This thesis examines the dual identity of the Church of England priest employed as an NHS healthcare chaplain. In 1948, full-time NHS chaplains provided a Church of England ministry of liturgy and pastoral care. Their twenty-first century counterpart delivers existential spiritual or pastoral care. Though Church of England chaplains are licensed by the Church, their work is shaped by the NHS and the Trust which employs them. They are accountable to the Church and the NHS even though each promotes different values and serves different ends. Published literature alludes to the chaplain’s sense of marginalization from the Church and within the NHS. Interviews with twelve full-time NHS chaplains, who are Church of England priests, focused on how they interpreted their dual identity as priest and chaplain, and the impact the two institutions had on these identities. This I framed using the theoretical model, ‘communities of practice’. Analysis of these interviews confirmed that chaplains thought they were disconnected from the priorities and values of the Church. This they described as ‘marginalization’, a term which appears elsewhere in published literature sometimes interchangeable with ‘liminality’. I claim that liminality is not only conceptually different but makes a distinct contribution to understanding the work and identity of chaplain and priest. I argue the existence of liminal intelligence and its importance in the ministry of the chaplain. I maintain that ministerial priesthood needs to be faithful to its liminal credentials. These I trace back to the liminality of the cultic priesthood outlined in the Hebrew bible as well as the liminality of Jesus, his teaching and the communitas of the early Church. I propose that the role of the ministerial priest is not only about recalling the institutional Church to its liminal roots but that liminality is the essence of priesthood.

This thesis explores the intersection of observational filmmaking with auto-ethnographic writing, a combination not used very often but with great potential for visual anthropologists. I examine how my research and filmmaking over a ten-year period have been shaped both by my cancer experience as well as by my Japanese background. Using the metaphor "journey", I approach my own traumatic cancer experience and turn it into a field of study. My journey begins from the moment of my first cancer diagnosis and treatment in the US, moving through my second diagnosis in Norway, and leading up to my most recent fieldwork with a cancer support community in Japan. My auto-ethnographic journey illustrates how I altered my own relationship to my cancer, moving through critical encounters that transformed me from a silent sufferer to an attentive listener. These experiences have also influenced my metaphorical thinking about "dying well" to "living well" with cancer. My personal journey is closely linked to my professional one, and also affects my approaches to filmmaking. By meeting the anthropologist Paul Stoller, who has also lived in the world of cancer, I learned the importance of coming to terms with one's own cancer mask. This mask can easily evoke a sense of being trapped in a "continuous liminality" (Stoller 2005), a transitional state between health and sickness, hopefulness and hopelessness, past and future, life and death. How am I able, as a researcher and filmmaker, to go on with my life in this in-between state and attend to the lives of others through this cancer mask? In my recent fieldwork, I decided to enter the world of the cancer patients' shadow and met with the families of patients and bereaved families in a support group in Japan. I learned that they too wore a mask, though I struggled to establish friendships with them as my cancer status versus their caregiver status distanced us somewhat. I overcame this challenge by using the technique of collaborative filmmaking to seek mutual fellowship with them, and trying to create a shared space in-between, ma in Japanese, where we could meet and feel with each other (kyokan empathy). For that purpose, and combined with the technique of feedback screening, I used a mobile phone as a filming device to free up my face and to make me available as a listener for the filmed persons. The fieldwork resulted in the film 'To the Last Drop' (2016). By combining the methods of auto-ethnographic writing and observational filmmaking, my personal account served to broaden my understanding of the experiences of those afflicted by cancer in Japan. Together, these methods expand on the space between, where suffering becomes visible and silence becomes audible, in a culturally sensitive way.

This visual arts project investigates notions of liminality and hybridity regarding the ambiguity of the interstitial position of the migrant. An examination of the migrant’s perspective and perception of cultural identity and the sense of home and belonging also underpins these studies. The project examines how the space between two cultures is experienced, and explores ways in which this might be visually expressed through the construction of fibre and textile art works. The researcher’s personal experience, as a German national now resident in the Cook Islands, provides the basis for reflections on cultural liminality and the ambivalence of feelings towards inclusion and exclusion. Material elements from European and Polynesian cultures such as cloth, fibres, and thread, and non-material elements like concepts and rituals are investigated for their potential to transcend the boundaries of their original culture to reveal the liminal space as source of energy and change. The 80% practice based work is accompanied by a 20% written exegesis

This narrative inquiry explores the curriculum making experiences and stories of three teachers - Claire, an early childhood educator, Rita, a middle years teacher, and Leah, a primary grades teacher - who taught students with a chronic illness. The research wonders of this thesis asked the following questions: what does it mean to engage in the curriculum around chronic illness? How do the teachers influence such a curriculum? What is the teacher's position within it? Do they experience a shift in knowledge, awareness, perception, or practice while engaged in this curriculum making? Derived from individual semi-structured interviews ranging from 25 minutes to one hour, a narrative account of each teacher is presented and inquired into within the three dimensional inquiry space, defined to include temporality, sociality, and place. The concept of a curriculum around chronic illness is presented. This curriculum focuses on the active construction of lives shaped by a chronic illness. In this research, the curriculum around chronic illness required the negotiation, and sometimes renegotiation, of liminal spaces. Liminality, found in the making of a curriculum around chronic illness, brought the teachers of this research to the peripheries of their students' worlds, where they learned, in time, to perceive their students and themselves wholly. The three teachers, through their unique positioning of their stories to live by, created new forward-looking stories (Nelson, 1999) that guided their teaching; stories marked by inclusion, community, loving perceptions, and care.

Against the background of The Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album, this study explores the ways Hanif Kureishi problematizes the notion of identity. The present study aims to lay bare how Kureishi moves the previously fixed categories into a slippery ground in his fiction and, in the process, how he challenges the fundamental givens of identity politics against the background of Homi Bhabha&rsquo / s key concepts: hybridity, mimicry, ambivalence, agency, liminality and the third space. It will also make references to the category of nation as narration in relation to Thatcherite politics and identity as a performative act/process. Bhabha&rsquo / s theories will also help highlight how Kureishi&rsquo / s characters create their liminal spaces and how they perform their identity within these spaces. Looking at both novels, it is concluded that the nature of identity is fluid since it is configured according to many variables such as religious practice, political activism, arts and sexual discourse which are not stable, either. Kureishi&rsquo / s novels fictionalize that identity can never be reified by the essentialist pre-givens of the traditional ideologies. In a multicultural world, rather than assimilation, it is important to grasp the unstable nature of identity in order to respect cultural differences. Thus, in a world where the dominant voices do not/cannot suppress the marginal ones, identity, national or individual, will keep on transforming itself.

Despite the fact that hakko ichiu ideology was the key device deployed by fascists to mobilize the Japanese for total war, Japanese studies have not reexamined the meaning of wartime hakko ichiu ideology and its historical continuity during the postwar era.This study traces and analyzes the meaning and intent of wartime hakko ichiu ideology and how it has evolved in official events spanning nearly 60 years from the 1940 ceremony of the 2600th Anniversary of the Accession of Emperor Jinmu through Expo '70 and the 1998 Nagano Winter Games. The first part of the study analyzes how Meiji nationalists between 1868 to 1905 used a Western model of gender to create a maternal image of Amaterasu as the empress. This image became the primary Japanese icon of female gender. The second part of the study traces the development of hakko ichiu ideology in three official events over a half-century. By examining the representation of Nippon News No. 23, Part1, (the film version of the Opening Ceremony of the 2600th Anniversary of the Accession of Emperor Jinmu), I argue against the traditional meaning of hakko ichiu--as mere colonialism--and redefine its meaning in terms of dominance and unity. I also discuss the interrelationships among gender, national matsuri, and hakko ichiu ideology. Finally, I examine how, by deploying national matsuri in the opening ceremonies of official postwar events, neo-nationalists were able to revive hakko ichiu ideology and promote neo-emperor worship. In doing so, they used hakko ichiu ideology as an effective instrument to avoid the constraints of the Peace Constitution that grew out of the peace treaty ratified after the end of World War II.

In recent times the need for educational research dedicated to engineering education has been recognised. This PhD project is a contribution to the development of engineering education scholarship and the growing body of engineering education research. In this project it was recognised that problem solving is a central activity to engineering. However, it was also recognised that the conditions for doing engineering are changing, especially in light of pressing issues of poverty and environmental sustainability that humanity currently faces, and as a consequence, engineering education needs to emphasise problem definition to a greater extent. One mechanism for achieving this, which has been adopted by some engineering educators in recent years, is through courses that explicitly relate engineering to social justice. However, creating this relationship requires critical interdisciplinary thinking that is alien to most engineering students. In this dissertation it is suggested that for engineering students, and more generally, engineers, looking at their practice and profession through a social justice lens might be seen as a threshold that needs to be crossed. By studying the variation present among students in three different courses at three different North American universities, the intention was to understand how students approach and internalise social justice as a perspective on engineering and/or develop their abilities to think critically. A conceptual model to frame the study was developed by combining elements of threshold concept theory and the educational research methodology, phenomenographic variation theory. All three of the courses studied operated on a similar basic pedagogical model, however, the courses were framed differently, with social justice in the foreground or in the background with the focus on, in one case, ethics and in the other, sustainability. All courses studied appeared to be successful in encouraging engineering students to engage in critical thinking and a similar general trend in the development of students’ conceptions of social justice was observed in each of the three courses. However, it does appear that if one is interested in developing an articulated understanding of social justice, with respect to engineering, that an explicit focus on social justice is preferable. / Thesis (Ph.D, Chemical Engineering) -- Queen's University, 2010-04-07 13:12:29.207

Diagnosis with a serious chronic illness is a powerful lived experience that touches all aspects of the individual’s life and which necessitates great adaptation across the lifespan. Ambiguity is a lived dimension of illness that is often expressed in illness stories, capturing the new state between health and illness which has also been described as a ‘liminal’ or in-between state of being (Little, Jordens, Paul, Montgomery & Philipson, 1998). Health care providers hold socially prescribed roles in which they are expected to be professionally competent and immune to personal illness. The lived experiences of health care providers who have been diagnosed with serious chronic illness were explored in this study to better attempt to describe the phenomenon. Six health care providers from various professional backgrounds participated in the research. A semi-structured interview guided the conversation between the researcher and the participant. The participants were encouraged to tell the story of what has happened to them and to reflect on the impact to their lives and practice. Participants were also asked to reflect on their perceived level of support and preparedness via their professional training, and to share any recommendations they might have for others going through this experience. The data gathered were found to be rich in both depth and detail. The data were analyzed using van Manen’s interpretive phenomenological method. Significant statements created formulated meanings or categories, which became organized around eight themes. The themes formed several clusters. The theme clusters were then developed into a recognizable pattern of sub-themes which helped to further 7 describe the essence of the experience of health care providers living with serious, chronic illness. The findings of the research were found to be consistent with the literature that describes the lived experience of seriously ill health care providers as liminal in essence. Based on the research findings recommendations for social work practice, administration and policy, educational training reform and future research were outlined.

Diagnosis with a serious chronic illness is a powerful lived experience that touches all aspects of the individual’s life and which necessitates great adaptation across the lifespan. Ambiguity is a lived dimension of illness that is often expressed in illness stories, capturing the new state between health and illness which has also been described as a ‘liminal’ or in-between state of being (Little, Jordens, Paul, Montgomery & Philipson, 1998). Health care providers hold socially prescribed roles in which they are expected to be professionally competent and immune to personal illness. The lived experiences of health care providers who have been diagnosed with serious chronic illness were explored in this study to better attempt to describe the phenomenon. Six health care providers from various professional backgrounds participated in the research. A semi-structured interview guided the conversation between the researcher and the participant. The participants were encouraged to tell the story of what has happened to them and to reflect on the impact to their lives and practice. Participants were also asked to reflect on their perceived level of support and preparedness via their professional training, and to share any recommendations they might have for others going through this experience. The data gathered were found to be rich in both depth and detail. The data were analyzed using van Manen’s interpretive phenomenological method. Significant statements created formulated meanings or categories, which became organized around eight themes. The themes formed several clusters. The theme clusters were then developed into a recognizable pattern of sub-themes which helped to further 7 describe the essence of the experience of health care providers living with serious, chronic illness. The findings of the research were found to be consistent with the literature that describes the lived experience of seriously ill health care providers as liminal in essence. Based on the research findings recommendations for social work practice, administration and policy, educational training reform and future research were outlined.

In my thesis, I aim to show that a focus on liminality in contemporary Scottish fictional texts illustrates underlying developments of relevant social phenomena with regard to class issues, gender and sexual identity. The anthropological concept of liminality looks at a situation of “being between”. The liminar faces a situation of having to renegotiate their values and perceptions in order to proceed. Liminality always involves the existence of limits which have to be transgressed and against which the individual negotiates a personal situation. I further hypothesise that the transgression of limits can be seen as an instrument to create order. I take an anthropological approach to my thesis. Arnold van Gennep’s early studies on rites of passage and Victor Turner’s study of liminality originate in the observation of tribe-internal, social structures of personal development. Van Gennep assumes a tripartite structure among which liminality is the middle stage, the phase in which the initiand has to perform tasks to re-enter and become part of the community. Turner isolates the middle stage and transfers this concept to western societies. This theory is taken up and developed further by several literary critics and anthropologists. While the transgression of limits is often regarded as a violation of those norms which regulate societies, the transgression of limits in a rite of passage and connected with liminality is a vital aspect and socially necessary. Several concepts are related to this theory, which will play a major role in my thesis: Turner’s permanent liminality, Mikhail Bakhtin’s carnivalesque as well as Foucault’s transgression. In the first chapter, I contrast two of Alasdair Gray’s novels, stating that the most powerful message of social and capitalist criticism is not just visible on the surface of the hyperbolic texts, but particularly prominent in liminal passages. The theories of Bakhtin and Turner plays the most important role in this chapter. In the second chapter, A. L. Kennedy’s novels are contrasted. In So I am Glad a difficult psycho-social issue is solved by a liminal trigger-figure, Paradise is an example of the destructive and restrictive effects of permanent liminality. In chapter three, I deal with the issue of passing and an individual redefinition of gender identity. The performativity of masculinity reveals ambiguous definitions of gender and morale. The Wasp Factory portrays a form of masculinity which has destructive effects on the individual and its environment. It is the tension in the liminal situation of a gender myth, a brutally performed masculinity and the character’s biological sex which expresses a harsh criticism of society’s definition of masculinity. In Trumpet, the binary model of gender is questioned. The text suggests a different definition of identity as fluid, passing between the two ‘extremes’, formulating the possibility of a state of being ‘something in-between’. It is the confrontation with this ‘otherness’ which provokes a wave of rejection and protest in the environment of the individual passing as a member of the ‘other sex’. In this case, it is not the obvious liminal individual, but his son who undergoes a process of change and thus a process of renegotiating his strict value system. The final chapter deals with liminal spaces and how these reflect and support the internal development which the protagonists undergo. The choice of Orkney as a mystical place and the fictional setting in a war game show that liminal spaces – both real and fictitious – trigger a personal development and reconnect present day life in Scotland with historical events which have had a shaping role for Scottish and European life.