Inhabiting Liminal Spaces

This book draws together debates from two burgeoning fields, liminality and informality studies, to analyze how dynamics of rule-bending take shape in Rome today. Adopting a multiscalar and transdisciplinary approach, it unpacks how gaps and contradictions in institutional rulemaking and application force many residents into protracted liminal states marked by intense vulnerability. By merging a political economy lens with ethnographic research in informal housing, illegal moneylending, unauthorized street-vending and waste collection, the author shows that informalities are not marginal or anomalous conditions, but an integral element of the city’s governance logics. Multiple actors together construct the local cultural norms, conventions and moral economies through which rule-negotiation occurs. However, these practices are ultimately unable to reconfigure historically rooted power dynamics and hierarchies. In fact, they often aggravate weak urbanites’ difficulties in accessing rights and services. A study that challenges assumptions that informalities are predominantly features of developing economies or limited to specific groups and sectors, this volume’s critical approach and innovative methodology will appeal to scholars of sociology and anthropology interested in social theory, urban studies and liminality.

We tend to think of early medieval people as unsophisticated about geography because their understandings of space and place often differed from ours, yet theirs were no less complex. Anglo-Saxons conceived of themselves as living at the centre of a cosmos that combined order and plenitude, two principles in a constant state of tension. In Inhabited Spaces, Nicole Guenther Discenza examines a variety of Anglo-Latin and Old English texts to shed light on Anglo-Saxon understandings of space. Anglo-Saxon models of the universe featured a spherical earth at the centre of a spherical universe ordered by God. They sought to shape the universe into knowable places, from where the earth stood in the cosmos, to the kingdoms of different peoples, and to the intimacy of the hall. Discenza argues that Anglo-Saxon works both construct orderly place and illuminate the limits of human spatial control.

This book highlights the multiplicity of American women’s writing related to liminality and hybridity from its beginnings to the contemporary moment. Often informed by notions of crossing, intersectionality, transition, and transformation, these concepts as they appear in American women’s writing contest as well as perpetuate exclusionary practices involving class, ethnicity, gender, race, religion, and sex, among other variables. The collection’s introduction, three unit introductions, fourteen individual essays, and afterward facilitate a process of encounters, engagements, and conversations within, between, among, and across the rich polyphony that constitutes the creative acts of American women writers. The contributors offer fresh perspectives on canonical writers as well as introduce readers to new authors. As a whole, the collection demonstrates American women’s writing is “threshold writing,” or writing that occupies a liminal, hybrid space that both delimits borders and offers enticing openings.

This book presents interdisciplinary empirical studies about the COVID-19 pandemic’s complex influence on the professional, personal, and family lives of mothers in academia or “MotherScholars”. It calls attention to how the COVID-19 pandemic and higher education's responses to it highlight the historical, societal, and cultural inequities between diverse groups of MotherScholars. The volume represents diverse ethnicities (e.g., Black, Pinay, Asian American), an assortment of disciplines (e.g., sociology, education, psychology, Asian American studies, etc.), and a variety of methodologies (e.g., collaborative autoethnography, photovoice, kuwentos, etc.) to share diverse narratives linked through an identity and pursuit of MotherScholarhood. It addresses the wide range of pressures and influences affecting mothers in academia and tackles the additional burdens and prejudices MotherScholars with marginalized cultural and religious identities face. Taken as a whole, the book presents important and complementary findings through different MotherScholar perspectives, which underscore the complexity of their experience and how it was impacted by a global pandemic. MotherScholaring During the COVID-19 Pandemic will be a key resource for researchers and practitioners of education studies, educational research, educational leadership and policy, educational administration, gender studies, and women’s studies. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Peabody Journal of Education.

Although children have proliferated in Spain's cinema since its inception, nowhere are they privileged and complicated in quite the same way as in the films of the 1970s and early 1980s, a period of radical political and cultural change for the nation as it emerged from almost four decades of repressive dictatorship under the rule of General Francisco Franco. In Inhabiting the In-Between: Childhood and Cinema in Spain's Long Transition, Sarah Thomas analyses the cinematic child within this complex historical conjuncture of a nation looking back on decades of authoritarian rule and forward to an uncertain future. Examining films from several genres by four key directors of the Transition - Carlos Saura, Antonio Mercero, Víctor Erice, and Jaime de Armiñán - Thomas explores how the child is represented as both subject and object, and self and other, and consistently cast in a position between categories or binary poles. She demonstrates how the cinematic child that materializes in this period is a fundamentally shifting, oscillating, ambivalent figure that points toward the impossibility of fully comprehending the historical past and the figure of the other, while inviting an ethical engagement with each.

This book generates a fresh, complex view of the process of globalization by examining how work, scholarship, and life inform each other among intercultural scholars as they navigate their interpersonal relationships and cross boundaries physically and metaphorically. Divided into three parts, the book examines: (1) the socio-psychological process of crossing boundaries constructed around nations and work organizations; (2) the negotiation of multiple aspects of identities; and (3) the role of language in intercultural encounters, in particular, adjustment taking place at linguistic and interactional levels. The authors reflect upon and give meaning and structure to their own intercultural experiences through theoretical frameworks and concepts—many of which they themselves have proposed and developed in their own research. They also provide invaluable advice for transnational scholars and those who aspire to work and live abroad to improve organizational participation and mutual intercultural engagement when working in a globalizing workplace. Researchers and practitioners of applied linguistics, communication studies, and higher education in many regions of the world will find this book an insightful resource.

By foregrounding the voices and experiences of scholars from the Global South who have migrated to institutions in the Global North, this volume theorizes the "third space" as a unique, rich, and generative position in the Western academy. Global South Scholars in the Western Academy engages a range of critical methodologies to explore the challenges that Global South scholars have faced in establishing themselves in academic settings in the Global North. The text identifies the unique position that scholars have come to adopt "in-between" North and South and theorizes this positionality as a "third space", which is carved out by academics negotiating personal, professional, and cultural belonging. This liminal subject position, enriched by experiences of migration, racialization, poverty, and difference, is shown to drive knowledge-production and justice-orientated approaches in the academy. This book provides a new and overdue perspective on the experiences and contributions of Global South scholars in the academy. It will be of interest to academics, researchers, and scholars with an interest in critical theory, indigenous and multicultural education, the sociology of education, and higher education.