--- ONLINE --- MC: Doris Bachmann-Medick: Passages and Liminality --- ONLINE ---

Passages and liminality have become central concepts in the study of culture. They are indispensable tools of analysis as well as important modes of experience.  

            – In terms of analysis, the notion of passages, transitions, interstices and liminality offers particularly fruitful lenses for investigating social processes from a new perspective, not least with regard to our own projects. Such performative concepts provide a better understanding of political and social transitions and transformations in contemporary and historical worlds.

            – In terms of experiences, these performative notions stand for scenarios that are always ambivalent and risky, but also full of innovative potential. This Master Class addresses in-between situations and liminality as experiences of whole societies as well as of social groups or individuals. Furthermore it aims to uncover the processual details of transformative and boundary experiences, the structural elements of crises, the disruptive character of identity-formation and conflicts as well as the scopes for social innovation.

–        In terms of epistemology, we will discuss passages and liminality as lenses that bring the power dynamic of transitions to the fore. They make in-between spaces, third spaces, contact zones and overlaps explicitly productive for cognition as well as for acting in an entangled world. Can they open up alternatives to the dominant thinking in binary oppositions?

The class begins with an introductory lecture, continues with a discussion of a prepared text and focuses finally on methodological impulses for working with the concepts of passages and liminality in our respective projects.

Text for discussion (available on StudIP):

Bjørn Thomassen. Introduction: Into Liminality, in: B.T. Liminality and the Modern: Living Through the In-Between. London: Routledge 2016, 1–17.

// Dr. Doris Bachmann-Medick (GCSC)