Researching-Writing In the Liminal: Embracing My Humanity

• In Event: Shifting the Boundaries of Literacy: Writing, Identity, and Authenticity in Multiple Contexts

Abstract

Conducting research and writing it up are both liminal rituals. Liminality is an event that leads to transition. As initiands, researcher-writers “must stop, wait, go through a transitional period, enter, be incorporated” (van Gennep, 1960, p. 28). Initiands step out of the threshold, back into society altered (Lee, 2019).

For this study, I draw on Freire’s (1998) writing theories: “writing is not a mechanical act preceded by a greater, much more important act: the act of thinking in an organized manner about a specific object” (p. 1). Writing is meant to be experienced viscerally, the thinking on it, the thinking on the subject/object of knowledge constantly in flux. According to Freire, “while writing I continue to think and rethink what I had already thought before” (p. 2), which inevitably leads to “a greater creative capacity” (p. 2). I also look to the work on liminality as ritual by both van Gennep (1960) and Turner (1992), who describe liminality as rites of transition (p. 25) and the initiand as “not this or that, here or there, one thing or the other” (p. 49). In other words, the researcher-writer as much in flux as the work itself.

When I completed the initial draft of Strangers In Our Own Land: A Poetic Autoethnography (in-press) about growing up fearful that the Border Patrol would deport me, I thought I was done, in need of some editing and revision, otherwise, ready for submission for publication consideration. Then news broke: yet another tractor trailer found abandoned just outside of San Antonio, Texas, the trailer filled to capacity, 66 migrants, among them children and a pregnant woman, the majority of them already dead. Researching and writing should be a quest into the flux, and like Selzer (1976) says, “Such a quest is not without pain. Who can gaze on so much misery and feel no hurt?” (p. 16). At this point I understood all that I didn’t yet know about immigration, deportation, and the tragedy of human trafficking. I stepped back into my collection of poems, withdrawing from what I thought I knew, and opened myself “to discover something not yet known” (Turner, 1992, p. 52).

When the researcher-writer experiences the processes of researching and writing as liminal rituals they become self-reflective, empathetic, and they view the work (the subject, the self, the research, the writing, the product) as multidimensional and complemental.

When regarded as rituals, researching and writing invite the researcher-writer to consider the work and the self as in flux, perpetually under construction. Often, the work, the researcher, the subject, the entire undertaking can take on a one-dimensional character. Each part of a product. Absent is humanity. Viewed as a liminal venture, researching and writing allow for taking time to experience every aspect of the work, to scrutinize both it and the self in relation to it, to change our minds and hearts, to let the work and the processes alter us (Lee, 2019). We step out of the processes changed into possibility (Turner, 1992).

Author

• Rene Saldana, Texas Tech University