(Un)felt ferments: Limning liminal professional subjectivities with pragmatist–posthuman feminism and intimate scholarship

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to illuminate liminality as processual experiences and to disrupt (hetero)normative paradigms of organizational liminality identity work. I present an intimate inquiry of liminality from within lived liminal experience. My empirical focus is on personal liminal subjectivities as they unfold in specific, psychosocial time, and spaces—my situated, changing lives as a woman executive, mature doctoral candidate, and emergent academic. The posthuman calls for multi-directional, transdisciplinary openings, and experimental forms. In this paper I make four interweaving research contributions: (1) braiding philosophies, I conceptualize a pragmatist–posthuman organic theory of liminal subjectivity; (2) I illuminate my lived liminal experiences as affectual, conscious, and semi-conscious, where my identities are unbounded from self and recast as sociomaterial, entangled productions; (3) I innovate “methodologically” with an embrocation of Dewey’s experiential and esthetic philosophical methods, a flowing mixture of sensate scholarship and the adoption of radical–reflexivities; (4) I call for a community of inquiry into liminality as part of a quest to develop knowing democratically, in partnership with practitioners and all matter. My unfinished adventure is to perform scholarship useful to academics and practitioners, which can help make our practical lived experiences of liminality more bearable and fruitful.