In this article, I work toward producing understandings of
learning as liminal and as located in a liminal space. Framed as learning
through the
In asking the questions
As Thomassen (2015, p. 40) describes it, “liminality refers to something
very simple and universal: the experience of finding oneself at a boundary
or in an in-between position, either spatially or temporally”. Museums lend
themselves to investigating experiences of liminality inasmuch as their
collections often involve “the exotic, the strange – museums as houses of
mystery” (Witcomb, 2003, p. 24), potentially giving rise to experiences
of a transformational kind. Museums are also increasingly taking on what is
characterised as “difficult subject matter” evident in a proliferation of
exhibitions related to conflict, violence, loss and death (Bonnell and
Simon, 2007). Out-of-ordinary experiences are on offer that invite boundary
work: negotiating in-between situations and conditions such as the
uncertainty of war (a theme commonly “curated” within museums) or of climate
change (as discussed in Sect. 5.1 below). Providing the possibility of
liminal learning, these experiences need to be managed. Thus a museum
educator who participated in the empirical research reported the following comments: When you go to a museum and something slows you down, that often improves or
deepens the experience of learning as a visitor … And so
hopefully, although it might seem a bit stagey at first, including to
students, they might go – “how long are we going to spend in this room?” –
what's happening as they are kind of coerced into looking more closely at
exhibits, will actually allow them to think well.
Here, it can be argued, museum educators act as “masters of ceremony”,
guiding the characteristically unstructured, or partially structured,
learning experience that museum education involves, as, I propose, spatial
arrangements of rooms also do. I credit the idea that human agency and
material agency can both contribute to a liminal learning experience.
Drawing a distinction between anthropological liminality (which concerns
specifically human interactions) and ontological liminality, Stenner and
Moreno-Gabriel (2013, p. 244) forward the Whiteheadian philosophic idea
that the world is not “fundamentally bifurcated into `social' and
`natural' portions corresponding to `subject' and `object”'. “All
reality is ultimately composed, not of brute matter, but of events or
The structure of the article is as follows. Initially, I provide an account
of
In what follows, I outline two academic discourses of liminality that tend to be taken up in the educational literature. While these discourses intersect, what they presuppose and imply for educational practice is radically different. Additionally, while each rendering of liminality can contribute significantly to better understanding this practice, the “spatial” rather than “temporal” version of the liminal is particularly powerful. It is a location of potential critique (Mansaray, 2006, p. 175).
Conventionally, the word “liminal” derives from the Latin word the liminal is viewed from the perspective of the dominant social order,
which is static, and the dynamic energy of the liminal is harnessed towards
integration, which is why the liminal is a “transitional” state or process.
… In essence the liminal is a teleological concept, stemming
from certain functionalist perspectives on society. That is, the liminal is
concerned with assimilation and social order (Mansaray, 2006, p. 174).
A transitional conception of liminality can be considered to make for a restrictive geography of learning and education. In privileging a given end state, effecting social change is a challenge.
The second deployment of the concept of liminality presupposes a less
unidirectional and more processual understanding. Here, the term liminal
refers to “occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary”
( … the liminal … is an open form of internal
differentiation and refers to relations in which the final condition is not
pre-set, but rather is potentially negotiable and contestable. Liminality is
the as yet unnamed space
Two expansive metaphors of learning in space–time (Massey, 1999) concern
learning assemblages and learning networks. As Müller (2015, p. 27)
expresses it, assemblage thinking (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, 1987) and
actor–network theory (Latour, 2005; Law, 2009) have been at the
forefront of the revalorisation of the material, or commonly, the
The foundational anthropological
work of van Gennep for example, attends to rituals marking individual or
collective passages through the life cycle (Szakolczai, 2009, p. 141). Materiality
is extensively referenced in this work, yet I would not call it materialist
in the sense of “more than human” where humans and non-humans are deemed to
be co-constituting.
In a Deleuzian framing, a liminal space has no beginning or end. It is
emergent, a temporal and spatial configuration or assemblage that “allows us
to name a terrain” (Fendler, 2013, p. 787). Based on interdependencies
between subject and object, person and world, “assemblage has been
increasingly used to designate, not an arrangement or a state of affairs,
but an ongoing
Year 7 students trying out their “new” bodies and testing how they work with another student looking on and imitating the actions.
Thinking in an assemblage frame affords considering liminality and learning as “events, actions and encounters between bodies, rather than simply entities and attributes of subjects” (Puar, 2012, p. 58). The relational ontology that underscores assemblage thinking and actor–network theory takes the assumptive position that the world is not divided into a human domain of subjects and culture and a nonhuman domain of objects and nature. Much as Whiteheadian process philosophy has the potential to do, these onto-methodologies (Nimmo, 2016) can contribute fresh understandings of liminality and liminal learning. Emphasis is placed on the possibility of material practices playing as significant a part in liminality as human practices.
The project reported here was a small-scale, 1-year study (2013–2014)
sponsored by the author's university in collaboration with Museum Victoria.
Data were collected at each of this museum's three venues, Melbourne Museum,
the Immigration Museum and Scienceworks (see
In what follows, a selection from the data collected at Scienceworks, a
natural sciences museum, and from the Immigration Museum, a museum primarily
displaying Australia's immigration history, only is worked. As described
more fully below, the exhibitions in which the school visitors were filmed
at each of these museums, respectively, were
Developed for a new permanent exhibition at Scienceworks called
Science museums have been described as a “lively chaos … filled
with children running about, pushing buttons, walking through apparatus that
makes them feel different” (Kolb, 2013, pp. 43–44). This description
aptly captures the dynamics of a visit by a year 7 school group In
Australia, the average age of a year 7 child is 12.
The curator of Think Ahead describes the interactive shown in
Fig. 1
in these terms: Super Future You or Super Future Me is one which is looking at the idea of
how body implants or replacement parts are becoming increasingly part of
just remaining healthy as we age, or remaining healthy as we have … you
know, depending on what happens to us, that we might need to have a
replacement hip or a replacement heart valve, but increasingly these devices
and implants might actually enhance what we're able to do. And so in this
experience, visitors can select a number of things to try on their own
bodies. Some are quite fantastic like wings or a trunk, but others are more
fully embedded in real technology which is being developed at the moment
such as the bionic eye or bionic ear. And once you've selected something for
your head, something for your torso, and something for your legs, you then
get the opportunity to try out your new body – you see yourself moving as
you play a game to try and catch targets, and you test out how your new body
works.
Super Future You also offers the experience of human–technology
interactions. Or, broadly, interactions between human meaning-making and
materiality such as the design of the exhibition space with its “futuristic
feel” and the design of the pod-like station as a full-body interactive. As
Barad (2007) puts it, these interactions are best conceived as the
Or, better perhaps, a
curatorial vision of the future.
An entanglement of human subject and 3-D object, learning with Super Future
You
Some sense of the liminal quality of the learning on offer through the visit
to Scienceworks can be grasped in the visiting science teacher's report on
the value of museum visiting: (T)here needs to be a link between what they're experiencing at the museum
or at Scienceworks or in that space, to them being able to bring that back
to school and continue that discussion, and have them kind of move up to
that next level where it's not us feeding them the information, but them
starting to think about – well, what if we didn't have an atmosphere? What
if there was no water on a planet? How is that going to affect being able to
live on it? So I think for them being able to enter a space and see things
that we hadn't seen at school or investigated at school … I'm a
big believer [in] museum education and … giving the students an
opportunity to learn in a different way. … What I would love for
them to be able to see is that science isn't just about what we learn at
school in the classroom, that there is a connection to everyday, and
hopefully in the future.
Opening at the Immigration Museum in 2011, For an account of this installation provided by its
creator, see We knew we wanted an experience that people entered that was fairly
transitional, that would help sort of take them out of where they'd been
before and enrol them in something that was going to be quite a different
exhibition experience and an emotional experience. … In
Welcome, we wanted to suggest that diversity was there. So in that, there
are clearly people of different socioeconomic backgrounds; there's obviously
gender; there's age, a lot of age differential; there's, you know, Collingwood
fans; The term “Collingwood fans” refers to supporters of an
Australian Football League team called Collingwood. Collingwood supporters
have a reputation for being working class which, in Australia, can mean
“bogan” and feral.
Thus, for a small group of visitors from an independent girls' secondary
school, two women from Oxfam Oxfam is an international,
not-for-profit, community-based aid and development organisation. S.1: I'm getting a bit of the stabbing vibe from a lot of people.
(Oxfam women present in Welcome Hallway) S.2: How can you be judgemental, you're Oxfam? S.3: Oxfam people would not be like that. S.2: Like what did we do to them? S.3: I just made a stereotypical judgement. I just said Oxfam people. S.2: (reading slogan on T-shirt) Make trade fair S.3: By glaring at each other?
Clearly, this student group identifies with Oxfam and “Oxfam people”, with
members of it being surprised and affectively unsettled by the identities
embodied in the encounter: “Oxfam people would Well … it was easy to make stereotypical kind of judgements based on the
way they were acting, but I could actually feel it in my head, like you see
a man with … like a man and a woman and they're all kind of in footy gear
and stuff, and they're all like this and you're thinking, you know, “oh yeah
you're angry because I'm barracking for a different team” or “your favourite
team just lost”, or “you're just that sort of person”, but then you see them
waving, and you're like – “oh yeah, it's game day, you're really excited”.
And you can make the two stereotypes immediately, and you have them already
in your head, and it's kind of amazing to see the same two people do two
different things, and you stereotype them completely differently.
… It unsettled me that I could make those judgements and see
them as different people. Like the difference between the people – people
have bad days, people have good days. Like it happens. They change, but it
unsettled me that I could make the two different stereotypes about the same
people (Rihanna). I liked it (Welcome Hallway) too because it kind of felt like I was like a
third person watching a scenario where someone … 'cause when they were
really cold and unwelcoming, it seemed like people were discriminating
against them and stereotyping them, and I was like a third person watching
their reaction, while not hurting them, if you know what I mean. So I felt
sympathy for them, but then I kind of felt like they were being mean to me
by having that cold, unwelcoming kind of reaction, and they were kind of
really judgemental, and I felt like I could have been like discriminated
against as well, but it was really nice when they were welcoming (Nicky).
Four year 10 students encountering Oxfam women in the Welcome Hallway.
Rihanna and Nicky appear to understand that one's identity is not fixed and
same; rather, one occupies an identity position that can shift and change
depending on circumstances and that this shift and change is made by people
deemed “good” – “Oxfam people would
Welcome Hallway is a complex liminal space “where visitors are made strange
unto themselves, discover unsuspected links to each other and are made aware
of their own narratives about themselves and those around them”
(Witcomb, 2015, p. 164). Thus, when presented with the “judgemental” and
“glaring” version of “Oxfam people” over the course of the video display,
and declaring that “Oxfam people would
Liminality emerges here as a relational, intensive property of the
assemblage of the video installation including its life-sized human
participants and cultural content, Rihanna, other school visitors and the
mutually implicated practice of viewing and being viewed. Composed of
diverse elements, Welcome Hallway brings a liminal space into being through
which one can think in a culturally complex and differentiated way. As the
exhibition's curator comments, “You might be a Muslim woman who's rejected by
the other hijab-wearing Muslim women”. As the design of the video
installation intends to convey, cultural difference lies
Liminal spaces have a special salience in the empirical research reported
here. Accenting the embodied, the affective and the material, they have the
potential to “jump start” the learner out of a comfortable state of mind and
into a state of (productive) uncertainty. Thus, in occupying the space of
Welcome Hallway, the learner becomes other in relation to others, providing
the possibility of “genuine learning” (Semetsky, 2011) and significant
social change, change stemming from the insight that individuals and social
groups need not be pitted against one another but rather are always already
part of each other. In commenting on how, in Deleuzian philosophy, education
“becomes a mode of experiential learning from real events in human culture”,
Semetsky (2011, p. 140) defines genuine learning as “self-becoming-other
in experience”. Assembled in relations of
Liminal spaces of learning open up in museum learning and education and
The Data and Methods section provides a full account of data collected.
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest. Edited by: M. Houssay-Holzschuch Reviewed by: two anonymous referees