Paul Stenner

The Open University (UK) · Department of Psychology

With Professor Peter Hegarty I Co-Direct the new Open Psychology Research Centre at the Open University, UK. For further details, including about our launch event in June / July 2021, please visithttps://www.open.ac.uk/centres/psychology/

To theorise liminality as a core concept within process thought and to illustrate the personal and societal relevance of experiences of liminality. This project, beginning in 2013, dates back to an Exploratory Workshop funded by the European Science Foundation entitled “Liminal hotspots: Conceptualising the dynamics of suspended transition”. The workshop was led by Paul Stenner, Monica Greco, and Johanna Motzkau, with Megan Clinch as the dedicated research associate. Twenty-four academics from a variety of disciplines gathered over a series of meetings to focus on a novel psychosocial subject matter: liminal hotspots. We initially defined a liminal hotspot as an occasion of sustained uncertainty, ambivalence, and tension in which people feel “caught suspended” in the limbo of an in-between phase of transition. They may be occasions of impasse in which an interruption of the everyday, taken for granted state of affairs becomes permanent and the people involved become stuck, as it were, in enduring liminality. This means that a liminal hotspot does not refer to an observable object: it is a happening, rather than a thing; an event, rather than an entity. It does not passively wait for us to describe it, rather it occurs as an emergent feature of the play of particular circumstances: circumstances in which the usual normative orders are for whatever reason suspended or disrupted. The task of the exploratory workshop was to sharpen and substantiate this concept through collective discussion of a variety of empirical cases familiar to participants. The concept of liminal hotspots has thus gone through a series of phases. First, influenced by Szakolczai’s bold development of the concept of liminality (see also Thomassen, 2014) it was initially coined by Paul Stenner in a series of arguments addressing the transformative dimensions of emotional events, through a theoretical linkage of the concept of liminality with that of affectivity (Stenner, 2011, 2015, 2016, in press). It was then collaboratively developed in relation to Johanna Motzkau’s genealogical work on the concept of suggestibility as a liminal resource in practices of psychology and law (e.g., 2009); Monica Greco’s work on the conceptual history of psychosomatic medicine and on the sociology of medically unexplained symptoms (e.g., 1998, 2001, 2012); and Megan Clinch’s (2010) work on the medical treatment of thyroid conditions. As a next phase, it was collectively elaborated in the workshop described above, and the current special issue presents a sample of the work that resulted.