In my last post, I mentioned the concept of ‘liminality’ as part of threshold crossing in doctoral study. In this post, I want to focus on this more closely because this is a big part (in my experience) of what doctoral students struggle with as their study progresses from conceptualisation to completion. Understanding what the liminal space is, why it is a necessary part of learning and growth, and how to manage some of the discomfort can hopefully alleviate some of the ‘suffering’ many doctoral students experience, and can help them reframe this in more positive ways.

The idea of threshold crossing – grasping ‘threshold concepts’ – as part of education and learning was first conceptualised by Jan Meyer and Ray Land in a pair of papers published in the early 2000s (see here and here). They define a threshold concept as ‘akin to a portal, opening up a new and previously inaccessible way of thinking about something. It represents a transformed way of understanding, or interpreting, or viewing something without which the learner cannot progress’ (2003: 1, emphasis added). They argue in the 2003 paper that a threshold concept has five characteristics: it is transformative (it changes you/how you see the world); it is integrative (it draws together prior and new knowledge to create new understanding or an ‘aha’ moment); it is usually irreversible (once the concept has become clear or clicked, you cannot un-know or un-see what you now know and see); it is often bounded (for example, grasping a threshold concept in one part of your study doesn’t mean that you don’t have to cross further thresholds); and it is potentially troublesome (grasping threshold concepts can be difficult, take time, and involve some iterative thinking and working).

Margaret Kiley and Gina Wisker applied this idea to their work on threshold concepts in doctoral study and progression through a PhD project, postulating (through analysing interview conversations with experienced supervisors) that candidates have to grasp six threshold concepts – cross through six portals, if you like – in their research journey: Argument; Theorising; Framework; Knowledge creation; Analysis and interpretation; and Research paradigm. If you are doing a doctorate or supervising one, you probably recognise some or all of these. In my own study, these were all challenging, perhaps none more than getting to grips with my theoretical framework in the first instance, and then making it work in the analysis and interpretation of my data. I also found – and find with the candidates I am supervising – that the learning involved in grasping and crossing these thresholds is not linear; it is iterative and is both head work and heart work, meaning it’s not just intellectual, but also required me to have faith in myself, talk myself out of some deep holes of self-doubt, and trust that my supervisor meant it when she said I was on the right track.

This iterativity, and the troublesome nature of threshold concepts, brings us to liminality. Meyer and Land use Victor Turner’s work on liminality (he was a cultural anthropologist); basically, Turner posited the idea of the liminal as ‘ambiguous’ and ‘betwixt and between’ – neither here (where the meaning of the theoretical tools I have chosen my study feels jumbled and abstract) or there (where the pieces fit together and I can explain why this theory for this project and how I can use it). This ambiguity – the betwixtness – is what causes some of the ‘suffering’ – the self-doubt, the anxiety, the worry – that doctoral researchers experience. We are trained in our formal schooling, from an early age, to ‘know’ – What’s the answer? Who knows what this is? How do you know that? – which makes not-knowing a bit (or a lot) scary, especially if you are also struggling with feelings of ‘imposterism’ and worrying that you are not (yet) good enough or clever enough to be doing a PhD in the first place.

The thing about the liminal space – the space before the portal is reached and crossed – is that it cannot be avoided. It is part of grasping threshold concepts, part of learning and growing through that learning, part of making a novel contribution to knowledge – an undertaking that means we have to push ourselves beyond what we can do now, what we know now, how we see the world and think, read and write now. And the thing about threshold concepts, because they are so transformative, integrative and troublesome, is that they are not quickly and easily grasped – making sense of them, making them part of the way we think, act, read, write, and so on, takes time, effort, struggle, patience. We may need, then, to sit in an ambiguous, liminal space between not-knowing and knowing for some time. We need, as a former therapist so eloquently put it to me, to ‘hold the ambivalence’ as we work the problem, rather than rushing to the easiest resolution to avoid the discomfort.

As a researcher, I am mostly okay with this, because I’ve done it before and it’s worked out relatively well. I do get frustrated sometimes by how long it takes for the lightbulb to go on, but I do know that if I hang in there and keep doing the reading, thinking, and writing work, it will (and if it doesn’t, I can revise my process). As a supervisor, I find this more challenging, because none of my students have completed a PhD yet, and they don’t fully trust the process yet. When your focus is on getting a doctorate, and you have to finish within a specific time frame, and your progress is being measured and monitored, it can be hard to ‘hold the ambivalence’ and lean into the liminality. The pressure to ‘get through’ can feel really heavy, for candidates and supervisors alike. For supervisors, there is the temptation to provide answers, to resolve the crisis, to get things moving, and it can be hard to resist this when you see a student struggling or it’s taking a long time to ‘get’ the threshold concept. But stepping in too soon or too heavily can undermine the necessary and important learning and becoming work that we do as researchers in the liminal space. And that can undermine the transformative power of crossing the threshold to deeper and more integrated understanding and insight.

One of the things I have found useful in my own becoming-researcher journey is reminding myself that discomfort is part of coming-to-know something I don’t know, so struggling with a threshold concept doesn’t mean I am stupid or incapable. It means, rather, that I am working through something that is growing me – my ability to create knowledge in more sophisticated ways, my resilience as a researcher. I am building on my existing ability to know, do and be, and that work takes time and effort. It’s also helpful to remember that all researchers experience this throughout their career – as we take on new research and learn new theory, new methods, engage in new collaborations, we will be challenged and some ambiguity and ‘betwixtness’ awaits us. Talking about this with other researchers, and with our students, and ‘normalising the struggle’ as Julie Posselt might say, is an important part of creating learning environments that are more inclusive, more supportive, and that better facilitate researchers’ ability to rise to the challenges and work through them as they create and navigate their own research(er) journeys.