The salience of liminal spaces of learning: assembling affects, bodies and objects at the museum

Abstract

In this article, I work toward producing understandings of learning as liminal and as located in a liminal space. Framed as learning through the in-between, I engage with the concept of liminality as a way of unravelling the complexity of the practice of learning at the museum. Deploying data from video-based case studies of 40 school students' engagements with learning over the course of a visit to Museum Victoria, Australia, and utilising an analytic of assemblage, I map the spatial dynamics of learning in action. From analyses undertaken, it is argued that liminal spaces of learning open up in museum education and have a special salience. They have the potential to jump start the learner out of a comfortable state of mind and into a state of productive uncertainty. They also serve as a location for potential critique. More broadly, these analyses direct attention to the centrality of material practice and agency to liminality and liminal learning.