-guerrillera, in the context of the post-peace agreement in Colombia. It draws upon two ethnographic fieldworks conducted in the northeastern region of Colombia in 2019 and 2022. It analyses the political, spatio-temporal, and embodied dynamics of their reincorporation, drawing on two key concepts that speak to this feeling of occupying a space 'in-between' war and 'civilian society': liminality and borderlands. The article mobilises liminality as an analytical and empirical tool to delve into those dynamics and show the gendered contestations that precisely arise from this 'in-betweenness' that eludes dichotomous analyses of war and peace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops and applies the concept of liminality and liminal identities to illustrate the relative positioning of graduates within the transitional spaces of moving from one institutional context to another and navigating an uncertain and challenging labour market. The current pandemic-affected labour market provided a rich context through which recent graduates have to sense-make and negotiate a future identity trajectory, exacerbating challenges evident over the past several decades. Drawing on qualitative interview data with recent graduates, this article depicts the liminal spaces they occupy through a typology of transitional positionings, including movement between these spaces. These ideas carry wider implications for supporting graduates' transition to a challenging and volatile labour market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the pathetic condition of Palestinians as depicted by Palestinian American writers: Susan Abulhawa in The Blue between Sky and Water (2015) and Hala Alyan in The Arsonists' City (2021) through Victor Turner's concept of liminality. Palestine has been the stage for devastating tragedies, with Palestinians enduring brutal massacres, forced abductions, and sexual exploitation at the hands of Israelis since the mid-20th century onward. Consequently, Palestinians grapple with anxieties, uncertainties, and profound doubts about their future due to Israeli violence. Through the lens of liminality, this study investigates how both Palestinian writers portray the Palestinian tragic experience amidst devastating events by addressing themes of migration, discrimination, and promoting understanding and acceptance across diverse cultural backgrounds. This paper explores the Palestinians' painful experiences, which are transmitted to their descendants via colonization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: This study proposes a preliminary definition of third culture parenting drawn from the experiences of relatively privileged expat mothers who raise their children outside of their passport country. Background: A vast literature examining third culture kids (TCKs) in the context of expatriate postings exists, as does research on parenting styles among middle‐class, U.S. families; however, there is little scholarship exploring where these intersect: an emerging style of third culture parenting. Method: This gap was explored through an inductive, qualitative analysis of data collected from 11 in‐depth interviews with middle‐class mothers who were all married and globally mobile because of their husbands' work. In total, these families lived in 17 countries. Results: Respondents reflected on the challenges and opportunities of parenting while suspended in a liminal space between geographic locations and cultural contexts. Conclusion: This article examines several paradoxes that emerged in the analysis: juggling intensive parenting with children's increased independence, navigating family dynamics that are both insular and egalitarian, and creating a sense of belonging in mobility. Analysis of these paradoxes of mothering in liminality is significant if the transnational lives of expatriate families are harbingers of the kinds of identities and family relations that are becoming commonplace in a mobile world. Implications: The phenomenon of TCKs is well documented in the scholarship, but it must also be understood in relation to an emerging style of third culture parenting among expatriate families, which may inform therapeutic interventions aimed at these families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South Africa has a complex history of racialized (im)mobilities. During the social engineering of apartheid, the city became a racialized white space that was dependent on black migrant workers who were forced to live in the marginal spaces on the edge of the city. This daily commute was enabled through the construction of public transportation systems and commuter railways. This mundane and banal form of mobility became a key site of both repression and resistance during the apartheid era. The present article explores how these racialized railway mobilities were represented during the 'Drum decade' of the 1950s in South Africa. It explores how the short story, as a liminal genre positioned within local and transnational literary cultures, is mobilized to narrate railway mobilities during this transitional decade. Texts analyzed include the news reports and short stories by Can Themba, Es'kia Mphahlele, and Nat Nakasa. This article explores how the mobile public spaces of the railways and the mobile figures of railway passengers were mobilized in the Anglophone South African short story as a form of resistance to the repression of the apartheid era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I present the individual ethnography of Amina, a Senegalese woman possessed by the spirits of her lineage. Amina's story shows the lacerations of a person who simultaneously inhabits two worlds: the traditional Lebou culture and the Western one. When her spirits manifest themselves, she is forced to choose between two different interpretations of her suffering: the traditional persecutory and the Western psychopathological. She chooses the former but refuses the healers imposed by the tradition and turns to a priest of her choice, who proves to be sensitive to her need to personally own the healing journey. Amina strategically manipulates the plasticity of the traditional belief system without abandoning it; she bends it to shake the boundaries of herself, and her group and lineage. She uses the disruptive potential of possession and the irruption of the invisible world in the visible to renegotiate her role and acquire a new status in her group. She uses the performative dispositive of possession to renegotiate and expand her spaces of agency and affirm her tenacious subjectivity of a permanently liminal person, one who inhabits, shakes and redraws the boundaries between different worlds of meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper takes a critical posthumanist lens to study the consequences of rapid urbanisation of the Chinese landscape as presented in the short story ‘Good Hunting’, by Ken Liu. One of the main characters in the story is Yan, a huli jing (fox-spirit), whose ability to switch between her fox and human forms is severely impaired by the loss of remnant nature in China, and the subsequent erosion of the qi from the soil. It is not just the natural landscape that undergoes a transformation during urbanisation – the remnants of nature do not remain untouched by this process. Beings like Yan, who continue to inhabit the place that used to be their home, do not remain the same that they were pre-urbanisation. The city changes them, moulds them in ways hitherto inconceivable, and they undergo this transmogrification of their bodies and their self in order to survive. The article draws out the historical relationship between urban spaces and (post)human bodies, with a specific focus on the Chinese body, drawing parallels between the ideals associated with the city and juxtaposing them with what it means to be posthuman. The paper also interrogates Yan’s status as a liminal entity before and after Hong Kong’s transformation, and her use of liminality as a survival strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractIn this study, we examine the gendered experiences of Chinese returnees within a double liminality formed by prolonged border crossing and the COVID-19. Through qualitative interviews, we identified three themes based on features of liminality observed by Victor Turner: 1) gender norms ostensibly challenged but actually reinforced in the anti-structure, 2) kinship and romantic relationships renegotiated for comradeship, and 3) gender awareness gained through personal reflexivity. We seek to uncover the profound effects of these experiences within a complex space-time construct between points of departure from host countries and arrival at home. We hope to enrich scholarly discussions of gender dynamics observed in transnational mobility during a global health crisis and facilitate policy makers’ recognition of the gendered disparities in treatment for physical and mental suffering during a pandemic border-crossing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two plays focusing on the postincarceration experiences of sex offenders opened in 2018: Life Jacket Theatre Company's America Is Hard to See and Bruce Norris's Downstate. Both plays ask spectators to recognize the humanity of sex offenders while also keeping in mind the harm they caused. The questions at the heart of these plays are ultimately about ethics and space: how close do we as a society want to allow sex offenders? These plays stage the movement space and time—the spatiotemporality—of postincarceration carceral geographies and the embodied state of what I term "criminalized liminality." In this article I pursue a two-pronged approach to examine how these plays explore the spatiotemporality of criminalized liminality: primarily I employ critical spatial perspectives to address how the focus on the ethics of space in America and Downstate emphasizes theatre itself as a space of ethical engagement for artists and audiences; and secondarily that as a result of their content and form each play invites spectators to consider what it means to act on and offstage. I ultimately conclude that although these plays invite consideration of alternatives to the criminal punishment system like abolition their real power lies in their ultimate ambivalence. Each unsettles spectators without providing clear answers. The spatiotemporality of criminalized liminality and the slippage created by acting produce a certain generative uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The North-South divide forms the central axis along which scholars study the contemporary global order. Yet many countries fall in-between the cracks of a world divided into core and periphery. This paper develops a structural account to understand the position of countries in this space of in-betweenness. The focus is on Central and Eastern Europe. I draw on already existing scholarship on liminalities, the varieties of capitalism and transition studies to argue that a liminal identity of in-betweenness goes hand-in-glove with a domestic logic of transitioning, as the state seeks to move somewhere else. Furthermore transitioning dynamics position the state in the semi-periphery, as the transition to the civilizational core requires capital and know-how from abroad. The resulting semi-peripheral position further underlines the liminal identity. The paper uses this apparatus to understand why CEE countries are typically climate change laggards within the EU. Their continuing liminal identity results in frustration over and resistance against the schooling tendencies of Brussels and Western European capitals. The dynamics of a sense of imposition of climate change mitigation policies stem from CEE's liminal positioning as apprentices, but the reasons for the perceived alienness of such policies are located in domestic societal dynamics, and CEE countries' economic structure. The specific political structures of communism and the communist transition have strengthened particularistic personal ties of friendship and family between individuals and the localities they live in, while simultaneously weakening general and abstract conceptions of the public good. Accordingly initiatives for preserving specific localities can be strong, but conceptions of protecting an abstract, global climate, are not well developed. Additionally, the material costs of protecting the climate are higher in post-communist economies due to their comparative advantage in resource and labour intensive industries, their reliance on foreign capital, and a lack of domestic innovations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to approach the epistemology of revelation through the approach of political anthropology. It departs from Max Weber's distinction between ordinary and out-of-the-ordinary situations, which led to his idea of charismatic power. This article complements the Weberian perspective by introducing the anthropological term "liminality" for such situations, as well as the term "trickster" for figures who have a specific affinity for appearing in such situations, creating havoc instead of offering a solution. Ordinary knowledge does not apply to liminal void situations of incommensurability; incommensurable knowledge can be gained by magic and religion. Magic forces the transcendent and claims to produce effects, while religion is based on revealed knowledge, the validity of which is established by trust. Under particularly anguishing liminal conditions, the hardly tolerated practitioners of magic might gain positions of power. An important such example is offered by Persian Magi. Turning to the present, modern rationalism, with Bacon and Descartes, undermined both ordinary and revealed knowledge. The possible relevance of revealed knowledge in contemporary times is discussed through the related phenomena of apocalyptic expectations and Marian apparitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study looks at the sense of belonging among the youth who fled Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine and currently reside in Weimar, Germany. Having fled the war in a time of transition to a more independent stage of life, refugee youth are finding themselves in a challenging context of liminality: both in terms of age and environment. Experiencing a feeling of uncertainty about their positioning in life and a new society, refugee youth are especially prone to feeling excluded and lost, which creates further challenges for their well-being. While the sense of belonging cannot be strictly defined, it is considered a vital factor for mental and physical well-being, as well as a core sign of social integration. To understand how to help newcomers foster their sense of belonging, this study tracks senses of (non)belonging among refugee youth following a weak theory and psychogeographic approach. The results demonstrate the 'dialectic' battle of opposites: how right-wing city rallies and pro-Russian symbolism in Weimar are triggering a sense of alienation and detachment on the one hand, and how signs of solidarity with Ukraine and connecting to local social groups invite engagement with the city, its politics and hence create a sense of agency, welcoming and belonging on the other. The results of the study have important applicability for human geography as well as the development of the theory on the sense of belonging among refugee youth in the context of liminality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the role of consolation in a biopolitical and queer reading of Arundhati Roy's The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017). As a critique of contemporary Indian politics, Hindu nationalism, casteism, and economic neoliberalism, the novel promises to bring hope to those marginalized and dehumanized in "New India" — the "Unconsoled". It is argued that Ministry 's liberatory potential is best realized when approached from a combined perspective of biopolitical liminality, that of Agambenian homo sacer and Butlerian precarity, as well as the reformative and reparative practices of queer theory. When viewed through queer readings of failure and non-imperative happiness, the alternative world of Jannat Guest House becomes a queer counterpublic, whereas its inhabitants become agents of subversion, whose mere existence defies the imperative of religious, caste, cisheteronormative and capitalist hegemonies endorsed by the state. The article positively assesses the novel's ability to bring consolation. However, it indicates that there are also limitations to that and offers suggestions as to how to reaffirm the reformatory potential of the novel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of studies acknowledge the role of a liminal legal status as well as geopolitical factors in constituting a demand for an alternative citizenship. Less is known about the effects of war or political turmoil in countries of nationality for populations who live outside those countries in places with little or no permanent settlement paths. This paper takes the case of Syrian nationals born and raised in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to explore the impact of war in Syria on their considerations about, and for some, experiences of, migration, including through asylum-seeking in Europe. It argues that this migration is less about relocation to the "West" and more about a solution to restrictions tied to their liminality in the UAE, as well as their citizenship by birth. By pursuing "stronger" passports from elsewhere, they seek an ability to choose where they live — including the option to stay "home" in the UAE or maintain links there. This paper introduces the notion of circumstantial citizenship to better understand how, when, and for whom citizenship matters in restrictive migration contexts. By engaging with key debates in migration studies, such as volition, alternatives, and options, circumstantial citizenship conceptualizes people's complex journeys as they navigate liminality, changing conditions, international borders, and limited resources to access the long-term security of a better passport. Findings provide significant insights into the role of restrictive migration policies in shaping the value and meaning of citizenship and driving onward migration in complex ways today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]