LIMINALITY
My arrival at incorporating liminality into my framework for embedding ‘belonging’ and ‘mattering’ in meaningful, sustainable ways, came about through being told I was going to die within months. I have written more about this experience here.
Adding liminality gives us a language and a lens for understanding those in‑between spaces where there is a potential for transformation or indeed, devastation. Our work happens in thresholds; between crisis and stability, childhood and adulthood, exclusion and belonging. By naming these transitional states, it helps us slow down, attune and recognise that what looks like ‘stuckness’ is a necessary pause (although often forced) in a person’s re‑orientation.
Liminality legitimises uncertainty as part of the process rather than a failure of it, which is profoundly relieving when working in environments pressured to produce quick, linear outcomes.
A liminality lens helps us to understand our own experiences and to meet ourselves more deeply so that we can meet others in that sweet spot too.
LEARNING SETTINGS
Education is particularly interested in liminality; by definition, it recognises classrooms, new starts and opportunities for transformation. For example, this study, Liminal spaces constructed by primary schools in predominantly white working-class areas in England, argues that liminality offers a productive lens for analysing how schools engage with poverty, not as a static condition but as a dynamic process of becoming. The authors show that schools can act as thresholds of belonging and recognition, where individuals and communities renegotiate identity and agency.
Higher Education (HE), it has been argued, is not just transitional but also ‘liminal’. The findings in this study highlight that HE operates as a rite of passage, where learners renegotiate who they are and who they might become. Using the lens of liminality, suggests that education is not just credential acquisition but a process of becoming, where belonging and self‑recognition are continually re‑negotiated. Many researchers argue that teaching and learning are inherently transformative processes and that liminality helps explain why students often feel disoriented before they experience a conceptual breakthrough.
Research on professional learning shows that academics entering teacher‑education programmes experience liminality as they shift from disciplinary expert to educator. This transition disrupts established identities and creates a sense of discomfort, but the liminal space becomes a fertile environment for belonging and identity reconstruction.
LIMINALITY IN CARE
Children in care, those coming out of care and care experienced adults
The first place to guide you towards is my children’s book about grief and loss. Children in care experience endless losses and sometimes bereavement. Loss is an emotion occupied within the liminal space and it could be argued that being in care itself is liminal!
The Wave Project looks at the beach as a liminal space, a threshold between land and sea. This conversation talks about how the project has been therapeutic for the children, some of whom are in foster care.
Another study concludes that recognising liminality is crucial for designing more humane and effective support systems. It highlights that transitions from care are rarely linear; they involve cycles of progress, regression and re‑negotiation of identity. Interventions that acknowledge the emotional and social dimensions of liminality, such as flexible housing, relational continuity and gradual autonomy, are shown to foster belonging and resilience. It is argued that policy and practice should move away from outcome‑driven models toward approaches that honour the fluidity and uncertainty of becoming, positioning liminality as a space of potential rather than deficit.
LIMINALITY IN POETRY
The Power of Poetry
The arts of where you can find the most expressions of liminality, with even writer’s block itself understood and identified as that space between who you were before you wrote and who you are after. You can head over to Community Anthologies to find poetic explorations on liminality. Read Rebecca Poyner’s ‘liminality, place and poetry’ on the Blackbird Archive.
dVerse Poets explore liminality, stating that ‘a liminal space sharpens our space to the possible.’ Andy Sia invites us to think about liminality within poetry and The Stranger by Adrienne Rich is understood through the lens of liminality in the Feminist Poetry Movement.
Read Josie Wood’s poem ‘Liminal’, then venture over to Occupying Liminal Spaces; Minding the Gap in Haiku. There is no shortage of poetry that explores liminality.
LIMINALITY IN ART
Finding Ourselves in Art
Liminality and art intersect as spaces of transformation, inviting us to dwell in the dual aspect of uncertainty and possibility. In art, the liminal is the time between conception and completion, between the familiar and the unknown, where meaning is negotiated rather than fixed. Cover Street Arts show their work here while this article talks about the process.
Artists often use creative practice to explore transitions and ambiguities that resist closure. This makes art itself a liminal process; a way of holding tension, of making visible what is not yet fully formed. Art then is not only a product but a practice of becoming, where both artist and audience are invited into the in‑between, to encounter change as something generative rather than destabilising. Finally, take a look at this exhibition on finding yourself in the in-between.
LIMINALITY IN MUSIC
Resonance in Music
Liminality and music intertwine through rhythm, emotion and transformation. Music itself is a threshold experience. When we listen, perform or compose, we enter a space between silence and sound, self and other, structure and improvisation. This in‑between state invites vulnerability and openness, allowing both musician and listener to cross boundaries of identity, time and feeling. Listen to the sound of the music from the in between.
Think about it… In many traditions, music marks rites of passage; weddings, funerals, protests, celebrations, each moment a liminal crossing where collective emotion reshapes meaning.
Read this beautiful piece on music as a life-giving force and listen to Brian Eno’s ‘The Last to Know From Liminal.’ There is even a chapter titled Liminality in the Handbook of Music and Migration, describing lullabies as the sound of liminality.
The act of making or receiving music becomes a way of inhabiting transition, of holding tension and release and of discovering new forms of belonging through resonance.