Homemaking away from home: a semiotic cultural psychology perspective

How do migrants create a sense of home in the context of migration? What does it mean for a person to physically move away from one home and psychologically move toward another one somewhere else? How do migrants create a sense of continuity between the home that is no longer there and the home that is not yet here? This theoretical article is an invitation to address these questions from a semiotic cultural psychology perspective. The article emphasizes the importance of both geographical and semiotic movements in understanding the migration process. It shifts the focus away from tangible aspects of migration and toward the imagined and desired aspects of the process of homemaking. The concept of home is explored as a semiotic construction that guides human meaning-making processes, emphasizing its affective value and highlighting the dynamic dialectics of home and non-home. This alternative conceptualization offers new ways of understanding homemaking and being at home, beyond the commonly celebrated ideals of being settled or always being on the move. Finally, the article discusses the dynamic and developmental nature of migration, which can both threaten and open up opportunities for transformation and development, and suggests some general methodological principles that could guide research concerning the interplay between homemaking, migration, and culture.

Regulating liminality: Making sense of the vegetative state and defining the limits of end-of-life action

Persistently alive but unaware, vegetative state patients are stuck in the transition between life and death - that is, in a liminal hotspot. This condition raises complex ethical and legal dilemmas concerning end-of-life action. Drawing on social representations (SRs) and the liminality framework, our research investigated how the vegetative state was constructed within the Italian parliamentary debates discussing end-of-life bills (2009-2017). We aimed to understand (1) how political groups represented the vegetative state, (2) how they legitimised different end-of-life bills and (3) came to terms with the issue of liminal hotspots. By dialogically analysing three debates (No. of interventions = 98), we identified six themes and discursive aims allowing parliamentarians to differently represent the vegetative state and support different courses of action. In turn, we identified new features of the psycho-social processes generating SRs: the dialogical tensions between anchoring and de-anchoring. Results corroborated the idea that de-paradoxifying liminality relies on group sense-making and, thus, different political leanings differently addressed the liminality of the vegetative state. We also reveal a novel feature of dealing with liminal hotspots informing the psycho-social literature that applies when a decision needs to be taken, such as in the case of crafting a law: moving from the paradox.

A Theoretically Informed Critical Review of Research Applying the Concept of Liminality to Understand Experiences with Cancer: Implications for a New Oncological Agenda in Health Psychology

Liminality was described more than 20 years ago as a major category explaining how cancer is experienced. Since then, it has been widely used in the field of oncology research, particularly by those using qualitative methods to study patient experience. This body of work has great potential to illuminate the subjective dimensions of life and death with cancer. However, the review also reveals a tendency for sporadic and opportunistic applications of the concept of liminality. Rather than being developed in a systematic way, liminality theory is being recurrently 're-discovered' in relatively isolated studies, mostly within the realm of qualitative studies of 'patient experience'. This limits the capacity of this approach to influence oncological theory and practice. In providing a theoretically informed critical review of liminality literature in the field of oncology, this paper proposes ways of systematizing liminality research in line with a processual ontology. In so doing, it argues for a closer engagement with the source theory and data, and with more recent liminality theory, and it sketches the broad epistemological consequences and applications.

Environmental mastery and purpose of life during COVID-19-related lockdown: A study deepening the role of personal and community resilience

COVID-19 outbreak and the measures needed to contain its first wave of contagion produced broad changes in citizens' daily lives, routines, and social opportunities, putting their environmental mastery and purpose of life at risk. However, these measures produced different impacts across citizens and communities. Building on this, the present study addresses citizens' understanding of the rationale for COVID-19-related protective measures and their perception of their own and their community's resilience as protective dimensions to unravel the selective effect of nationwide lockdown orders. An online questionnaire was administered to Italian citizens during Italian nationwide lockdown. Two moderation models were performed using the Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) path analysis. The results show that the understanding of the rationale for lockdown only associated with citizens' purpose of life and that it represented a risk factor rather than a protective one. Furthermore, the interaction effects were significant only when community resilience was involved. That is, personal resilience did not show the expected moderation effect, while community resilience did. However, the latter varied between being either full or partial depending on the dependent variable. In light of the above, the theoretical and practical implications of these results will be discussed.

Cultures of Listening: Psychology, Resonance, Justice

Listening, as a general psychological capacity, is a key aspect of perception, communication and experience. However, listening researchers frequently characterize it as a neglected, misunderstood and ill-defined phenomenon. This is a significant problem because questions of listening pervade social inequalities and injustices, as this paper demonstrates in the context of UK child protection practices. Exploring concepts of listening within and beyond psychology, the paper illustrates how a lack of overall theorization can contribute to inequality and injustice within applied listening practices. To address this, the paper theorizes listening in the spirit of Whiteheadian process ontology, drawing on the work of Nancy and Bonnet. Based on this, it develops the concept of ‘Cultures of Listening’ (CoL), which provides a tool for the critical analysis of troubled listening practices, indicating how they can be challenged and transformed. Within CoL, listening is not a mere aspect of auditory perception or communication, but each instant of listening is considered as shaped by and expressing political, social and experiential circumstances, that is, cultures. The paper demonstrates the theoretical, critical and applied value of CoL by offering a detailed analysis of the role of listening within troubled UK child protection practices.

Enabling Spaces; Rethinking Materiality and the Invitational Character of Institutional Environments

This article explores how physical surroundings may be integrated as a supportive measure in social work efforts. Drawing on ecological psychology and the concept of liminality, the article presents a case study of Kofoed’s School (KS), a social institution in Copenhagen, Denmark. In recent years, KS has undergone a major renovation, opening up previously sheltered workshops to the public. By creating liminal spaces of possibility, where students can take up “both/and” positions allowing for a multitude of ways to participate, students are experiencing increased support and inclusion, which contributes to a growing feeling of citizenship and well-being. Drawing on participant observations and interviews with students, staff members, as well as customers at the school’s shops, we explore how the architectural layout may facilitate students’ flexible and fluid movements between more or less sheltered positions and further discuss how this flexibility may become supportive for their personal development and well-being. We propose to think of such spaces of possibility as enabling spaces, where inclusive architecture contributes to the creation of new possibilities for participation for people in marginalized life positions. This, we suggest, holds a great potential for social work efforts for people experiencing complex social vulnerability.

Reading men’s experiences of balancing work and family life through the lens of semiotic cultural approach to life-course transitions

Becoming a parent is one of the most important transitional experiences in adulthood that has significant implications for new parents’ mental and physical health and psychosocial development. A growing body of research examines how men transition to fatherhood and balance their work and family obligations in complex contemporary societies. However, this phenomenological evidence remains under-theorised from the life-course development perspective. In this paper, a semiotic cultural approach to life-course transitions is used to explore how a sample of educated and employed Australian men in heterosexual relationships experienced and made sense of their fatherhood and work and family conflicts. Thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with 20 fathers highlights how these fathers attempt to navigate between multiple, ambiguous and sometimes contradictory societal expectations about fatherhood, while also struggling to balance their desires to be a ‘good father’ with their wives and partners’ attempts to be a ‘good mother’, thus evidencing the weak cultural guidance of transition to fatherhood. The analysis shifts the focus away from developmental outcomes and moves towards understanding the semiotic processes through which development occurs in the complex intertwinement between person and their environment. The discussion of men’s dilemmas about fatherhood also underscores the future orientation of human development and highlights how persons are actively and intentionally involved in this movement towards an unpredictable but imagined future.

Embodying disabled liminality: A matter of mal/adjustment to dis/ableism

This article combines the line of work that links disability and liminality with feminist dis/ability studies to analyse how the 'disabled body-subject' is produced and subjectified during hospitalisation and post-hospitalisation. This analysis is based on six bodily itineraries conducted with three men and three women with a spinal cord injury (five with tetraplegia and one with paraplegia) acquired during their adolescence. First, we interpret hospitalisation as a phase of 'acute liminality' in which the disabled body-subject starts being produced as suspicious, expropriated and de/gendered. Secondly, we illustrate how discharge and the 'return' to the community entail the formation of several bodily assemblages that embody mal/adjustment. This leaves the subject in a state of 'sustained liminality' plagued with paradoxes and ambivalence. We argue that both liminalities lead disabled subjects to do an emotional work consisting of adjusting to situations of affective disablism while also opening up spaces of resistance regarding heterosexist and ableist mandates. We conclude by pointing out the potentialities of a two-way dialogue between medical sociology and dis/ability studies.

Sensemaking Processes during the First Months of COVID-19 Pandemic: Using Diaries to Deepen How Italian Youths Experienced Lockdown Measures

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought about disruptive changes in individuals' lives, breaking the established systems of meaning worldwide. Indeed, in the first months of the pandemic, with individuals being forced to stay at home for a prolonged time to contain the spread of the virus, the need to build new meanings to understand and face this crisis emerged. Building on this, the present study contributes to the understanding of how sensemaking processes were shaped in the face of COVID-19 collective trauma during the very first months of the pandemic. Hence, 36 Italian young adults aged between 21 and 25 submitted daily diary entries for two weeks (T1 was the third week of Italian National lockdown; T2 was the penultimate week before the ease of such stay-at-home orders), resulting in 504 texts. The stimulus was always "Could you describe your daily experience and feelings?". The Grounded Theory was used. Thus, 15 categories emerged, grouped into three macro-categories. The core category was sensemaking as adaptation. Indeed, the sensemaking process seemed to be a strategy to adapt to the new circumstances related to the lockdown, facing the emotional, cognitive, and activation reactions such conditions by relying on coping strategies and the redefinition of primary as well as broader social relationships.

Caring through distancing: Spatial boundaries and proximities in the cystic fibrosis clinic

This paper re-examines relations between proximity, distance and care, focusing on practices of 'distancing' in the cystic fibrosis (CF) clinic. While care is often thought of in terms of proximity, literature on 'landscapes of care' highlights the potential for 'care at a distance'. We extend this literature to examine practices of social distancing, specifically the act of maintaining a 'space between' bodies in communal areas - a practice currently brought to the fore by the COVID-19 pandemic. Using the CF clinic as a case study, we examine how distancing can be understood as an emplaced practice of care, shaped by - and shaping - architectures and materialities in particular contexts. We explore these issues drawing on data from Pathways, practices and architectures: containing antimicrobial resistance in the cystic fibrosis clinic, a UK AHRC funded study (AH/R002037/1) examining practices in three cystic fibrosis clinics using visual and ethnographic methods. Clinical staff practices of maintaining distancing were often regarded by patients as 'care-ful', part of personalised 'care in place', embroiling a wider care assemblage including ancillary staff, materialities and architectures. Patients also actively participate in distancing as an 'ethic of care', using strategies of 'holding back' and 'looking out' in confined spaces. Yet our findings also highlight tensions between care, proximity and distance in circulation spaces and communal areas, including transient spaces where the assemblage of care breaks down. The article concludes by considering wider implications for healthcare design and for the COVID-19 pandemic.

Saving a victim from himself: The rhetoric of the learner's presence and absence in the Milgram experiments

This paper contests what has remained a core assumption in social psychological and general understandings of the Milgram experiments. Analysing the learner/victim's rhetoric in experimental sessions across five conditions (N = 170), it demonstrates that what participants were exposed to was not the black-and-white scenario of being pushed towards continuation by the experimental authority and pulled towards discontinuation by the learner/victim. Instead, the traditionally posited explicit collision of 'forces' or 'identities' was at all points of the experiments undermined by an implicit collusion between them: rendering the learner/victim a divided and contradictory subject, and the experimental process a constantly shifting and paradoxical experiential-moral field. As a result, the paper concludes that evaluating the participants' conduct requires an understanding of the experiments where morality and non-destructive agency were not simple givens to be applied to a transparent case, but had to be re-created anew - in the face not just of their explicit denial by the experimenter but also of their implicit denial by the victim.

Problematizing 'productive citizenship' within rehabilitation services: insights from three studies

Background: The idea that everyone should strive to be a 'productive citizen' is a dominant societal discourse. However, critiques highlight that common definitions of productive citizenship focus on forms of participation and contribution that many people experiencing disability find difficult or impossible to realize, resulting in marginalization. Since rehabilitation services strive for enablement, social participation, and inclusiveness, it is important to question whether these things are achieved within the realities of practice. Our aim was to do this by examining specific examples of how 'productive citizenship' appears in rehabilitation services.Methods: This article draws examples from three research studies in two countries to highlight instances in which narrow understandings of productive citizenship employed in rehabilitation services can have unintended marginalizing effects. Each example is presented as a vignette.Discussion: The vignettes help us reflect on marginalization at the level of individual, community and society that arises from narrow interpretations of 'productive citizenship' in rehabilitation services. They also provide clues as to how productive citizenship could be envisaged differently. We argue that rehabilitation services, because of their influence at critical junctures in peoples' lives, could be an effective site of social change regarding how productive citizenship is understood in wider society.Implications for rehabilitation'Productive citizenship', or the interpretation of which activities count as contributions to society, has a very restrictive definition within rehabilitation services.This restrictive definition is reflected in both policy and practices, and influences what counts as 'legitimate' rehabilitation and support, marginalizing options for a 'good life' that fall outside of it.Rehabilitation can be a site for social change; one way forward involves advocating for broader understandings of what counts as 'productive citizenship'.

Psychological Functions of Semiotic Borders in Sense-Making: Liminality of Narrative Processes

In this paper we discuss the semiotic functions of the psychological borders that structure the flow of narrative processes. Each narration is always a contextual, situated and contingent process of sensemaking, made possible by the creation of borders, such as dynamic semiotic devices that are capable of connecting the past and the future, the inside and the outside, and the me with the non-me. Borders enable us to narratively construct one's own experiences using three inherent processes: contextualization, intersubjective positioning and setting of pertinence. The narrative process - as a subjective articulation of signs in a contingent social context - involves several functions of semiotic borders: separation, differentiation, distinction-making, connection, articulation and relation-enabling. The relevant psychological aspect highlighted here is that a border is a semiotic device which is required for both maintaining stability and inducing transformation at the same time. The peculiar dynamics and the semiotic structure of borders generate a liminal space, which is characterized by instability, by a blurred space-time distinction and by ambiguities in the semantic and syntactic processes of sensemaking. The psychological processes that occur in liminal space are strongly affectively loaded, yet it is exactly the setting and activation of liminality processes that lead to novelty and creativity and enable the creation of new narrative forms.

Motzkau J. Introduction to the Special Issue on Liminal Hotspots

This article introduces a special issue of Theory and Psychology on liminal hotspots. A liminal hotspot is an occasion during which people feel they are caught suspended in the circumstances of a transition that has become permanent. The liminal experiences of ambiguity and uncertainty that are typically at play in transitional circumstances acquire an enduring quality that can be described as a “hotspot”. Liminal hotspots are characterized by dynamics of paradox, paralysis, and polarization, but they also intensify the potential for pattern shift. The origins of the concept are described followed by an overview of the contributions to this special issue.

Affectivity and liminality in ritualized protest: Politics of transformation in the Kiev uprising

This article provides an anthropologically inspired analysis of the Maidan protest movement in Ukraine. We argue that the uprisings involved all essential features of liminality: a dramatic situation marked by volatility, ambivalence, and potentiality that led to the embryonic formation of a communitas. The article describes how protesters met and mobilized on Independence Square in ritualized action, and how these forms of action served to frame the meaningfulness of the events. Engaging this social drama as a “liminal hotspot,” we discuss how subjectivity and affectivity must be analysed jointly as part of the same political-ritual process.

Permanent (trickster) liminality: The reasons of the heart and of the mind

The term liminality is often used to celebrate escape from rigid structures or to promote creativity. However, the collapse of the stable frameworks of social life also generates anguishing conditions of uncertainty. This article introduces the term “permanent liminality” for situations in which the temporary suspension of normality becomes permanent. Such situations of entrapment within an interstitial dimension produce an emotional overheat, generating a “liminal hotspot.” This paper addresses the possibility of ending such entrapment. Reasoning cannot guide out of permanent liminality, as—in the absence of stability necessary to apprehend ratio, or harmonious proportionality—it is also liable to short-circuit, being closely associated under liminal conditions with imitativity. A solution is offered, through Pascal rather than Kant, by the heart. Such an idea also receives support from the Palaeolithic Age, maternal heartbeat in the womb, and long-distance walking pilgrimage.

Suspended transitions and affective orderings: From troubled monogamy to liminal polyamory

While monogamy is the norm for romantic and intimate relationships in contemporary western societies, having other sexual and affective interactions alongside a monogamous relationship is a common practice. Instead of a unilateral and/or covert non-monogamy, polyamory promises a consensual, ethical, and responsible non-monogamy. The personal transformation of normative cultural frameworks is fundamental to the experience of “becoming polyamorous.” This article explores such occasions using the notion of liminality in order to illustrate the phenomenon of “liminal hotspots.” Focusing on a specific and exemplary case describing the first stages of a polyamorous relationship, the paper explores the reordering of social formations involved. In this case, “becoming polyamorous” is expressed through a process of suspended transition where categories can be described as both/and monogamous/polyamorous and neither/nor monogamous/polyamorous.

Managing suspended transition in medicine and law: Liminal hotspots as resources for change

This article explores occasions when professionals in law enforcement and medicine find themselves trapped amidst the paradoxical demands of diagnostic/investigative practice. By juxtaposing research into the experiences of police officers charged with interviewing children who are the alleged victims of sexual abuse, and clinicians tasked with diagnosing and managing contested cases of thyroid disease, the paper develops an understanding of such practice paradoxes as occasions of stalled transition, or liminal hotspots. Drawing on a process theoretical understanding of liminality, the analysis explores the personal, experiential, and affective efficacy of the epistemological framework that both practices share. While liminal hotspots denote paradox stalemates, the paper argues that they are also responsible for recurrent instants of temporary affective unsettledness, and as such can provoke novel thinking and agency towards innovation in practice areas notoriously resistant to change and improvement. Systematizing this property could turn them into resources for change.

The emergence of motives in liminal hotspots

The concept of “motivation” commonly constructs as a psychological essence what is really the paradoxical imposition of a required desire. While the resulting impasse blocked theoretical development for around four decades, pragmatic motivational techniques evolved regardless. These could be (probably to no avail) dismissed for not taking account of the deep theoretical problems. This article suggests instead to rearticulate them with the conceptual repertoire of liminal hotspots, which directs attention to the emergent nature of activities and collectives, and thus motives. This is done as part of an ongoing collaboration with counselors who experiment with different ways of helping young drug users without taking motivation as premise, in the sense of a prerequisite, for interventions. Data from recorded counseling sessions are analyzed and rearticulated, first in terms of the classical motivation–resistance contradiction; then through pragmatic approaches in counseling, i.e., the prevalent cognitive-client-centered form and the “solution-focused brief therapy” approach—and finally as motives emergent in liminal hotspots.

Suspended liminality: Vacillating affects in cyberbullying/research

This article develops a concept of liminal hotspots in the context of (a) a secondary analysis of a cyberbullying case involving a group of school children from a Danish school and (b) an altered auto-ethnography in which the authors “entangle” their own experiences with the case analysis. These two sources are used to build an account of a liminal hotspot conceived as an occasion of troubled and suspended transformative transition in which a liminal phase is extended and remains unresolved. The altered auto-ethnography is used to explore the affectivity at play in liminal hotspots, and this liminal affectivity is characterized in terms of volatility, vacillation, suggestibility, and paradox.

Liminal transitions in a semiotic key: The mutual in-feeding between present and past

This article proposes a reading of liminal transitions in semiotic terms; that is, as a byproduct of the dynamics of sensemaking consisting of how two components of meaning interact: the observable side of meaning ( Significance in Praesentia)—the rupture directly experienced by the interpreter—and a further generalized meaning—the semiotic scenario ( Significance in Absentia), which makes the lived experience interpretable. Due to its pre-semantic and affective nature, in the liminal hotspot the semiotic scenario keeps a certain version of the self alive, regardless of the changes occurring in the real world. The conditions that favor such dynamics are briefly outlined as well as some implications for theory, methodology, and intervention.