This paper examines activist subtitling practices in light of the two sociological concepts of narrativity and liminality. With particular focus on online contemporary activist communities that ...counter extremism, subtitling is studied as part of the cultural liminoid practices that produce and disseminate alternative narratives challenging the rigid frames of global jihadism. Launched as reactions to the repercussions of the Arab Spring and the establishment of the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, ضايعة الطاسة Daya alTaseh and ذا بيج دادي شوو The Bigh daddy Show are two activist online media initiatives that spread counter-jihadist narratives in Arabic subtitled in English. The study attempts to investigate the narratives mediated in the subtitles and their reflections of liminality. The subtitling in both initiatives is scrutinised and compared using a two-fold theoretical framework combining the socio-narrative theory in translation studies and theories on activist translation. Guided by this framework, the paper applies a descriptive qualitative analysis to data collected from observations and interviews. The data analysis reveals the distinct liminoid stories of Daya alTasehand The Bigh daddy Show as narrated in the English subtitles, pinpointing the similarities and differences between them. User interaction with both initiatives is also highlighted as a contributor to the development of the subtitling process.
Summary
Gangs are commonly presented in research as an attractive alternative for those who feel excluded and unrecognized in “ordinary” society. Gang life is volatile, however, and violence (open or ...suppressed) is more or less omnipresent. Exiting a gang seems to be motivated by both thoughts of a better life and disappointment in the gang's failure to meet hopes and expectations.
Findings
From an analysis of former gang members exit processes, this article investigates what about gang life was stressful and motivated participants dropout, how they coped with tensions, and elaborates how social work could use this tension productively to support people exiting gangs. The data consist primary of interviews with 20 former gang members and 42 professionals. Organizational theory was used in combination with theories on liminality and identity reformation to understand how tensions occurred in gang life, how they were managed, and what caused exit.
Applications
Social workers may help members exit from gangs by supporting and strengthening their motivations to leave, stimulating their self-reflection, and reminding them of their past transformative. Most important, gang members should be helped to recognize the positive urges that drew them towards gangs and refocus those wishes for community to general society.
This article examines the effects of the outbreak of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine in February 2022 on the reconstruction of the notion of ‘Eastern Europe’ in Slovak political discourse and ...the subsequent re-definition of Slovakia’s political subjectivity vis-à-vis the contested notion of the ‘East’. It aims to advance the application of ontological liminality concept in international relations integrating it with post-structuralist and post-colonial insights on identity formation. I seek to shed light on how Slovakia negotiates its liminal position of being ‘the East of the Western Europe’ under the new geopolitical and discursive realities. Drawing on the concept of ontological liminality and post-colonial notion of master, my principal argument suggests that Slovakia aspired to demonstrate its capability to define the normative meaning of EUrope as one of its ‘core’ members positioning itself as a superior European state, a ‘master’ in relation to Ukraine. Although, on Slovakia’s mental map, the notion of ‘East’ assumes a far-away position it escaped long time ago, at the same time ‘East’ with the tinge of orientalism has been constructed as an indispensable subject position that the future newcomers to EUrope carry when they are pursuing their transition to the West. Based on hierarchically underpinned discursive self-positioning of Slovakia, ‘East’ is thus made a pre-liminal attribute which post-communist countries let go when beginning their transition to/through the Central Europe that ultimately emerges as an intermediary post-colonial spatial and discursive setting where liminals undergo the ritual of becoming genuinely EUropean.
Drawing from a participant‐observer study of volunteering in the context of UK music festivals, we examine how the sense of meaningfulness and community relate to instrumental goals of consumption ...and efficiency. We argue that the liminal nature of the festival setting supports an ambivalence in which meaningfulness is established through constructions of community, while the commodification of community feelings leads to heterogeneous understandings of the work setting. Our findings reveal heterogeneous ways in which work was rendered meaningful by festival volunteers, ranging from (1) A commodity frame, characterizing work as drudgery seeking ‘fun’ through consumption (2) A ‘communitas’ frame, emphasizing a transcendental sense of collective immediacy and (3) A cynical frame, where communitas discourse is used instrumentally by both managers and workers. We discuss meaningful work as caught between creative community and ideological mystification, and how alternative workspaces vacillate between emancipatory principles of solidarity and neo‐normative forms of ideological control.
Abstract
This article draws on a study with Syrian refugee youth and their teachers to examine how young people, holding liminal social and legal statuses in Jordan, manage uncertainty. Through an ...analysis of students' experiences, this article describes the varying strategies that they developed to protect their sense of hope across time by maintaining ontological security, or an understanding of self. These findings suggested that refugee youth, unable to navigate uncertainty through their educational spaces, explored alternative ways to actively build hope and sustain a sense of control in their lives. They nurtured hope by constructing a continuous narrative of their experiences, exploring their skills and potential, and forming attachments to ideas of place and possibility. Buildings on these findings, this article argues for the importance of integrating practices within education which respond to refugee youths’ needs to maintain ontological security and hope in the face of uncertainty.
Our article conceptualizes the experiences of women entrepreneurs through exploring how they negotiate an entrepreneurial identity in liminal digital spaces. Providing empirically textured narrative ...portraits of women’s experience of transitioning from employment to a digital entrepreneurial career, this article counters the ascendant rhetoric celebrating the democratizing promise of digital technologies. We present a more critical analysis of the experience of self-doubt and existential precarity including the ways in which gender norms permeate the intimate structures of women entrepreneurs’ everyday lives and selves. We also develop the concept of liminality by illustrating how women digital entrepreneurs cope with liminality through identity play and identity work.
The Gothic is a hybrid mode with the ability to merge with other media forms, and, predictably, it has been adapted into video games. Gothic themes, motifs, tropes, characters, and settings are often ...appropriated, transformed, and assimilated to in-game narratives and mechanics. Indeed, looking back at the history of video games, game designers have been frequently drawing on the Gothic by representing labyrinthine spaces, ghostly enemies, and uncanny objects (Kirkland, “Gothic” 109). In Lost in Random (Zoink AB, 2021), the Gothic is prominent in its narrative, atmosphere, and aesthetics. The game features decaying, haunted, liminal settings and bodies that offer possibilities to transgress and subvert boundaries and unveil a hidden past that refuses to fade away. This article examines the intersections between Lost in Random and the Gothic tradition. Focusing on the themes of transgression, subversion, liminality, past, and duality, it observes, on the one hand, how these themes are present in a cultural work that falls into the strand of ‘happy Gothic,’ as introduced by Spooner, and, on the other, how the Gothic works in Lost in Random
The “salt” of life Hervouet‐Zeiber, Grégoire
American ethnologist,
02/2023, Volume:
50, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Abstract
In 2015, during the cease‐fire in Ukraine, Misha, a Cossack, a veteran of Afghanistan and Chechnya, and a “volunteer” in the ongoing war, waited impatiently to be called back to the front, ...smoking in his truck parked across from his apartment in St. Petersburg. Misha's commitment to a life of combat is an invitation to think of war not as an interruption of ordinary life but as an ongoing, corroding presence in contemporary Russia. In turn, his truck's liminality, moving between home and front, pushes us to reconsider domesticity in its relationship to this ongoing presence of war. From the perspective of Russia, domesticity does not appear to be an obvious object of aspiration and a stable space of return “after war.” More poignantly, domesticity turns out to constitute the shifting ground of relationships at play when people negotiate ethical commitments and achieve a form of attachment to life—what Misha called the “taste” or the “salt” of life.
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