Browsing by Subject "liminality"

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Love and Liminality: Understanding College as a Liminal Phase in regards to Romantic Love and Courtship
(2019) Gomez, Paulina; Cons, Jason
Twelve students at the University of Texas at Austin have been interviewed in an attempt to understand romantic love and courtship on the college campus. Romantic love and courtship on UT campus are best understood through the conceptualization of college as a liminal period. Students are expressing liminality in their ambiguous and unstructured behaviors and perceptions of courtship, and their rendition of romantic love as irreconcilable on the college campus. Romantic love is thus conceptualized as the ‘structured result’ of ‘the activity which has no structure’ that is college courtship. It is through this activity with no structure that students learn and perpetuate their ideal romantic love that they will seek out after the liminal period, that ultimately structures them into marriage and family units.
Wages of Liminality: How an in-between status lowers the earned wages of women health workers
(The Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, 2020) Marwah, Vrinda
In this paper, I analyze the experiences of the world’s largest, all-women community health workforce through the lens of liminality. Originally used to describe transition from one state to the other, the concept of liminality in the study of work and organizations can frame workers’ experiences of being in-between established structures and roles in varying degrees, times, and/or places. India’s ASHAs, or Accredited Social Health Activists, are community women at the frontlines of the state’s health care provisioning. But the state does not categorize them as workers or employees. ASHAs are considered volunteers. Instead of salaries, they are paid task-based incentives. Based on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork, including 80 interviews, I find that ASHAs’ liminal occupational status as ‘paid volunteers’ produces conditions of chronic underpayment and control for them, further lowering their already low wages. This has implications for how we understand the gender wage gap. I argue we need to consider not just how much women are paid, but how the amount is structured, and how that places women workers in relation to others in the workplace. Moving beyond whether liminality is a negative or positive experience, future research should delineate the conditions under which liminality is negative or positive, and for whom.