“The beyond is not a new horizon, but a sense of the transition that takes place in the interstices” — Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (1994)

Bhabha’s reflection on “in-between” offers a powerful lens for understanding liminality not simply as a space of transition but as a condition in which meanings ferment, identities loosen, and new forms of knowledge emerge. Liminality is a condition of suspension — a threshold state in which something is no longer what it was, but not yet what it will become. Rather than presenting identity, meaning or reality as fixed, liminal narratives foreground uncertainty, transition and possibility. The liminal is where the boundaries of categories dissolve; where the self becomes permeable; where knowledge becomes speculative. 

In an age marked by ecological precarity, digital mediation, and political flux, the notion of the liminal acquires renewed significance. We move between the analog and the digital, the local and the planetary, the human and the posthuman. To inhabit these thresholds is to engage instability as a source of critique, creativity and resistance. Across disciplines, liminality names processes of transformation. In anthropology, Victor Turner (1969) describes liminality as the middle phase of a ritual — a moment when the subject becomes unmoored from social identity. In psychology, liminality corresponds to crisis, transition or the unstructured space of trauma and recovery. In science and technology studies, liminal bodies are those unsettled by medical classification: bodies that blur the categories of health/sickness, organic/artificial, human/machine. Digital cultures produce their own liminalities: online identities that are real yet anonymised, intimate yet mediated. Political spaces – borders, diasporic enclaves, refugee camps – operate as structural liminalities, where belonging and citizenship may not be mutually inclusive categories.

Literatureand art frequently inhabit thresholds of the kind described above. Genres merge into hybrid forms such as memoir-theory, speculative realism, autofiction, and documentary poetry. Characters exist in states of emotional or existential limbo: displaced peoples in settler colonial states, queer subjects navigating unarticulated identities, narrators suspended between memory and forgetting. Language itself is an arena where the liminal becomes manifest and where meaning may be deferred. Poststructuralist theory argues that texts are not sites of resolution but of perpetual becoming — authored not by individuals but by shifting networks of discourse. As both condition and method, liminality invites new ways of reading, thinking, and creating. It asks how transitional states shape aesthetic form, ethical encounter and epistemological openness. What does it mean to inhabit instability as a mode of critique? How might the threshold itself become a generative site for theory, art and politics?

The Department of English, Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence invites abstracts for individual fifteen-minute presentations that examine liminality across the disciplines of the Humanities and Social Sciences. Graduate scholars and early career researchers from all over India are encouraged to apply. A limited number of outstation participants will be provided accommodation on campus during the conference. They will also be reimbursed for 3AC train travel to and from New Delhi.

Possible themes may include, but are not limited to : 

1. Liminality of Forms: Hybrid and Experimental Texts

2. Physical Liminalities: Disability and Illness

3. Ecological Liminalities: Human/Nonhuman Boundaries and the Environment

4. Digital Liminalities: Avatars, Virtual Selves, and Mediated Embodiment

5. Liminal Selfhood: Autofiction and Life Writing

6. Spaces of Liminality: Places and Non-Places, Urban Margins, and Digital Geographies (cyberspace, metaverse, etc.)

7. Temporal Liminalities: Hauntology, Nostalgia, and Futurity

Submission Guidelines:

Please upload an abstract of  300 words and a bio-note of 50 words (in PDF or Word format) along with other details on this google form: Abstract for Liminality 

IMPORTANT DATES

Abstract deadline: December 12, 2025

Notification of acceptances: December 26, 2025

Conference dates: February 6-7, 2026