(Un)felt ferments: Limning liminal professional subjectivities with pragmatist–posthuman feminism and intimate scholarship

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to illuminate liminality as processual experiences and to disrupt (hetero)normative paradigms of organizational liminality identity work. I present an intimate inquiry of liminality from within lived liminal experience. My empirical focus is on personal liminal subjectivities as they unfold in specific, psychosocial time, and spaces—my situated, changing lives as a woman executive, mature doctoral candidate, and emergent academic. The posthuman calls for multi-directional, transdisciplinary openings, and experimental forms. In this paper I make four interweaving research contributions: (1) braiding philosophies, I conceptualize a pragmatist–posthuman organic theory of liminal subjectivity; (2) I illuminate my lived liminal experiences as affectual, conscious, and semi-conscious, where my identities are unbounded from self and recast as sociomaterial, entangled productions; (3) I innovate “methodologically” with an embrocation of Dewey’s experiential and esthetic philosophical methods, a flowing mixture of sensate scholarship and the adoption of radical–reflexivities; (4) I call for a community of inquiry into liminality as part of a quest to develop knowing democratically, in partnership with practitioners and all matter. My unfinished adventure is to perform scholarship useful to academics and practitioners, which can help make our practical lived experiences of liminality more bearable and fruitful.

Keywords

Autoethnography liminality organic theory posthuman pragmatism reflexivity

Introduction

My desire is to illuminate the affective everyday struggles of liminal professional identity experiences arriving at some practical learning insights. I break with (hetero)normative paradigms that dominate research on organizational liminality identity based on established Western conceptualizations of inquiry commencing with a theoretical starting point, proceeding to objective observation of static phenomena, interpretation, and distillation of original knowledge. In this paradigm reality equals what can be known, new knowledge is made by (academic) knowing-minds and the researcher comes to finite, universal conclusions. I adopt a messier processual approach beginning with my situated, lived, liminal experiences where I’m entangled in moving, transactional, uncertain, and often unknowable worlds, motivated to change things in practice.

I weave my paper with the help of several feminist philosophers including Anzaldúa, Braidotti, Cixous, and Grosz. Creating an unusual configuration with them, I draw-in the radical thinking of American Pragmatist John Dewey whose 70-year project was to regenerate philosophy to meet life’s evolving and commonplace difficulties (Fesmire, 2015). Dewey’s revolutionary start point is that inquiry begins not with abstract philosophical theory, but with lived “problematic situations” that check our composure. His alternative thinking forms a weft thread throughout my paper. Dewey’s philosophy is refreshingly humble, practical, and melioristic, aiming to make our ordinary predicaments more luminous, and our undergoings through them more fruitful and developmental, individually, and collectively (Dewey, [1925]2008). He urges us to set aside our intellectual habits and expectations of academic knowledge making, condemning the idea that all experience is knowing and knowable, calling it out as an intellectualist’s fallacy (Dewey, [1929]2008: 232). For Dewey knowing is democratic, practical, social, and its ends-in-mind are to do with creating better worlds for all. This resonates with me as a feminist practitioner-scholar immersed in organizations’ commonplace struggles including those of equality. Dewey’s pragmatism has called out to other feminists (cf. Heldke, 2019) and I follow the work of Barrett (2013) in bringing Dewey into conversation with poststructural feminism, extending with dialog with posthuman feminism.

In recent years my professional identity has become an indeterminate, problematic situation checking my composure and stimulating this inquiry (Dewey, [1938]2008). The (relative) harmony of my career identity as a senior woman executive with its habitual activities established over decades capsizes. In my fifties I’m suddenly in alien professional territory struggling to stay afloat. I work fulltime in a 24/7 role. I study part-time for my PhD at an overseas university, lurching toward becoming an early-career academic. I leave my corporate role to focus on writing-up. Post PhD, I start teaching and researching in US universities (where I live) trying to find footings—a full-time academic job or a portfolio career? Throughout, I remain indelibly an organization practitioner though I’m confused about who any of my professional selves are or what’s possible at my age. I become disorientated, isolated from others, including my established communities of practice.

My aim is to open up affective dimensions of liminality where “twilight, the vague, dark and mysterious flourish” (Dewey, [1925]2008: 369). I engage with the immediate felt or qualitative dimensions of experience (Dewey, [1930]2008). This includes the unfelt, the noncognitive, “which makes up a vastly greater part of experience than does the conscious field” (p. 370). Out of this affective lived liminal experience I’ll present “half-knowledge” that contains “uncertainties, mysteries and doubts” (Keats, 1817, in Dewey, [1934]2005: 33) as provisional insights available for retesting in further lived experiences.

Dewey identifies the immediate quality of experience with the esthetic (Fesmire, 2015) and prompts us into experiencing life like artists rather than scientists or philosophers (Alexander, 2004, 2014). Inquiry for Dewey is both “literally and metaphorically art” and can be “valued and enjoyed” as such (Fesmire, 2015: 193–194). This paper is organized and written differently as a way to capture the qualitative dimensions of immediate liminal experience and as a venture into thinking and experiencing as an artist. Such theoretical and methodological experimentation is in harmony with this journal’s aims which call for different approaches and new perspectives on learning and exploration of philosophies of knowledge and knowing, including gendered ones. It is also a continuation of the collection of experimental essays that formed a recent Special Issue on “Writing Differently” in this journal (Gilmore et al., 2019), a Special Section “Changing Writing/Writing for Change” in Gender, Work & Organization (Beavan et al., 2021) as well as other creative essay MOS journal articles and chapters (Cunliffe, 2017; Jääskeläinen and Helin, 2021; Mandalaki and Pérezts, 2020; Pullen, 2018; Gilmore at al., 2019; Sinclair, 2019).

For Dewey ([1925]2008), language (communication) is the “tool of tools” (p. 246). Language “transforms the kind of being we are; it allows us to participate in a shared life of being and value. . .mutual listening.” Language is culture, the “full symbolic mode of human existence” over time (Alexander, 2014: 82–84, original emphasis). I begin this essay with the cultural roots of two words key to my study.

Etymology of liminal and limning

Oxford English Dictionary (OED)/The definitive record of the English language.

Liminal, adj.	Limning, n.
Etymology < classical Latin līmin, līmin threshold	Etymology < Limn v. Altered form of LUMINE.
1. Relating to the point beyond which a sensation becomes too faint to be experienced.	1. Illuminating of manuscripts, etc. Also concrete.
2. Characterized by being on a boundary or a threshold, esp. by being transitional or intermediate between two states, situations, etc. In later use influenced by sense 3.	2. a. Painting (†formerly spec. in water-color or distemper). b. An instance of this; concrete a painting.
3. Cultural Anthropology. Of or relating to a transitional or intermediate state between culturally defined stages of a person’s life, esp. as marked by a ritual or rite of passage; characterized by liminality	3. Attributive, as † limning gold , † limning picture , limning-skill . 1617 I. Oliver in Wills Doctors’ Commons (Camden) 84 All my drawings. . .and lyming pictures, or anything of limning whatsoever. . .as yet unfinished.
Derivatives Liminally adv. 2002 G. Levine Dying to Know viii. 198 Deronda again lives liminally, somewhere between the two narratives and the two ways of knowing.

Angles of approach

I move to describing angles of approach that facilitate my inquiry. I have separated them but in practice they are constantly interweaving and are sometimes explicit and other times implicit in the text.

Alterity

Women are underrepresented at senior levels in organizations (Hunt et al., 2020) and in MOS (Financial Times, 2020; Fotaki and Harding, 2018). It follows that the study of female executives is under-researched, including their psychic life (Baker and Kelan, 2018), as “sanitized masculinity continues to be the prevalent norm” (Fotaki and Harding, 2018: 35). Heteronormativity in the workplace and the academy is rarely challenged (Rumens, 2016) including in studies of liminality. How can we argue for equality and inclusiveness in organizations if we won’t accept alterity in MOS? Some challenges can be spotted however, mostly in feminist and queer locales, which I’m (re)joining here (Beavan, 2019; de Souza et al, 2016; Fotaki and Harding, 2018; McDonald, 2016; Parker, 2001; Rhodes, 2019; Weatherall, 2019). My experiences of liminality are affective, fluid, and messy. Straight, sanitized methods cannot capture them. I use intimate scholarship, which is embodied, embedded, and embrained (Braidotti, 2018) and esthetic scholarship (Dewey, [1925]2008) to illuminate my liminal (un)felt ferments.

Affect

Losing my established professional identity, I feel peculiar without bearings or company. My worlds grate against each other and I bleed confidence, as if on an extended maternity leave. “Monsters of doubt” are my constant companions (Hawkins and Edwards, 2013: 24). My selves are both no-longer and not-yet. I’m in borderlands, one of the “Los atravesdaos,” crossing over, going through the confines of the “normal.” Perceived as squint-eyed, perverse, troublesome, half-dead by vigilant communities on both sides of the wall. I exist on the “thin edge of barbwire” (Anzaldúa, 2012: 35).

My problematic, affective, liminal experiences are the doorway into my inquiry. I am conducting my research on the process of liminality from within the process (Dewey, [1938]2008). My start point is therefore entitative although my inquiry interest and approaches are processual.

Processual

Workplace and researcher identity categories are generally assumed to be stable and identifiable (McDonald, 2013, 2016). An exception are studies of organizational liminality which focus on identity transitions (cf. Beech, 2011); though the prevailing model of liminality presented is sequential, with the uncertain liminal period bookended by settled selves. My experience of liminality is far messier. Ibarra’s (1999) work stands out for a shift into a processual conceptualization of multiple, provisional selves. Ideas that are extended creatively by Simpson and Carroll (2020) who processually re-theorize “identity work as liminal—emergent, edgy, ephemeral, precarious and fluid in nature” (p. 502). Leadership identity work, they suggest, can be seen as a site of “perpetual liminality” (p. 508) and also learning. I take belays from these moves plunging into conceptualizing liminality as ongoing performative flows and professional identities as multiple, evanescent, always forming and reforming, coagulating experiences. This is not without difficulties. The unified individual is sedimented into our thinking (cf. Harding, 2020).

My specific interest is in illuminating how new subjectivities may be produced out of this disturbing liminal environment where tension “grips this place like a virus” (Anzaldúa, 2012: 25–26). Living in this state seems interminable; a lock-down.

Braidotti’s posthuman feminism

Braidotti shines a torch; hope in the dark. I embrace her affirmative posthuman feminism which builds on elements from earlier feminisms and is distinct. Her position shares with humanist feminism a focus on an embodied and equal woman-in-the world. It follows poststructural feminism with its antihumanist critique rejecting universalism, binary thinking, and the abstract idea of Man, (critiqued as masculine, white, Eurocentric), emphasizing “the carnal nature of thought. . . its embedded and embodied structure” (Braidotti, 2016: 678). She moves further, to a world where the human is humbled, living as just one lifeform. All matter for Braidotti, is vibrant and material, interacting in complex ways within social, psychic and natural environments. The human however is not rendered obsolete. Braidotti’s call is to renegotiate what it is to be a human who is composed, conceptualized and experienced socially, and for relational and affective accounts. I perceive connections with Dewey, though her articulations are explicitly feminist and labeled posthuman.

Dewey’s experiential and esthetic empirical methods

To answer her call involves a radical shift from a stable researcher objectively studying static phenomena to what Dewey calls studying experience. Dewey is not using our common use of experience as the pool of life happenings we accumulate intra-psychically and use as knowledge. For Dewey experience is an active happening in the social world involving transactions (felt and unfelt) between things that alter things. “We do something to the thing and then it does something to us in return: such is the peculiar combination” (Dewey, [1916]1980: 146). Experiencer and experienced are cojoined and both are changed by the experience, which is also a singular situation with a unique, unifying affective quality. Dewey believes as humans we seek a sense of fulfillment and unity in experience and when experiences feel chaotic or frustrating, we are provoked through discomfort into action from which we learn. For Dewey experience and learning are one process. I focus empirically on a small number of situations, Dewey’s word for an active happening, a bounded event in a social world. In a situation all matter is transacting and transforming, and the situation is also atemporal, filled with the consequences of past experiences and generative with new possibilities. After Dewey I’m using experience as method.

This poses some challenges. Everything is moving in Dewey’s situation and this fluid lifeworld, is largely noncognitive, “[t]he visible is set in the invisible; and in the end what is unseen decides what happens in the seen; the tangible rests precariously upon the untouched and the ungrasped” (Dewey, [1925]2008: 44). The way to perceive the invisible, he suggests, is to learn to look out of the corner of our eyes employing an esthetic gaze. This requires patience. Then the danger is, that should we sight something, we rush-in imposing conceptual schema to sense-make. Dewey’s solution to interpretive hastiness is distinctive. He suggests iterative mapping, looping from the thick situation to reflexivity and then back to concrete situation, always contextually sensitive (Fesmire, 2015). Knowing is fallible in this method. At best warranted assertions (Dewey, [1938] 2008) may be inferred using our imagination (Dewey, 1941). Warranted assertions are not axioms, they are partial, provisional, creative, conclusions which always contain some doubt, yet are ready for testing in loops of experience and reflexivity in situations. In this paper I’ll be making some warranted assertions which I’ll try out (with imagination) and then reshape ready for more testing–in–experience. I’m assaying to make theory processually, organic theory, which is living, imaginative, material, morphing, vibrant, emerging from lived experience and reflexivity.

Perceiving the (un)felt

My research gaze in this paper is attuned to the unsettling, dynamic processes of liminality including fleeting encounters, subtle movements, flows, and affective intensities that make up liminal experience. I have to look beyond Dewey’s somewhat vague instructions (Alexander, 2004) to find ways to perceive the (un)felt in each situation. I start with my selves as affective, relational, transacting entities as a portal to move outwards into the world (Braidotti, 2018; Dewey, [1934]2005) embracing zig-zag and associative thinking (Braidotti, 2013; Milner, [1937]2011). My focus also includes the OED’s first definition of liminality as “relating to the point beyond which a sensation becomes too faint to be experienced.” Faint affective resonances are listened to and netted as a method of accessing the “off the radar of the self” (Ashcraft, 2020: 852) and I develop other perceptive skills. My body registers danger even though I am not in physical danger and fear is clearly relative given my privileges. Danger hones my affective antennae, “I feel the lingering charge in the air. . .sense emotions someone (or something) near me is emitting.” I semi-consciously cultivate “la facultad” (Anzaldúa, 2012: 60–61), the capacity to see in surface phenomena deeper structures, an instant sensing, arrived at without conscious reasoning, sometimes communicated in images and symbols. This faculty breaks the habitual modes of seeing reality and the patterns of consciousness, residing not in reason but in the body. My senses become “acute and piercing.” La facultad is a “survival tactic” that people caught between worlds cultivate when feeling dangerously unsafe and also, weirdly, simultaneously “excruciatingly alive to the world” lived in the “serpent” of borderland experiences (Anzaldúa, 2012: 47).

The application of these skills is visible in vignettes of my liminal experiences.

Radical–reflexivities

The Deweyan experiential empirical method establishes cycles of reflexivity between immersion in experience (via situations). I work with McDonald’s (2013, 2016) concept of queer reflexivity which destabilizes notions of stable normative identities of the researcher and/or participants defining them instead as intensely relational, highly context-specific, multiple, and dynamic. Critical to this framing is that this is not reflexivity centered on the relational (Cunliffe, 2016), though it is intensely relational, but that it destabilizes the reflector, going beyond the intersubjective into the transpersonal. This is aligned with my processual and posthuman orientations.

I am particularly interested in Serra Undurraga’s (2020) conceptualization of affective reflexivities (plural) that produce different worlds and selves. For her, reflexivity is an “inevitable activity that is both expressive of a sense of self and continuously creating this very self” (p. 920, original emphasis). In this sense reflexivity is not an activity but a movement where we create selves. Different reflexivities produce differently. If we are in humanist mode, where we think we can stand outside of ourselves observing, we may yield a production of a unitary and stable subjectivity. If we use a more “opaque reflexivity with a relational-social understanding of subjectivity” this may “yield a sense of decentred humanness: [where we are] aware of how our constant engagements with the material non-human are enabling our existence and experience” (p. 926).

In combination these radical–reflexivities afford a subaqueous, decentring, generative exploration of my lived liminal experiences in different situations.

Écriture féminine

I adopt Cixous’s (1976) écriture féminine. A writing that refuses the “phallogocentric marinade” (Thanem and Knights, 2019: 121) by embracing the female body (Höpfl, 2007; Pullen and Rhodes, 2015) and forms part of the organization studies “writing differently” movement (Gilmore et al., 2019). It’s a form of writing that decentres the intact self, facilitating an opening to the invisible. Much of Cixous’s sixty-year oeuvre is written in a hyperdream “[s]he wanders, but lying down. In dream. Talks to herself. Woman’s voyage as a body” (Cixous and Clément, 1986: 66). It is writing which portrays flowing affectual intensities “by which all borders are crossed, the human being enters into floods and expands from its others, vegetal, mineral, animal” in ordinary moments when “it is necessary to have brushes to clean shoes” (Cixous and Calle-Gruber, 1997: 165). I follow other organizational scholars who have written écriture féminine (Author, 2019; Vachhani, 2019).

With these angles of approach sketched, I turn to the conversations in MOS on liminality that I am joining.

Malestream anthropological and humanist roots of liminality studies in MOS

In MOS liminality has been defined by the work of white, European, male cultural anthropologists. Van Gennep ([1960] 2019) in his 1909 book, Les Rites de passage, used liminal to describe the rituals of transition between one social identity and another. Van Gennep’s idea of “rites of passage” was later taken up and developed by Turner (1967). Turner (1967) crystallized liminality as a state “betwixt and between” where the liminal subject (the liminar) faces “social ambiguity” and “structural invisibility” (p. 95), later becoming reintegrated into a new post-liminal status with a more coherent identity and societal (re)acceptance.

According to these authorial, anthropological accounts, ritual functions to provide cultural support to liminars struggling with identity ambiguity and transition. Viewed in psychoanalytical terms, ceremonial rites serve to contain existential anxieties and emotional turbulence, which typically accompany identity transitions and may also formally delineate a transitional space (Winnicott, 1975) for the liminar in which identity play and transformational learning might occur.

Van Gennep’s and Turner’s are studies conducted from the point of view of an academic, disembodied, external, expert observer, and this perspective dominates studies of liminality. It’s the mode of knowledge making that Dewey takes issue with (Dewey, [1929]2008). Their foundational work has also influenced the lexicon—see above the third OED definition of liminality—and scholars within organization studies have adopted the anthropological concept of liminality to explore and explain moments of individual identity change within contemporary organizations. Beech (2011) offers a comprehensive review of such applications pointing to the various ways it has been employed to examine, inter alia: occupations, hierarchical roles, spaces, and events, and organizational networks. Many of these studies share an interest in the manifestation of ambiguity and uncertainty associated with transitions between different subject positions in organizations and their potential for creativity and innovation at an individual and/or organizational level. Their focus is less on rituals and more on meanings that organizational members associate with in-between roles/spaces/occupations. Söderlund and Borg (2018) in a review of the application of liminality in MOS demonstrate that the conception of liminality has been significantly extended beyond the sequential to make more visible the roles and positions of the liminar and the liminal space in which transition takes place. Some of these studies also refreshingly examine dimensions of liminal experience both from the perspective of the researcher and liminars (Czarniawska and Mazza, 2003; Eriksson-Zetterquist, 2002; Page et al., 2014). Recently some researchers have suggested that the precarity of the 21st century workplace has made liminality more difficult to traverse and pervasive (Ibarra and Obodaru, 2016, 2020; Petriglieri et al., 2018, 2019). My personal lived experience as an adjunct professor reflects this conceptualization.

Organizational studies of liminality are, therefore, also studies of professional identity; a topic which has been the subject of extensive attention by organization researchers. This paper is not the place to offer a review of the organizational identity literature as this has been addressed comprehensively elsewhere (cf. Brown, 2015, 2020). What is striking about this body of work though, is that even studies engaging with poststructural or even posthuman framings, tend “to begin with, and boil down to, the individual” (Ashcraft, 2020: 848). Humanist Man exerts epistemological staying power.

Overall, studies of liminality in MOS remain malestream with little space for alterity.

Toward an unbounding of the intact humanist individual in MOS

Psychodynamic studies emphasize liminal space as a holding space and a playground for identity work, (Ibarra, 1999, 2003; Ibarra and Obodaru, 2016, 2020; Petriglieri and Petriglieri, 2010; Petriglieri et al., 2018, 2019). Play/ing offers a more generative potentiality to liminality, shaking the humanist premise of a stable identity into possibilities of multiple, provisional selves. Petriglieri (2020a) pushes further and provocatively suggests that identity itself is a fabrication and that psychoanalysis can offer an alternative theorization of identity as a multiplicity, dynamic, full of unconscious affect and vitality. He urges us to move our lenses out into the world, advocating for a systems psychodynamic viewpoint (Petriglieri, 2020b) as a human relations 2.0, though he simultaneously struggles to let go of the concept of a singular self who must keep going to be fully human and feel alive.

Ashcraft (2020) has also sought to replace the “fantasy of the bounded individual” (p. 848). Drawing on affect theory she assays to illuminate “pre-individual. . . “senses of self””(p. 849). This is a move to recast identity as a posthuman sociomaterial production and specifically to suggest that the human subject emerges through sensate connection with others, connections of which we are only half aware. We believe in our self-governance but in fact we are sleepwalking. “Occupational identity is not made by people but through senses of self: semi-conscious, transpersonal bodily encounters that collide with, as well as constitute, human will and effort” (p. 859, original emphasis). Researching affective pre-individual flows is, as Ashcraft says, alien terrain and she introduces the unbounded figure of the Sleepwalker an intriguing, if abstract, “hybrid figure at once human and non-human. . .who acts under the influence of relational currents it cannot discern” (p. 861).

A processual and concrete approach to identity is also taken up by Simpson and Carroll (2020) who in an empirical study of leadership development work theorize a position of “perpetual liminality” where identities are ephemeral, precarious and continually “formed and reformed within the dynamic flow of identity work” (p. 514). Their attention is drawn to “small changes of imagery, vocabulary and tone. . .of the emerging identity situation” (p. 505). It’s an assay to capture “actual goings-on” of identity work and this resonates with me as a practitioner.

Ashcraft and Simpson and Carroll’s papers are inspirational, radical reformulations of identity work opening the door to alterity. I extend their work with my processual explorations to illuminate the “actual goings on” of my liminal identity flows and identify new becomings.

What kind of human am I/we, am I/we becoming?

How do we re-define the subject without reference to humanistic man? This paper is not the place to tackle this significant challenge in depth. I turn first to Dewey because I believe the antecedents of posthuman conceptualizations of subjectivity can be located in American Pragmatism. Dewey’s ideas were, and remain, radical. For Dewey, sociality precedes individuality. We are formed through interaction with the social world (Dewey, [1934]2005). A complex multiplicity, we are a knot of multiple selves in dialog with each other; selves which are temporal and evolving. Our selves change the social world and are changed by it. Nothing is stable and everything is always processual and unfolding. Dewey, as we have seen, doesn’t privilege cognitive thinking; that which is not known is just as real as that which is known (Dewey, [1925]2008). Selves can be formed by what is out of our conscious awareness.

To concretize I’m sharing a writing extract of a situation. The writing is intimate scholarship and, following Dewey, I’ve given it title to reflect its unifying affective quality. I have placed the writing in a text box and used different fonts to aid readability. I’ll follow the same process with other writing extracts.

Fall 2014This piece was written at the beginning of my doctoral (and liminal) journeying. I’m on a business trip to London and the experience is a morning sixteen–minute walk from Cannon Street tube station to my company’s offices in the City. On the walk, I transact with all kinds of entities moving through multiple selves spatially and temporally on a frequent basis. Although the walk is not physically taken at slow speed, my internal pace is slowing down facilitating a semi-conscious state where sensory associations intensify (la facultad) and relational connections between the sights and sounds of the City landscape evoke affective intensities and associations. What’s more occluded in such a short extract is Dewey’s peculiar combination where everything is transformed.Shadows Alighting today off the District Line at Cannon Street, I emerge into the breaking dawn. Cannon Street, underground station of my first work commute. . .suddenly suffused with memories: a young Cambridge graduate displaced from her rural upbringing in the West Country to the thriving capital city of her birth; a girl feeling displaced from a known student identity to an unknown working one, in a world of men. . . I recall the room where my first office was, the personalities, embarrassing faux-pas –a memory of gently being told that I didn’t need to write on the back side of paper when taking notes, the company could afford the extra paper. . . How far I’ve come from that first work home at Anchor Terrace, and yet, perhaps, not far at all? I wonder what parts of me may still be “anchored” to a terrace building on Southwark Bridge Road?Stopped at traffic lights. Home or abroad in London? From the reality of tax authorities and my employer I’m abroad. From the reality of citizenship, I’m both home and abroad. From the reality of my immediate family, my husband and children, I’m abroad, but from the reality of my sister, brother, nieces and nephews, I’m home. At some subliminal level maybe this is part of why I enjoy the walk? I can float in mixed identity spaces, belonging and not belonging at the same time.I’m traversing medieval cobbles. . . struggling in heels, continuing northward. Anxiety stirs as I cross to walk on the east side of Princes Street, to save squinting into the dawn light. I’m in the shadow of the Bank of England. A number 21 double decker bus rumbles past. Familiar 21, taken from London Bridge Station to Moorfields Eye Hospital. A resonant tremor of Mum’s anxiety and shame, her fear that her flawed maternal genes were responsible for her kids’ ocular difficulties. Me –a left eye squint. Cross-eyed. Grown out of.

Dewey ([1929]2008) also suggests that natural entities have two basic tendencies: to reach out and associate with other entities; and to individuate, discovering our unique qualities. Individuality is not a given, it arises from a social development process and is a process of growth and learning. He uses the metaphor of a garden (Sullivan, 2001). As individuals, our individuality can be distinguished from other entities, we need to cultivate our personal gardens to develop our unique qualities. At the same time, our individual cultivation is only possible because of transactions with other entities in the social world. These concepts of sociality preceding individuality, association, individuation, and learning are vital to my gestation of an organic pragmatist–posthuman theory of liminality.

Braidotti theoretically outlines a processual vision of human subjectivity “foregrounding an open, relational, multiple–self-other entity framed by embodiment, sexuality, affectivity, empathy, and desire as core qualities” (Braidotti, 2016: 681, 686) and also our unique differentiation. “We-Are-(All)-In-This-Together-But-We-Are-Not-One-And-The-Same”; “becoming-subjects-together” (Braidotti, 2019: 52, 73). Neither unitary nor autonomous as subjects, we are embedded and embodied, deeply steeped in the material world and individually accountable. Part of a complex, relational, and affective assemblage with human and non-human others that renders porous the boundaries between inside and outside of self. We are never just one. We are flows, processes, relationality. It is affectivity that activates our body into new becomings. She is always affirmative, “the human being’s in-built tendency is toward joy and self-expression and not toward implosion” (p. 47). Again, I concretize with a writing extract.

August 2015This piece is written at a time when I’m at an impasse on my doctoral journey. I’ve been working determinedly to obtain renewed commitment for support of my PhD following the departure of my boss, including obtaining organizational consent for my research, a pre-requisite for my ethics committee submission. I’m frustrated by ominous silence. I’m also experiencing difficult feelings of being othered by colleagues as I continue difficult work as an organizational change agent. My reporting line is about to change from HR into the business. With my academic supervisors on summer annual leave, I’m feeling bereft of support and psychologically stuck. Perceivable are transactions between my sweaty body and the landscape opening up my receptivity to relational currents I cannot discern but which are triggering affective resonances from my past. Associations and images bubble up (la facultad). Despite my difficulties, the extract also demonstrates Braidotti’s idea that it is affectivity that moves my body (at least in my imagination) into affirmative, joyous action.Repressed I’m running in the heat and humidity of an August New England mid-afternoon, heading southward, towards the beach, leaving the noisy and fumy car traffic of the Old Boston Post Road. I’m seeking the shade of trees, highway and railway bridges. Passing the elegant colonial houses of Southport Village, noticing the climbing roses in their second bloom and creamy tree hydrangeas in full glory. I’m letting my mind wander where it will. I’m thinking about work and relationships in a loose and unstructured way and letting my body respond and trying to tune into its sensations. I’m feeling othered. This feeling a bedfellow. I’m the youngest of four children, a shy, bookish girl whose intellectual prowess escaped the notice of her parents; I didn’t always feel as if I belonged to my family of origin. . . In the many places I have worked in my adult life feeling I don’t quite fit in. Othered that, which is both necessary to presence, but necessarily pressed into absence or repressed. Mulling, I start the sweaty and short climb up Harbor Road, running parallel to the water. Anxiety flutters in my stomach, a slight queasiness. I’m not repressed, I reflect but perhaps my functional bosses wish to repress me? Am I necessary but pressed into absence? A picture floats into my mind; a gilded cage. HR is a gilded cage and I’m a little blue bird, swirling around the cage, fluttering my wings. I dart and dive. I’m free. The cage door is open. I’m meant to fly inside the cage but I know the door will snap shut behind me. Happy outside. I won’t fly in. I don’t belong in there.

“The loss of humanist unity is the starting point for alternative ways of becoming-subjects-together….But because ‘we’ are not one and the same, the patterns of becoming will necessarily differ” (p. 47, 73) . Thus, for Braidotti, posthuman subjectivity, is a practical project. She calls for “adequate and differential accounts of multiple subject positions that are in process of becoming” (p. 69) that account for “different speeds and patterns of becoming” (p. 72). A call I am answering in this paper.

Following Dewey and Braidotti, my conceptualization of subjectivity is processual and relational including with the more-than-human dynamic and situated in the material world, embedded and embodied, differentiated and connected. Although I’m sympathetic to Simpson and Carroll’s (2020) theorization of liminality as ongoing practice rather than a state—as perpetual and as a learning experience–the liminality I am experiencing is affectively acute and of a different order and duration. My sense of professional identities is collapsing, and conscious new becomings end in regular disappointment.

With this understanding of pragmatist–posthuman subjectivities I’m turning to articulate a theory of liminality.

An adventure: Conceptualizing a pragmatist–posthuman feminism/t’s organic theory of liminality

What is theory?

The normative definition is that theory must offer universal principles, philosophical rigor, contrasted with practical relevance. Dewey refutes such dualistic thinking, radically reframing it. For Dewey, there is no epistemological difference between theory and practice. The chief value of theory for Dewey is if it can be useful for solving real-world problems, prospectively. Theory emerges from experience and must be reexplored in new experience. Action is therefore an integral part of theory, not something separate, lesser, or after. As we have seen, for Dewey theory and knowing are always fallible and contextual at best warranted assertions may emerge. Warranted assertions are nor axioms. They are tentative conclusions, which using imagination, are ready for retesting in more lived experience in order to improve it.

A small number of warranted assertions

Warranted, in the sense of based on what has come before in this paper and from other lived liminal experiences not represented here. Assertable in that they point forward to something yet to be done—test them against radically-reflexively written experiences—in order to make further warrantable assertions; an action-learning cycle.

What I am offering is neither certain nor permanent. It is organic theory. I offer, briefly, four warranted assertions. Each is followed by an affective vignette as a testing ground. After the vignette I comment on and rework the warranted assertion to try out in new inquiry with the vision of establishing a practice–theory–practice rhythm. The affective and relational complexity of my liminal experiences is apparent. It is impossible given the word limit constraints of a journal article to do this complexity justice in my comments; out of necessity I am selective.

Liminality as a time of arrested relationality and therefore arrested becomings

I return again to self as an affective, relational, transacting entity, and as a portal to move outwards into the world (Braidotti, 2016; Dewey, [1934]2005). Dewey proposed that natural entities have two basic tendencies, the first of which is to reach out and associate with other entities. For Braidotti, it is affectivity that activates our body into becoming. My warranted assertion is that my becomings are stuttering without transactions in social worlds. I’ve unbecome a corporate executive and PhD student. Isolation is a dominant feeling, most intense in my memory, in the period after I had submitted my dissertation. In the lull I started studying for a low-residency MFA (Master’s in Fine Arts) at Naropa University driven partly by a desire to find community as well as to develop my creative writing skills.

November 2019It is nine months since I left my full-time job. Summer academic conferences are a distant memory. This excerpt is taken from a lyric essay penned as homework. I’ve been drawn to reading poetry on grief, close reading A toast in the house of friends: Poems by Akilah Oliver (2009), written following the tragic death of her twenty-year-old son Oluchi. Oliver herself passed away in 2011 from a sudden heart attack.There is no limit or boundary to the suppleness of being. i sit on a dreary grey November daywatching you alivevisibly visible haunting

on YouTubereading In Aporia rich voice, living voice, tender voiceaskingAm I now the dead person? watching you alivevisibly visible jauntingon You Tubeperforming with Annesharing spaces, chanting voicesnaropa voices, women’s voiceslifting me alively*naropa sisters as hingeheart as hingeheart stopping as hingenaropa sisters as shadowoluchi as shadowakilah as shadowderrida as hingederrida as shadowderrida as tracetracing spectropoïesis cixous as hingecixous as sistercixous as candlelight in the darkour dead babies as tracesour dream children as shadowslights in the darkness*my body knows before I knowthis sudden arrival of the ghost of the otherthe colour photos are of my son oluchi mcdonald’s graffiti artwork. his grafher lighting itmarking his absencewith presenceoluchi’s graf as elegiacakilah’s essay as elegiacboth a bewailingamplified in my inner ear3,500 hairs swayingakilah oliverinsister of oluchi mcdonald

oluchi’s graf his phantompresencebrought forth by magical mysticmother poesisundoing oluchi’s erasurea mother-son collaborationa mother-phantom-son sequencebeyond mediated temporalityThere is no limit or boundary to the suppleness of being. oluchi absent shadowbut so vivid-vivacious on the pageinvisiblebut in his invisibility now visible***

There is allusion in this poem to loss of my previous professional identities and to troubling experience of living in the liminal borderlands apparent in the line “Am I now the dead person?.” However, to my amazement what I read in this situation is not an absence of relationality but an abundance. I’m actively transacting in an affective, relational world—though the relationality is via and includes texts and YouTube. I’m part of a complex, relational, and affective assemblage with human and non-human others that renders porous the boundaries between inside and outside of self as well as temporality. The poem, texts, people are flows, processes, relationality. The extract foregrounds “an open, relational, multiple–self-other entity framed by embodiment, sexuality, affectivity, empathy, and desire as core qualities” (Braidotti, 2016: 681, 686). In this extract Akilah, Oluchi, Derrida, Cixous, Anne (Waldman), Naropa sisters, YouTube, hearts, lost children, and many other entities and I are “becoming-subjects-together” (Braidotti, 2019: 73). Affirmative joy triumphs liminal darkness as Oluchi, (and I) become “vivid-vivacious” on the page.

To return to Dewey, we can also see sociality preceding individuality. It is out of this social assemblage that I am finding, even though it was out of my conscious awareness, a new self, I am becoming-poet. Finally, there are different reflexivities at work in the piece that facilitate visibilities of pre-individual affectual intensities. There is Serra Undurraga’s (2020) opaque reflexivity as a movement where intuition and bodily feelings such as 3500 inner ear hairs swaying, is opening up new meanings. McDonald’s (2013, 2016) queer reflexivity is destabilizing me as reflector, going beyond the intersubjective into the transpersonal.

I reshape the warranted assertion: liminality as a time of surprising relationality with humans and more-than-humans that affectively generate becoming-subjects-together and individually, which may be out of conscious awareness.

Liminality as a time of arrested individuation

Dewey’s ([1929]2008) second tendency is a desire to individuate, discovering our unique qualities. Individuality is not a given, it arises from a social development process and is a process of growth and learning. Perhaps my ability to learn and individuate is arrested without a social development process and at a time when confidence in my professional skills is also diminishing?

August 2019This piece is comprised of excerpts from a much longer poem about attending the 2019 AMA Conference. I have my PhD, have unbecome PhD student. I’m applying for full-time academic jobs without understanding the difficulties of doing this on the east coast of the US as a mature woman, ex ‘C’ suite executive, qualitative, critical management, feminist, performative, poetic MOS researcher. I’ve not yet resurrected myself as a practitioner either. I’m in a conscious and depressed liminal state lacking professional selves, feeling pyschologocally stuck (Petriglieri, 2007).I am dirt no longer a PhD studentno longer a corporate executiveI attend the Academy of Management in Bostonno affiliationno faculty positionno adjunct roledrifting tentativeregressing into childhoodshynessoddly shamefuldespite a recent PhDaccoladeconference Best Paper doubtinglost looking for The Sheraton downtownI-phone in sweaty August morningpalmsignal bouncing off high-risesI head this waythat wayspinning body dressedelegantly for an interviewsweat tricklinglost lookingso hard*I tremble as I sit at an interview tablein an empty room filled with numbered stationsrepresenting this university and thatforcing a deep breath into my bellyto exude confidence I don’t feellook into the eyes of an interviewerwho knows me and denies melaboring over incoherent repliesI absorb his rejectiondirt is dangerousI am feminist dirta post-menopausal hag.*An invitation to a journal’s50^th birthday party

people I knowwine and cakeI dawdle along the Charles Riverlost in an introverts processingarrive lateI lurch from one acquaintanceto another“Are you presenting a paper?”“No.”“Are you performing?”“No.”conversational wordsunable to surface throughsqueezed vocal cords“Where are you working?”“I’m applying for jobs.”white winestings as sherry vinegarpink American cake icingcloys and chokes“Are you going to the Human Relations reception?”“No.”that auspicious invitationnever arrivedin my in-boxoutsidershrinkingslitheringaway to the Boston Tred line.*Splintering afterwardsinto thin shardsTo be marginalis to benegligibleperipheralfrom the Latin margo definition includes the wordbrink9pm on Saturday eveningin August alonefeeling on the brinkof f a l l i n g

Virginia Woolf with stonesin her pocketsinto the river.*Sitting in the hotel suite of theanywhere-around-the-world décora senior mentor and wegaze out across a view of Boston Harborshimmering in the heatnow we’re soaringflying high on wild womanlyscholarly exuberationsof the poststructuralpsychoanalyticpost-post human feminismsfledgling first flight giddyresuscitation with an Organization Studies Revise and ResubmitAlleluia. There is a God.*Back home in Connecticut“I was worried about you going”says my husband with intuition.skin red rawnettle stungI haveapplication influenzatoo weak to write***

In this piece my reflexivity is more “transparent and essentialist” (Serra Undurraga, 2020). Others are perceived, including the cake and wine, as enemies, or, in the case of my mentor, an ally. It is easy to see pathology in my mood. I am feeling lack, not my unique qualities, and affect is predominately negative producing an abject self. That said, there are visible complex, relational, and affective assemblages with human and non-human others—interviewers, guests at the journal party, my mentor and the Charles river, hotel rooms, shimmering view, Organization Studies journal—that render porous the boundaries between inside and outside of myself. The exception to the abjection is the contrasting scene with my mentor where exuberance is in the air moving between us and there is a shift toward a more affective/relational modality and reflexivity. In this moment we are together, and in relationality with the room and view, becoming–academics and I have a sense of discovery of my potentiality as a publishable MOS academic.

I amend this warranted assertion to: liminality as a time of abjection which arrests individuation and ability to discover unique qualities, though this is uneven and surprising sparkling moments (White and Epston, 1990) illuminate new potential becomings.

This moves me to my next warranted assertion.

Moments of astonishment which provide anticipatory illuminations of new futurities

What might speed-up becomings? “The present moment is both the record of what we are ceasing to be and the seeds of what we are in the process of becoming, at the same time” (Braidotti, 2018: 184). I have a felt sense of inchoate sparkling moments when I perceived something. Queer theorist Muñoz (2009), argues, following Bloch, for a sense of astonishment that “allows us to see a different time and place” that emerges out of the “darkness of the lived instant.” Astonishment, he suggests, “helps us surpass the limitations of an alienating present” allowing us “to see a different time and place. . .wish-landscapes” (p. 5). He suggests we can detect this sense of astonishment in relationality with entities, wish landscapes, such as, for Muñoz, O’Hara’s poems or Warhol’s paintings. We become “imbued with a feeling of forward-dawning futurity….The anticipatory illumination of certain objects is a kind of potentiality that is open, indeterminate, like the affective contours of hope itself” (p. 7). Moments of sensory and relational astonished contemplation are modes of being and feeling of the not quite there, yet concrete and embodied. Anticipatory illumination can and regularly will be disappointed but, disappointment must be risked, as such moments are “indispensable to the act of imaging transformation” (p. 9, my emphasis). Vision is both material and metaphorical. Muñoz’s idea of moments of astonishment is affirmative, reflecting Braidotti’s idea that as humans we move toward joy. I illustrate with two extracts which return us to earlier situations. The first is a continuation of my commuting walk and the second to my summer run to the beach.

Fall 2014Dawn(ing) Light I exit the City of London crossing over London Wall. The Wall is still visible at different points around City, but not here at Moorgate. . .I’m in a reverie, wondering what the ancient Roman postern gate would have looked like, when I’m suddenly jostled by a picture taker standing on the kerb next to me. My gaze follows his, going diagonally across the junction and upwards to the glass dome – a Foster edifice – Moor House. The dawn sun is hitting the curved edge of the glass roof, refracting a rose glow outward into the sky. It’s a sudden moment of beauty, a connection back a mile down the causeway of the Walbrook, to the god Mithras. And I’m moved in my dérive away from thoughts of Roman gates, as I contemplate lofty glass Moor House, back to Cambridge, where Foster was the architect of a similar glass building in the 1990’s, the Faculty of Law. And from there my mind skips and jumps to The Stirling Faculty of History, to lectures seldom attended, to studying and essay writing, freezing or boiling in the library’s unregulable temperatures. Most of us student historians hated the place with its terrible acoustics and falling glass cladding, a loathing that somehow continued on into our future lives, perversely contaging all our views of modern architecture, even to my consideration this morning of Moor House, breathtaking in the dawn light and bathing The Globe pub below.Summer 2015Elusive A couple of miles further on I descend down a short hill and into the beach car park. I pause for a moment, taking time out mid-run, looking out across Long Island Sound. The beach is deserted at this hour, except for one couple sitting away from me at a picnic table and it is mine to enjoy. My gaze is on the moving water of the Sound, southward and it was here, 15 years ago, that the most northerly sighting of the smoke from the torn asunder Twin Towers could be seen. The state commemoration is on the public beach across the river estuary. Looking at the water, I’m remembering the upcoming 9/11 anniversary. I’m filled with a sense of poignancy and gentle fluidity that I’m struggling to tune into…. incandescence - the meaning of which is also fiery, aflame, passionate. At these words Joan of Arc is quickly summoned from the theatre of my inner world and I see vividly the image of her on horseback galloping forward her pennant held aloft. This provokes an intense feeling that something is hovering at the edge of my awareness but it’s slippery and elusive and I can’t quite grasp it.

Capturing semi-conscious feelings of a futurity, not quite here, is difficult. The idea is to perceive alien pre-individual affectual intensities or collisions which the body feels, yet cannot discern consciously (Ashcraft, 2020) and, to represent this phenomena in language. Poetry works as an esthetic opening to pre-individual intensities (Kristeva, 1984), but prose is how I captured these experiences. In the first excerpt it is dawn breaking over Moor House that provides the moment of astonishment. My reflexivity is queer, moving from intersubjective to transpersonal. Although my conscious thoughts fly backward to my student days, in the falling cladding, there is perhaps an unconscious anticipatory illumination of my futurity as a critical management scholar?

In the second excerpt powerful affects are evoked in/by the assemblage of water, the beach, burning towers and my embodied gaze. La facultad again can be perceived, this time in the form an associative image (Joan of Arc) and in my instant sensing of the burning twin towers. I am astonished, with a sense of poignancy and gentle fluidity, and again, is there an unconscious anticipatory illumination of an affirmative, elusive futurity in the figure of Joan, on horseback, galloping forward with her pennant held aloft.

The moments of astonishment are vague and elusive. This warranted assertion I see no need to reframe at this stage, rather the need is to continue to test it out in the mundanity of lived, liminal experiences and see what emerges. I turn to my fourth and final warranted assertion (although the possibilities for warranted assertions could continue).

We make sudden, semi-conscious leaps toward possible new futurities

I feel this intuitively and turn to Grosz (2002, 2012) to help me articulate my ideas. Like Muñoz, she’s interested in how we envisage and engender a future unlike the present, when we don’t know what such a future entails. The future she suggests is an “openness of becoming that enables divergence from what exists” and that the “past is the condition for infinite futures” and that we can leap into a future we do not control through finding something “untimely in the patriarchal present and past” (Grosz, 2012: 49, my emphases). She continues, we have to invest in the “power of the leap, by which the actual emerges and produces itself from its virtual resources [generating] the surprise of the new” (Grosz, 2002: 18–19). Although she is talking about feminism and her idea of the leap is briefly articulated, abstract and disembodied, it’s a useful concept to try and glimpse moments when I felt myself suddenly vaulting into new becomings escaping otherness.

Early September 2019This piece is an extract from a short personal essay. Out of the blue and within days of being recruited, I am about to start teaching an undergraduate gender studies class for freshman through seniors. It’s been a sprint to pull together a teaching syllabus. As an MOS scholar I’m vaulting disciplinary lines.(Stage) fright waiting, ten minutes early, outside a room she struggled to find, despite being on campus yesterday, and has now checked five times the room number just to be sure it is the same number as the one printed on her syllabus; the one printed underneath her name which has professor prefixing it in black arial font. heavy black canvas bag at her feet which has the name of the last company she worked at embroidered in small red letters on the side, topples over spilling out thirty-two white, stapled, pristine printed copies of the said syllabus across narrow linoleum corridor floor blocking the way, and now dirtied, as she’s standing by trash cans, unready now for distribution to students. anyway will be rejected as kids online paperless indignant about climate endangering stupid paperanxious. circles of discomfort constricting her ribs and she swallows to refresh her sawdust mouth. a different type of jitters she always experienced before going up on stage to speak before hundreds of employees, when her left leg would tremble and she’d push against a wall to get breath low into her body, yet her body feels some resonant tremor as she prepares to do the unknown.there is no choice she can imagine other than to enter this classroom just as there was no choice but to enter on stage to perform her one-woman show fourteen months ago, just as there was no choice twenty-nine years ago but to enter the mortuary and identify her dead brother, just as there was no choice fifteen years ago but to climb the steps of the pulpit and give her father’s eulogy, just as there was…. students are arriving and she attempts a smile. faint smile returns and yawns. trepidations about her competency.

a gender class. welcoming all genders of this she is able. knowing theory, her butler, muñoz, halberstam and connell. not knowing theory, unfamiliar unread texts dotted through her curriculum. does she know enough theory?what kind of anxiety is this? a dread of something evil. from the latin anxietatem (nominative anxietas) “anguish, anxiety, solicitude,” noun of quality from anxius “uneasy, troubled in mind.” sometimes considered a pathological condition. should she unpack this anxiety? review it, sort it, label it? in unwrapping this emotion will it dissipate in her hands, blown away like strands of cirrus clouds in an autumn sky? it fills her belly. she forces her mouth into a reluctant smile, screws her feet up in her shoes and then relaxes them.she lifts two heavy bags onto her narrow shoulders, pushes the door ajar and enters, students following

This piece is radically–reflexive and a whole assemblage of the corridor, bags, syllabi, trash cans, students, and are flows, processes, relationality. My I seems humbled and the extract is written, not consciously when it was penned, in the third person. Anxiety is intense and moving from myself through the spilling copies of the syllabus and through the arriving students and their anxiety is contagious too in “trepidations about her competency.” I identify at least three opportunities for a leap, the first two from my patriarchal past and the third from my present. In the first I’m calling on courage, times when I’ve faced “no choice” but to be strong and to do something difficult, to overcome anxiety, and vault me across the threshold and into the classroom. In the second, with my associative leap into the etymology of anxiety, it is intellectual knowledge that I’m using to leap. In the third, counterintuitively, it is lifting two heavy bags onto my shoulders that enable me to leap forward and push the classroom door ajar. All three leaps involve a harnessing of masculine performances—strength and intellect.

This warranted assertion I’m leaving as is, to explore in further inquiry. I sense in this experience and in others, such as the Joan of Arc moment at the beach, there is a surprising leap out of liminality into a new professional becoming. I’m not yet sure whether this is catalyzed from, or only catalyzed by, something untimely in the patriarchal present and past.

A Deweyan inquiry is never completed. My warranted assertions are the start-point for further experience-based inquiries into lived liminal experiences. However, here I can take my inquiry only a little further. The Law of Journal Word Counts constrains me. I’m traversing to “discussion” and “conclusions.”

As yet unfinished

An aim of this paper is to disrupt (hetero)normative paradigms of organizational liminal identity work. I’ve limned (un)felt ferments of liminal experience and articulated and applied an organic pragmatist–posthuman feminism theory of liminality. I’ve used esthetic and intimate scholarship, a variety of angles of approach, to illuminate liminal situations revealing how self is a sociomaterial production and new selves emerge affectivity and relationally from entanglements with other entities. I hope my assay will provoke other processual, affective, and relational accounts of liminal identity work. There is a danger, however, that this may lead us back to studies on liminal identity processes by researchers from outside the processes. This would be a return to (hetero)normativity. Dewey saw presciently the dangers of a “class of experts” becoming “so removed from common interests as to become a class with private interests and private knowledge” (Shields, 2003: 529). A chasm separates, in my view, the daily, dirty, dynamic, goings-on in flesh–and–blood organizations and MOS research in (ivory-tower) universities.

Braidotti is always affirmative. I believe we can invest in a leap, saltating over border walls to (re)join practitioners in solving real-world problems prospectively and in partnership. As a step toward a “human relations 2.0” (Petriglieri, 2020b: 9), and as a fourth contribution of this paper, I am making a generative call, based on pragmatist ideas, to establish a community of inquiry (Shields, 2003) shaped around the problematic, doubting situation of the liminal professional. This Deweyan approach puts unfolding liminal experience, not theory, as the point of our departure. Democratic and emancipatory a “rich participatory community,” practitioners and scholars, could engage in ongoing research, working as a “participatory democracy” (Shields, 2003: 522) with “mutual respect, mutual toleration, give and take, the pooling of experience” (Campbell, 1998: 40). Everyone involved, as co-researchers and co-subjects (Reason, 1999). I hear shouts of “utopian” given the individualistic world of the global neoliberal business school, where crushing research production and profit targets kill-off our desires for creative experimentation and sustained deep engagement with practitioners. However, reframed, “[c]oncrete utopias are educated hope” (Muñoz, 2009: 3). Reason (1999) provides us with an education on how to get started with his “Layperson’s Guide” to collaborative inquiry (Reason, 1999: 1350). Communities of inquiry in MOS are, I envision, a hopeful surge towards a futurity without walls where we “work towards the betterment not of one kind of people but for the common good” (Addams, [1895]1970, in Shields, 2003: 524, Shield’s emphasis). A posthuman “affirmative mode of potentia” (Braidotti, 2019: 158).

Endings, or becoming-subjects-together

I have assayed to show we might carry out inquiries into liminality, and more broadly inquiry in MOS, generatively. Togetherness. Day-by-day working alongside each other, as academics, practitioners, and all entangled vibrant matter. The forging of a participatory democracy between the business school and practitioners as anticipatory illumination and a place for limning gold. On La Frontera, “[b]ecoming-subjects-together” (Braidotti, 2019: 73).

“This land was Mexican once

was Indian always

and is,

And will be again.”

(Anzaldúa, 2012: 113)

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Peter Case and Margaret Page, my doctoral supervisors, for their wonderful collaboration on early drafts of this paper. Special thanks also to my anonymous peer reviewers for their respons-able reviewing. I experienced the process as affirmative and mentoring where I felt my text was close read, responded to carefully, dialogically, and perceptively. The paper strengthened and I grew as a scholar as a result. I also wish to thank ML Associate Editor Jamie McDonald for his excellent guidance throughout the review process. Responsibility for remaining errors and omissions are mine alone.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Katie Beavan

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