A fuzzy predictive fault-tolerant control scheme is proposed for a wide class of discrete-time nonlinear systems with uncertainties, interval time-varying delays, and partial actuator failures as well as unknown disturbances, in which the main opinions focus on the relevant theory of FPFTC based on Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy model description of these systems. The T-S fuzzy model represents the discrete-time nonlinear system in the form of the discrete uncertain time-varying delay state space, which is firstly constructed by a set of local (...) linear models and the nonlinear membership functions. The novel improved state space model can be further obtained by extending the output tracking error to the constructed model. Then the fuzzy predictive fault-tolerant control law based on this extended model is designed, which can increase more control degrees of freedom. Utilizing Lyapunov-Krasovskill theory, less conservative delay-range-dependent stable conditions in terms of linear matrix inequality constraints are given to ensure the asymptotically robust stability of closed-loop system. Meanwhile, the optimized cost function and H-infinity performance index are introduced to the stable conditions to guarantee the robust performance and antidisturbance capability. The simulation results on the temperature control of a strong nonlinear continuous stirred tank reactor show that the proposed control scheme is feasible and effective. (shrink)

Port Cities are historically the places for paradigm shifts, radical changes, and socio-economic transitions. In particular, the interaction zone between the port infrastructure and urban activities creates liminal spaces at the forefront of many contemporary challenges. In these liminal spaces, the port's flows, form, and function intertwine with urban contexts and conflict with the living conditions. Conceptualizing the portcityscape and harborscape as liminal space and urban thresholds leads to (re)thinking about innovative participatory methods and technologies for (...) building community resilience in port cities. Additionally, inevitable constant development in port cities requires adaptability and resilience from the waterfronts to the hinterlands and city centers. Such confrontation of port infrastructures and urbanization is socio-politically and spatially challenging, specifically in historic port cities. Therefore, as the approach to exploiting energy and human resources changes over time, the physicality of the built environment in port cities and how we (re)use the resources need to be redefined. This research investigates key socio-spatial features and challenges of port cities by examining how the port's proximity to the city requires coordination, collaboration, transparency, and community dialogue. The introduction and background literature discuss three domains and notions of port city studies, building community resiliency through participatory frameworks, and parasitic architecture. By building upon this analytical framework, the paper presents case studies developed within the research-led design studio focusing on building resilient communities in four port cities, including Amsterdam, Constanta, Alexandria, and Rio De Janeiro. This research focus on the community-enabled application of emerging technologies, innovative approaches, and co-designing and co-building participatory methods. The selected case studies introduce an integrative and multi-scalar pedagogical framework for building resilient communities in liminal spaces of port cities. (shrink)

Within the framework of 'Temporalities and the Urban Fabric: Co-Producing Liminal Spaces in Transitional Epochs,' this rigorous examination unravels the multilayered nuances of temporality and its intimate relationship with urban spaces in times of transition. The research delineates the intricate interplay between public exhibitions, urban realms, and socio-political paradigms, particularly within the dynamic settings of the metropolitan entities of Houston and Amsterdam. These cities, as epitomes of temporal urban flux, become fertile grounds for exploring the ephemeral essence of (...) class='Hi'>liminal spaces and their transformative manifestations. By weaving together diverse academic domains – from Design Computation and Fabrication to Urban Communities and Spatial Justice – this study underscores the symbiotic fusion of Augmented Reality (AR) and Gamification within the broader canvas of urban temporalities. Crucially, the research accentuates the transformative potential of Extended Reality (XR) in augmenting the theoretical and methodological contours of urban studies within these transitional epochs. (shrink)

This collection moves from COVID to Kairos, engaged with the legacy of Paul Tillich. Liminal spaces reflect ambiguous transitional moments in human consciousness and culture. In early 2020, cultures and states turned inward for protection, exacerbating intertwined health, political, racial justice, and economic crises. Tillich would have understood these overlapping challenges to be heralding a kairotic moment, reflecting simultaneous crises and opportunities. The collected essays reflect on the intersections of COVID and Kairos. Authors engage numerous ethical challenges precipitated by (...) the current Kairos moment, thinking through and with Tillich. Other essays offer reflections on our cultural moment, engaging topics from public health to video games to hate speech. Reflecting on the cultural moment, this collection offers unique insight into the Tillichian legacy for the present and future. (shrink)

This article explores the way in which surrealist techniques and assumptions underpin spatial representations in Ballard’s Concrete Island. With much of Ballard’s fiction using spatiality as an ideologically charged instrument to articulate a critique that underpins postcapitalist culture, it seems important to focus on exactly the kind of spaces that he creates. This paper will investigate the means by which spatiality is conceptualized in Ballard’s fiction, with special emphasis on places situated on the borders between realism and fantasy. Ballard’s spaces, (...) often positioned on the edgelands of cities or centers of civilization, can be aligned with the surrealist project as presented not only by the Situationalist International, but of psychogeographical discourse in general. What the various Ballardian spaces—motorways, airports, high-rises, deserts, shopping malls, suburbs—have in common is a sense of existing outside stable definitions or what, following Marc Augé, we would call non-places, which by their definition are disconnected from a globalized image society, thus generating a revolutionary idea of freedom. As these places exist outside the cognitive map we impose on our environment, they present a potentially liberating force that resonates in Ballard’s fiction. (shrink)

Conflicts abound in Asian American churches between different groups. This study articulates a theological location of forgiveness that speaks to those conflicts. In particular, it situates forgiveness in the liminal space between what Homi K. Bhabha describes as "domains of difference" that define different generational or ethnic groups within Asian American churches. Yet the possibility of forgiveness is enacted only when both sides of a conflict are willing to move from those domains into liminal space. This (...) study argues that Mark Lewis Taylor's articulation of "dialogical questioning" is a useful mechanism for making such movements possible. (shrink)

Person‐centred practice indubitably seems to be the antithesis of technology. The ostensible polarity of technology and person‐centred practice is an easy road to travel down and in their various forms has been probably travelled for decades if not centuries. By forging ahead or enduring these dualisms, we continue to approach and recede, but never encounter the elusive and the liminal space between technology and person‐centred practice. Inspired by Haraway's work, we argue that healthcare practitioners who critically consider their (...) cyborg ontology may begin the process to initiate and complicate the liminal and sought after space between technology and person‐centred practice. In this paper, we draw upon Haraway's idea that we are all materially and ontologically cyborgs. Cyborgs, the hybridity of machine and human, are part of our social reality and embedded in our everyday existence. By considering our cyborg ontology, we suggest that person‐centred practice can be actualized in the contextualized, embodied and relational spaces of technology. It is not a question of espousing technology or person‐centred practice. Such dualisms have been historically produced and reproduced over many decades and prevented us from recognizing our own cyborg ontology. Rather, it is salient that we take notice of our own cyborg ontology and how technological, habitual ways of being may prevent (and facilitate) us to recognize the embodied and contextualized experiences of patients. A disruption and engagement with the habitual can ensure we are not governed by technology in our logics and practices of care and can move us to a conscious and critical integration of person‐centred practice in the technologized care environments. By acknowledging ourselves as cyborgs, we can recapture and preserve our humanness as caregivers, as well as thrive as we proceed in our technological way of being. (shrink)

The 2023 edition of the Venice Architecture Biennial Time Space Existence will draw attention to the emerging expressions of sustainability in their numerous forms, ranging from a focus on the environment and urban landscape to the unfolding conversations on innovation, reuse, community, and inclusion. In response to climate change, exhibited projects will investigate new technologies and construction methods that reduce energy consumption through circular design and develop innovative, organic, and recycled building materials. Participants will also address social justice by (...) presenting living solutions envisioned for displaced communities and minorities, while others will examine the tensions between the built urban environment and the nature surrounding it, identifying opportunities for coexistence. Time Space Existence not only aims to be a display but also a living workshop where established and emerging practitioners can work together and present their own visions of the status of architecture and the built environment nowadays. By bringing together ideas from across the world, the exhibition presents itself as a platform for exchange and experimentation and strives to stimulate an engaging dialogue that is inclusive of all voices. (shrink)

Dreamcore originates from a video (or image) form submitted on 21 April 2018, when an anonymous user posted a thread on 4chan’s paranormal section collecting images that would make people feel ‘uncomfortable', and another user’s comment under it gained the attention of the community. And it has been a new subculture that uses familiar scenes to make the audience nostalgic but uneasy, with two important characteristics: ‘Lost items’ and ‘exposed shame’. In contrast to the philosophical concept ‘sense of material’, the (...) absolutely independent defamiliarization, or liminal space’s ‘neither … nor … ’, ‘lost items’ pursues the familiarity in strangeness without resorting to the expression of magical reality, or using ambiguity between the two to create a ‘either … or …’ atmosphere; Compared with modern urban planning based on the principle of ‘ecology’, ‘exposed shame’ reveals infrastructures that do not match the natural setting in the image, causing abruptness and embarrassment. Both point to the dreamcore’s playful ambiguity, thus not being governed by serious art and symbolising the original intention of free creation. (shrink)

In this article, I demonstrate how Capital Christian Ministries International has been conceptualised as ecclesiastical spaces for de-gendering. I have utilised symbolic imagination within the Ndembu cultural liminality as theoretical framework in theological studies. I have argued that the initiates in the liminal spaces subverted social normative through the process of un-gendering. The article concludes by arguing that reclaim and reconstitute ecclesia spaces as liminal spaces have potential to promote gender emancipation within African Christianity.

This paper will examine the transformative possibilities of liminal space as described by Victor Turner and Isabel Clark in the musical experience. It draws on the author's previous phenomenography of musical experience an analytical frame based on the liminality of musical experience using the notion of difference-in-relationship drawing on Martin Buber's "I-Thou experience" and including theorists such as Dewey, Maslow, Levinas, Derrida, Noddings and Shore, M and I. S. Csikszentmihalyi, and Custodero. It will examine the implications of the (...) use of a liminal music space for cultural and personal transformation including its relationship between this space and the everyday world, the loss of boundaries, collective vulnerability, the opportunity to try out new personas, the handing over of responsibility to a higher power and the capacity for joyful play and the possibility of empowerment. It draws on Shakespeare's play Midsummer Night's Dream (drawing, as it does on Ovid's Metamorphoses) to illuminate the nature of transformation. (shrink)

This book review evaluates Kenneth B. Kidd's Theory for Beginners: Children's Literature as Critical Thought, focusing specifically on Kidd's exploration of the symbiotic relationship between children's literature, philosophy, and critical theory.

The last decade has seen a slow but steady increase in the number of postdoctoral scholars employed in faculties of education. In this article, seven postdoctoral scholars who worked in the same Ca...

1. IntroductionConstructing narratives that can combat people’s unease about their sense of belonging, by providing a sense of certainty and steadfastness, is a recurrent affect in the history of humanity.1 Perhaps change is, however, the only constant in this history. Over a hundred years ago, Max Weber bemoaned the transition to a rationalized modernity as “the disenchantment of the world,”2 which in turn had been inspired by similar concerns expressed by Friedrich Schiller in his poem “The Gods of Greece” (“Die (...) Götter Griechenlands”) at the end of the eighteenth century.3 Intensifying scholarly debates across the humanities and social sciences, asking questions about what people experience as fundamental changes to the fabric of their lived realities and how they cope with it, further indicate that Western societies are in transition in the present day. There is, however, disagreement over whether the human condition simply observes changes or whether it transforms into a qualitatively new stage, one that has been termed postmodernity, late modernity, and liquid modernity.4 Nevertheless, there is a consensus among scholars that contemporary realities unfold in contrast to social imaginaries that have defined Western societies and senses of belonging since the “global transformation” took place in the nineteenth century. This transformation still “underpins core aspects of contemporary international relations,” as Barry Buzan and George Lawson contend.5 Even today, social imaginaries are narrated—and criticized as such—in grand terms, often with a focus on the nation and a (however conceived) glorious future. (shrink)

Liminal Bodies, Reproductive Health, and Feminist Rhetoric presents composition professor Lydia McDermott's "sonogram" methodology of rhetorical listening, an exercise that discloses feminine voices muted or unjustly disciplined within texts ostensibly written on women's behalf. The texts examined by McDermott range from eighteenth-century pregnancy manuals to speeches by Favorinus, the ancient sophist, who is described from antiquity as a hermaphrodite. Part of McDermott's purpose in sonogramming is to critique modern and contemporary feminists. She objects to the feminist trend of perpetuating (...) and answering a "disability" rhetoric about women, or of demonstrating that women can overcome a... (shrink)

Playing fields are “spaces where the communitas suspends its everyday life and structures” and “The internal logic of sporting games is connected to values from the social context”, Playing fields: Power, practice, and passion in sport, 127–144. Reno: University of Nevada Press). But what about the space in between? What kind of semiotics organisation can be detected in the membrane between player and liminal space where spectators are not allowed yet specific characters needed to carry out an (...) event? We can therefore identify a liminality that can be connected either to the controlled or the wild playing field and depending on which of the two is the case can be analysed according to the degree of regulated system of signs which they produce. This implies different pathways and rituals: as matches are played, a variety of bodily activities may be taking place concurrently. Furthermore, it is inevitable that these activities attract the attention of the audience or alternately lead a player to interact with a non-player. In this article, I will first try to identify certain semiotics features, especially connected to Eco’s Peircian concept of Encyclopedia, that characterize the status of liminal space around the playing field. Then I will focus on liminality in soccer, investigating what kinds of interaction exist outside the playing area. (shrink)

There is an increased controversy surrounding Westerners' use of ayahuasca. One issue of importance is psychological resiliency of users and lack of screening by ayahuasca tourism groups in the Amazon. Given the powerful effects of ayahuasca coupled with lack of cultural support, Western users are at increased risk for psychological distress. Many Westerners who experience psychological distress following ayahuasca ceremonies report concurrently profound spiritual experiences. Because of this, it may be helpful to consider these episodes "spiritual emergencies," or crises resulting (...) from intense and transformative spiritual experiences. Although the author warns readers to avoid romantic comparisons of Western ayahuasca users to shamans, ethnographic data on indigenous shamanic initiates along with theory on liminality may be of some use to understand difficult experiences that accompany ayahuasca use. Given that psychotherapy is culturally sanctioned, therapists trained in treating spiritual crises can help Western ayahuasca users make meaning of their distress. Three case studies are offered as examples of individuals working through various sorts of crises following ayahuasca ceremonies. (shrink)

If James has a latent tuberculosis infection , he is at risk of developing active tuberculosis disease but he is not yet sick. LTBI is a liminal space between health and illness. Diagnosed with LTBI, James could be conceptualised as having a liminal body. Treatments for LTBI are available, but why would a person seek treatment for a disease he does not yet have? One thing is definite: James needs to be educated about the symptoms and severity (...) of active tuberculosis disease. (shrink)

Narrative analysis is well established as a means of examining the subjective experience of those who suffer chronic illness and cancer. In a study of perceptions of the outcomes of treatment of cancer of the colon, we have been struck by the consistency with which patients record three particular observations of their subjective experience: the immediate impact of the cancer diagnosis and a persisting identification as a cancer patient, regardless of the time since treatment and of the presence or absence (...) of persistent or recurrent disease; a state of variable alienation from social familiars, expressed as an inability to communicate the nature of the experience of the illness, its diagnosis and treatment; and a persistent sense of boundedness, an awareness of limits to space, empowerment and available time. These subjectivities were experienced in varying degree by all patients in our study. Individual responses to these experiences were complex and variable. The experiences are best understood under the rubric of a category we call “liminality”. We believe that all cancer patients enter and experience liminality as a process which begins with the first manifestations of their malignancy. An initial acute phase of liminality is marked by disorientation, a sense of loss and of loss of control, and a sense of uncertainty. An adaptive, enduring phase of suspended liminality supervenes, in which each patient constructs and reconstructs meaning for their experience by means of narrative. This phase persists, probably for the rest of the cancer patient’s life. The experience of liminality is firmly grounded in the changing and experiencing body that houses both the disease and the self. Insights into the nature of the experience can be gained from the Existentialist philosophers and from the history of attitudes to death. Understanding liminality helps us to understand what it is that patients with cancer seek from the system to which they turn for help. Its explication should therefore be important for those who provide health care, those who educate health care workers and those concerned to study and use outcomes as administrative and policy making instruments. (shrink)

Liminality and the Modern offers a comprehensive introduction to this concept, discussing its development and laying out a conceptual and experiential framework for thinking about change in terms of liminality. Applying this framework to questions surrounding the implosion of ‘non-spaces’, the analysis of major historical periods and the study of political revolution, the book also explores its possible uses in social science research and its implications for our understanding of the uncertainty and contingency of the liquid structures of modern society.

One of the most intriguing bio-objects in the emerging field of regenerative medicine is umbilical cord blood. Employed in existing haematological therapies, but also loaded with potentialities for future uses, cord blood has been lately the focus of a regulatory debate which confronts public and private forms of biobanking. This article explores the political and anthropological side of this debate, describing the ways in which different health practices related to the umbilical cord (and to its symbolic sibling, the placenta) have (...) been involved in processes of societal production and reproduction. Through the use of ethnological and historical data, and their comparison with current practices, I contend that the technical manipulation of cords and placentas goes much longer into the past than what a first glance suggests, and that these two objects can be understood as biological spaces in which forms of social belonging and versions of the societal bond are at play. The current conflict between public and private cord blood banks is therefore interpreted as part of a longer history of bodily practices, and as reflecting recent mutations in the biopolitical constitution of advanced liberal societies. (shrink)

The spaces between the modernist categories of human and nonhuman, or nature and culture, are collapsing in the Anthropocene. As human technological influence continues become evidenced as a global geologic force, ‘liminal spaces’ expand. Liminal spaces are spaces at the intersections and aggregations of human- and nonhuman-animal umwelten mediated by technology. Soundscapes, the collection of human and nonhuman created sounds of a particular place and time, give us unique access to the semiotic exchanges that constitute those spaces. Soundscape (...) ecology, the study of ecosystemic relations through sound, is a method by which to engage and understand those liminal spaces. Understanding liminal spaces in this context of soundscape ecology offers insights into new ways in which organisms relate to and within their environments through sign exchange; or, new ways animals engage complex worlds of experience. In this paper I articulate this argument and define ‘sonic liminality’ as a biosemiotic process of the creation and engagement in hybrid natures. I examine umwelt engagement through a specific case study: analysis of soundscapes at a local zoological park in the southeastern United States. I argue that the digital technology-driven empirical work of soundscape ecology gives semioticians access to informational ecosystems, and therefore to the ways in which information transforms the boundaries between individual organisms and their built and natural environments. (shrink)

Theories about relationships impact the ways in which we imagine that teachers and students can or should interact. These theories often involve either individualistic or relational assumptions. A contrast has been made between theories that assume that the individual is primary, and the relationship secondary, and those that assume that the relationship is primary and the individual secondary. Roughly mapping on to these assumptions are the implications that educational relationships either ought to facilitate autonomy or community, emancipation or socialization. I (...) argue that educational contexts occupy a liminal space at the boundaries of multiple contexts, and so have limited ability to either emancipate or socialize students relative to these contexts. However, the very liminality of the educational space allows for a unique view and exploration of these contexts using autonomy and community as means rather than ends of education. Learning, described here as re-co-gnition, is facilitated as students move away from and then return to the liminal, and teachers and students view again together the boundaries of these various contexts as they intersect at the school. Implications for teaching in this liminal space are explored for recognizing relationships between student and teacher, childhood and adulthood, home and the “outside world,” and boundaries within and between disciplines. (shrink)

This paper explores the experiences of infertile women who occupy a liminal space in society, and argues that the fertility clinic served as a space to tolerate women's experiences of liminality. It provided not only rituals aimed at transition to pregnancy, but also a space where women's liminal experiences, which are caused by the existential chaos of infertility, could be tolerated. The British experience seemed to differ from the American one identified in the literature, where (...) self‐management and peer group support are described as strategies used by infertile women to manage infertility. The British women in this study did not appear to draw so much on self‐management or peer group support to deal with their experiences of infertility. They appeared to be isolated in their experience. The clinic thus provided a space in which recognition was given to their intensely private experiences of difference from those in the outside fertile world and allowed them to manage these socially unacceptable, culturally taboo and invisible experiences. However, because of its very limited success rate in enabling women to become pregnant, rather than facilitating the transition of status from infertile to fertile woman, the clinic also served to reinforce the liminal experiences of those women who remained infertile. Inadvertently, the clinic offered a way of being in limbo while at the same time reinforcing the liminal experiences of women. (shrink)

A dearth of literature focuses on the relationship between acculturation, power distance and liminality for migrant nurses entering foreign workplaces. Expectations are for migrant nurses to be practice‐ready swiftly. However, this aspiration is naïve given the complex shifts that occur in deeply held cultural beliefs and practices and is dependent on an organisational climate of reciprocal willingness to adapt and learn. This exploratory study identified that although a plethora of literature addresses challenges migrant nurses face, there are limited data that (...) link these transitional processes to concepts that might usefully guide transitions. This study draws from the overarching concept of acculturation, together with Hofstede's (2011) notion of power distance and the theory of liminality to explore the experiences of eight migrant nurses. Data highlighted that adjusting to altered hierarchical relationships took many months because negotiating power distance challenged deeply held beliefs and assumptions about professional and organisational hierarchies. Migrant nurses’ accounts indicated a paucity of organisational processes to address these difficulties; therefore, they navigated this liminal space of adjustment to power distance differences in an ad hoc manner. Their acculturation experiences, arguably unnecessarily prolonged, indicate the value in workplace commitment to exploring a collaborative, critically reflective approach to optimise transitions. (shrink)

Taking the example of the Basel carnival Fasnacht, the paper shows in what way ritual can maintain the impression of being traditional and unchanging, and yet be open to changes and innovations. As the basic conceptual framework we use the notion of liminality, which Victor Turner identified as the creative moment of ritual. In Fasnacht, this liminal dimension appears in two degrees. The carnival as such represents a reflexive liminal counterpart to the standard social structure, yet it is (...) itself also highly structured and bound by conservative traditional rules. As a reaction to this, there arises within Fasnacht a second-order liminality in the form of the so-called wild Fasnacht, which turns the official antistructural Fasnacht rules upside down once again, testing their validity. While the carnival structure offers a regulated opportunity for questioning everyday social behaviour, wild Fasnacht questions even this regulated manner of questioning as such, opening space for its reflection and modification. We use detailed examples to demonstrate how the subtle dialectics of structure and antistructure keeps the tradition of Basel’s Fasnacht alive and allows it to evolve without destroying its aura of traditionality. (shrink)

This article applies the anthropological concept of liminality to reconceptualize palliative care ethics. Liminality possesses both spatial and temporal dimensions. Both these aspects are analyzed to provide insight into the intersubjective relationship between patient and caregiver in the context of palliative care. Aristotelian practical wisdom, or phronesis, is considered to be the appropriate model for palliative care ethics, provided it is able to account for liminality. Moreover, this article argues for the importance of liminality for providing an ethical structure that (...) grounds the doctrine of double effect and overcomes the impasse of phronesis in the treatment of the terminally ill. (shrink)

_Wild/lives_ draws on myth, popular culture and analytical psychology to trace the machinations of 'trickster' in contemporary film and television. This archetypal energy traditionally gravitates toward liminal spaces – physical locations and shifting states of mind. By focusing on productions set in remote or isolated spaces, Terrie Waddell explores how key trickster-infused sites of transition reflect the psychological fragility of their willing and unwilling occupants. In differing ways, the selected texts – _Deadwood, Grizzly Man, Lost, Solaris, The Biggest Loser, (...) Amores Perros and Repulsion_ – all play with inner and outer marginality. As this study demonstrates, the dramatic potential of transition is not always geared toward resolution. Prolonging the anxiety of change is an increasingly popular option. Trickster moves within this wildness and instability to agitate a form of dialogue between conscious and unconscious processes. Waddell's imaginative interpretation of screen material and her original positioning of trickster will inspire students of media, cinema, gender and Jungian studies, as well as academics with an interest in the application of Post-Jungian ideas to screen culture. (shrink)

This article explores the pedagogical, transformative aspects of education as a relation, viewing such transformation as occurring in the liminal space between body and spirit. In order to explore this liminal space more thoroughly, the article first outlines a case for why liminality is of educational and not only of pedagogical concern, building on James Conroy's notion of the liminal imagination and his emphasis on the importance of metaphor for calling our attention to the ontological (...) spaces that make up educational practice. I then use this metaphor both substantively and methodologically, offering a reading of Clarice Lispector's novel The Stream of Life as a performance of the liminal imagination in its attempt to put into focus the embodied and transcendent aspects of becoming, both of which I see as central to defining what is pedagogical about human existence. The article then turns to developing how different metaphors may be mobilised to signify the particularly relational quality of becoming, drawing on Luce Irigaray's work to explore more closely the corporeal and spiritual aspects of becoming in relation. I then turn my attention to a more fulsome discussion of the significance of approaching pedagogical relationships in education in this way and what this signifies for the teacher-student encounter in particular. (shrink)

This paper explores a tension between Francis's openness to ‘liminality’ and certain papal statements condemning transness that reproduce the ways in which people are marginalised as trans. It seeks to make sense of these tensions, reading them back through Francis's theology of history, and suggesting a place for trans people to locate ourselves within the Church in spite of them. It argues that Francis's failings around transness can be viewed as ‘limitations’ to be overcome in a redemptive movement. It then (...) argues that Francis's theology of history is reflected in his ‘dialogical’ use of authority, which admits a space and role for us as pastorally accompanying the Church beyond these limitations. Finally, it argues that Francis's pastoral theology is founded on a theology of encounter which suggests that this process is an expression of divine love that draws people to God through a loving encounter with others. Trans people are thus called to put ourselves at the service of this love, and can take hope in its powers even amidst our own weakness. (shrink)

This article explores the distinction between anti-colonial longing and postcolonial becoming through a commentary on Antjie Krog’s Begging to Be Black. The epistemology and ontology of postcolonial becoming is the central concern. Begging to Be Black is a mytho-poetic narrative in which a world is imagined where King Moshoeshoe, missionaries from the 19th century, Antjie Krog and her friends and colleagues, ANC cadres, the Deleuzian philosopher Paul Patton, Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the ANC Youth League are placed in (...) the same narrative space where they can intermingle. And this is done to respond to a crisis of the present — the difficulties South Africans face in grappling with the legacies of colonialism and Apartheid, and the fact that there is a process of un-homing and re-homing that Krog feels white South Africans in particular need to think about more deeply. The article compares Krog’s approach to decolonization with that of the leading South African philosopher of ubuntu, Mogobe Ramose. Both Krog and Ramose offer the epistemological and ontological resources for grappling with the relationship between past, present and future in a decolonizing setting. The article examines how postcolonial critique may take place through liminal figures. Liminality is characterized as central to postcolonial becoming. (shrink)

Despite the growing importance of ‘social value’ as a central feature of research ethics, the term remains both conceptually vague and to a certain extent operationally rigid. And yet, perhaps because the rhetorical appeal of social value appears immediate and self-evident, the concept has not been put to rigorous investigation in terms of its definition, strength, function, and scope. In this article, we discuss how the anthropological concept of liminality can illuminate social value and differentiate and reconfigure its variegated approaches. (...) Employing liminality as a heuristic encourages a reassessment of how we understand the mobilization of ‘social value’ in bioethics. We argue that social value as seen through the lens of liminality can provide greater clarity of its function and scope for health research. Building on calls to understand social value as a dynamic, rather than a static, concept, we emphasize the need to appraise social value iteratively throughout the entire research as something that transforms over multiple times and across multiple spaces occupied by a range of actors. (shrink)

In this article I discuss the problem of embodied subjectivity, viewed from the perspective of spatiality. The questions I address arise from my ethnographic study on chronic pain. My main argument is that, in contrast to philosophical understanding of space as an a priori, or as a container, space and spatiality are shaped and reshaped through the body in pain. What characterizes most patients' experiences of space is movement. This can be understood through Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological theory of (...) the lived body but needs in addition a cultural contextualization. Because of biomedical thinking, in Western settings chronic pain is liminal. It does not fit the biomedical categories of disease or space. This profoundly shapes patients' understanding of their subjectivity as homeless, and their experience of spatiality as estranged and exiled. (shrink)

This chapter outlines a case for why liminality is of educational and not only of pedagogical concern, building on James Conroy's notion of the liminal imagination and his emphasis on the importance of metaphor for calling our attention to the ontological spaces that make up educational practice. It then turns to developing how different metaphors may be mobilised to signify the particularly relational quality of becoming, drawing on Luce Irigaray's work to explore more closely the corporeal and spiritual aspects (...) of becoming in relation. The chapter also presents a more fulsome discussion of the significance of approaching pedagogical relationships in education in this way and what this signifies for the teacher‐student encounter in particular. Finally, it argues that exploring the existential dimensions of pedagogical relationships between body and spirit similarly requires a language of in‐betweenness, or liminality, that gives full weight to the complex processes of human becoming. (shrink)

Ayant enquêté auprès de plusieurs jhākri/chamans de l’Himalaya népalais, nous avons pu explorer leur espace liminal, cet « entre-deux » qui sépare le monde des morts de celui des vivants. En cherchant à reconstituer la complexité des rapports entre pratiques rituelles et pratiques narratives des systèmes de croyance hindoue, nous avons considéré ce limen comme un lieu de passage, aux frontières fluides, pour des ontologies surnaturelles et des êtres humains aux pouvoirs exceptionnels, en l’occurrence ces jhākri népalais. À partir (...) des données ethnographiques concernant le rituel d’incorporation au cours duquel ces chamans himalayens peuvent fusionner avec leur esprit tutélaire, nous avons développé un modèle en nous basant sur une propriété du cerveau confirmée depuis la Gestalt : sa bistabilité cognitive enactive. L’incorporation, qui prend place en phase liminale, se déroule bien selon un cycle bistable, avec une alternance constante de deux expressions formelles, métemmorphoses, chacune potentiellement stable en mode fusionnel ou ségrégationnel. C’est là selon nous que réside tout le « secret » du succès de telles conceptions métemphysiques autour de la métemsomatose, hypertrophiée chez le jhākri passeur intra mundi en mode bistable. Our recent investigations among several jhākri/shamans from the Nepal Himalaya allowed us to identify a liminal “in-between” space, separating the world of the dead from the living one. From the relationship between ritual practices and narratives in Hindu beliefs, we can consider this limen, with fluid boundaries, as a crossing point for different supernatural ontologies and for a few human beings with exceptional powers, Nepalese jhākris. To cope with the ethnographic data about the incorporation ritual, when these shamans may fuse with their tutelary spirit, we had to dwell on a model repeatedly fed since Gestalt findings, endowing the brain with an enactive cognitive bistability property. This incorporation ritual which takes place in the liminal phase, evolves in such a bistability cycle, with two alternating morphings, each potentially stable in a fusion or segregation mode. Her lies the core for the success of such metemphysical concepts about metensomatosis, overdeveloped in the jhākri as a bistable intermediary intra mundi. (shrink)

The purpose of this note is to study impulsive control and synchronization of memristor based chaotic circuits shown by Muthuswamy. We first establish a less conservative sufficient condition for the stability of memristor based chaotic circuits. After that, we discuss the effect of errors on stability. Meanwhile, we also discuss impulsive synchronization of two memristor based chaotic systems. Our results are more general and more applicable than the ones shown by Yang, Li, and Huang. Finally, several numerical examples are given (...) to show the effectiveness of our methods. (shrink)

Under the sumptuous immensity of the sky, the snow covered the endless forests, the frozen rivers, the plains of an immense country, obliterating the landmarks, the accidents of the ground, levelling everything under its uniform whiteness, like a monstrous blank page awaiting the record of an inconceivable history.Increased interest in the experience of space in literature in recent decades has resulted in numerous commentaries on such topics as colonial space, geographical space, gendered space, liminal (...) class='Hi'>space, psychic space, and signifying space. In fact, Con Coroneos suggests that Homi Bhabha’s “DissemiNation”1 considers as many as forty different types of space.2Conrad studies have not been silent during this... (shrink)

To better reflect the precise clustering results of the data samples with different shapes and densities for affinity propagation clustering algorithm, an improved integrated clustering learning strategy based on three-stage affinity propagation algorithm with density peak optimization theory was proposed in this paper. DPKT-AP combined the ideology of integrated clustering with the AP algorithm, by introducing the density peak theory and k-means algorithm to carry on the three-stage clustering process. In the first stage, the clustering center point was selected by (...) density peak clustering. Because the clustering center was surrounded by the nearest neighbor point with lower local density and had a relatively large distance from other points with higher density, it could help the k-means algorithm in the second stage avoiding the local optimal situation. In the second stage, the k-means algorithm was used to cluster the data samples to form several relatively small spherical subgroups, and each of subgroups had a local density maximum point, which is called the center point of the subgroup. In the third stage, DPKT-AP used the AP algorithm to merge and cluster the spherical subgroups. Experiments on UCI data sets and synthetic data sets showed that DPKT-AP improved the clustering performance and accuracy for the algorithm. (shrink)

本书不仅深化了我们对规范的政治理论与道德哲学的关系的解释,而且也在道德哲学领域中产生了一系列值得我们关注的重要争论.

Enhancing teacher leadership is not only one of the approaches to improving teaching and learning, but it is also essential to the success of education reform. Based on leader-member exchange theory, 294 preschool teachers in China were surveyed, and a structural equation model was established to explore the relationship between the participating teachers' principal leadership style, teacher leadership and psychological capital. The findings revealed a significant positive correlation between transformational and transactional leadership styles and preschool teacher leadership. The laissez-faire leadership (...) style had no correlation with preschool teacher leadership. The transformational leadership style and transactional leadership style were significantly and positively correlated with psychological capital, while the laissez-faire leadership style was significantly and negatively correlated with psychological capital. The transformational leadership style can positively influence preschool teacher leadership directly and indirectly through psychological capital; and the transactional leadership style can only positively influence preschool teacher leadership indirectly through the mediating role of psychological capital. Preschool teachers' leadership can neither be directly influenced by a laissez-faire leadership style nor be indirectly influenced through the mediating role of psychological capital. (shrink)

本书共分五章,内容包括:综述、语言性认知操作三模式论、语言特点与思辨理性的语言进路、先秦名家“诡辩”命题新解、公孙龙子“诡辩”命题新论。.