The concept of home has been changing for more than a century. This change began with colonialism and the movement of people across the globe, often within a set power dynamic. Since people now move with greater frequency, the question of where home is and what home means is more relevant than ever before. Meticulously researched, Transformations of the Liminal Self addresses the formation of home and identity and the ways in which the latter depends on the former. Using the postcolonial Muslim characters in the literary works of British authors Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, Zadie Smith, Monica Ali, and Fadia Faqir, author Alaa Alghamdi shows how home and identity are profoundly impacted by the power dynamics of the colonial relationship, the individual immigrants experience, and the subjects multicultural setting. Drawing upon the theoretical work of Homi Bhabha, Rosemary Marangoly George, Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak, and Edward Said, the conception of home and the formation of hybrid identities is examined and connected to larger cultural manifestations of MuslimWestern relationships. More specifically, Alghamdi explores how these characters define their home. Bold and challenging, Alghamdis work offers a rigorous and well-articulated contribution to the ongoing academic conversation about identity and postcolonial literature.

This book explores how natural landscapes are linked to positive mental wellbeing. While natural landscapes have long been represented and portrayed as transformative, the link to mental wellbeing is an area that researchers are still aiming to comprehend. Accompanying five groups of people to rural Scotland, the author considers individual, external and group motivations for journeying from urban environments, examining in what ways these excursions are personally and socially transformative. Far more than traversing mere physical boundaries, this book illustrates the new challenges, experiences, territories and cultures provided by these excursions, firmly anchored in the Scottish countryside. In doing so, the author questions the extent to which people’s own narratives link to the perception that the outdoors are positively transformative – and what indeed does have the power to influence transformation. Grounded in extensive qualitative research, this contemplative and ethnographic book will be of interest and value to students and scholars of the outdoors and its connection to wellbeing.

This book emerges from within the everyday knowledge practices of International Relations (IR) scholarship and explores the potential of experimental writing as an alternative source of ‘knowledge’ and political imagination within the modern university and the contemporary structures of neoliberal government. It unlocks and foregrounds the power of writing as a site of resistance and a vehicle of transformation that is fundamentally grounded in reflexivity, self-crafting and an ethos of care. In an attempt to cultivate new sensibilities to habitual academic practice the project re-appropriates the skill of writing for envisioning and enacting what it might mean to be working in the discipline of IR and inhabiting the usual spaces and scenes of academic life differently. The practice of experimental writing that intuitively unfolds and develops in the book makes an important methodological intervention into conventional social scientific inquiry both regarding the politics of writing and knowledge production as well as the role and position of the researcher. The formal innovations of the book include the actualization and creative remaking of the Foucaultian genre of the ‘experience book,’ which seeks to challenge scholarly routine and offers new experiences and modes of perception as to what it might mean to ‘know’ and to be a ‘knowing subject’ in our times. The book will be of interest to researchers engaged in critical and creative research methods (particularly narrative writing, autobiography, storytelling, experimental and transformational research), Foucault studies and philosophy, as well as critical approaches to contemporary government and studies of resistance.

Has the Affective Turn itself turned sour? Two seemingly contradictory developments serve as starting points for this volume. First, technologies from affective computing to social robotics focus on the recognition and modulation of human affectivity. Affect gets measured, calculated, controlled. Second, we witness a deeply concerning rise in hate speech, cybermobbing, and incitement to violence via social media. Affect gets mobilized, fomented, unleashed. Politics has become affective to such an extent that we need to rethink our regimes of affect organization. Media and Affect Studies now have to prove that they can cope with the return of the affective real.

This book examines the transformation of the figure of the stranger in the literature of the modern age in terms of liminality. As a ‘spectral monster’ that has a paradoxical and liminal relationship to both the sacred and the secular, the figure of the modern stranger has played a role in both adapting and shaping a culturally determined understanding of the self and the other. With the advent of modernity, the stranger, the monster, and the spectre became interconnected. Haunting the edges of reason while also being absorbed into ‘normal’ society, all three, together with the cyborg, manifest the vulnerability of an age that is fearful of the return of the repressed. Yet these figures can also become re-appropriated as positive symbols, able to navigate between the dangerous and chaotic elements that threaten society while serving as precarious and ironic symbols of hope or sustainability. The book shows the explanatory potential of focusing on the resacralizing – in a paradoxical and liminal manner – of traditionally sacred concepts such as ‘messianic’ time and the ‘utopian,’ and the conflicts that emerged as a result of secularized modernity’s denial of its own hybridization. This approach to modern literature shows how the modern stranger, a figure that is both paradoxically immersed and removed from society, deals with the dangers of failing to be re-assimilated into mainstream society and is caught in a fixed or permanent state of liminality, a state that can ultimately lead to boredom, alienation, nihilism, and failure. These ‘monstrous’ aspects of liminality can also be rewarding in that traversing difficult and paradoxical avenues they confront both traditional and contemporary viewpoints, enabling new and fresh perspectives suspended between imagination and reality, past and future, nature and artificial. In many ways, the modern stranger as a figure of literature and the cultural imagination has become more complicated and challenging in the (post)modern contemporary age, both clashing with and encompassing people who go beyond simply the psychological or even spiritual inability to blend in and out of society. However, while the stranger may be altering once again the defining or essentializing the figure could result in the creation of other sets of binaries, and thereby dissolve the purpose and productiveness of both strangeness and liminality. The intention of “Monstrous Liminality” is to trace the liminal sphere located between the secular and sacred that has characterized modernity itself. This space has consequently altered the makeup of the stranger from something external, into a figure far more liminal, which is forced to traverse this uncanny space in an attempt to find new meanings for an age that is struggling to maintain any.

Religion has been responsible for both horrific acts against humanity and some of humanity's most sublime teachings and experiences. How is this possible? From a contemporary psychoanalytic perspective, this book seeks to answer that question in terms of the psychological dynamic of idealisation. At the heart of living religion is the idealisation of everyday objects. Such idealisations provide much of the transforming power of religious experience, which is one of the positive contributions of religion to the psychological life. However, idealisation can also lead to religious fanaticism which can be very destructive. Drawing on the work of various contemporary relational theorists within psychoanalysis, this book develops a psychoanalytically informed theory of the transforming and terror-producing effects of religious experience. It discusses the question of whether or not, if idealisation is the cause of many of the destructive acts done in the name of religion, there can be vital religion without idealisation. This is the first book to address the nature of religion and its capacity to sponsor both terrorism and transformation in terms of contemporary relational psychoanalytic theory. It will be invaluable to students and practitioners of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, psychology and religious studies, and to others interested in the role of religion in the lives of individuals and societies.

The study of literature and culture is marked by various distinct understandings of passages – both as phenomena and critical concepts. These include the anthropological notion of rites of passage, the shopping arcades (Passagen) theorized by Walter Benjamin, the Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade, present-day forms of migration and resettlement, and understandings of translation and adaptation. Whether structural, semiotic, spatial/geographic, temporal, existential, societal or institutional, passages refer to processes of (status) change. They enable entrances and exits, arrivals and departures, while they also foster moments of liminality and suspension. They connect and thereby engender difference. Passages is an exploration of passages as contexts and processes within which liminal experiences and encounters are situated. It aims to foster a concept-based, interdisciplinary dialogue on how to approach and theorize such a term. Based on the premise that concepts travel through times, contexts and discursive settings, a conceptual approach to passages provides the authors of this volume with the analytical tools to (re-)focus their research questions and create a meaningful exchange across disciplinary, national and linguistic boundaries. Contributions from senior scholars and early-career researchers whose work focuses on areas such as cultural memory, performativity, space, media, (cultural) translation, ecocriticism, gender and race utilize specific understandings of passages and liminality, reflecting on their value and limits for their research.