As every reader of Lucian knows, he always belongs to something without belonging to it wholly. His relationship to his own Greek identity is undoubtedly the most symbolic instance: although wholly mastering the Greek language, he emphasises his being a barbarian. Lucian’s foreignness is a typical mark of his protean authorial persona throughout his œuvre, producing a constant tension between an inside and an outside as Lucian emphasises his own paradoxical liminality. This chapter discusses six of his texts (True Histories, Scythian, The Hall, On Salaried Posts, Symposium, and Lexiphanes), suggesting that a movement towards the inside and then the outside marks Lucian’s textuality in disparate ways. Depending on the specific narrative context, this movement assumes different meanings (autobiographical, metaphorical, metapoetical, rhetorical) that are often combined with each other, but most importantly produces a fundamental tension between meaning itself and the absence of significance.

Chapter 7 discusses liminality from a pragmatic point of view. All interactionally complex rituals take the participants through a threshold to some degree, in that the rights and obligations and related conventions of pragmatic behaviour holding for rituals tend to differ from their counterparts in ‘ordinary’ life. Yet, it is relevant to study fully-fledged liminal rituals with a sense of irreversibility. For example, ritual public apologies are liminal in the fully-fledged sense because the person who realises such ritual apologies passes a threshold with no return. Liminal rituals come together with strong metapragmatic awareness: if the moral order and the related frame of the ritual are violated, both the participants and the observers tend to become alerted and engage in intensive metapragmatic reflections. Chapter 7 will present a case study focusing on the liminal rite of workplace dismissal. Such dismissals represent typical liminal rituals in the very sense of the word: they change the life of the recipient and as such they are very meaningful and irreversible. Because of this, perceived ‘errors’ in the realisation of this ritual tends to trigger particularly intensive metapragmatic reflections and evaluations.

This chapter argues that, in spite of inevitable differences, Mediterranean detectives are liminal characters who belong to minority cultures and often need to negotiate their sense of belonging with the hegemonic culture. All the identity variations present in Mediterranean crime fiction are symbolic of the complex network of cultures, identities and influences that characterise the Mediterranean area. The liminality of the detective speaks of a rich and diverse cultural and literary arena in which a national hegemonic culture is often – but unsuccessfully – politically superimposed. It also speaks of a desire to unsettle the populist rhetoric that sees ‘fortress Europe’ at the centre and northern African and eastern Mediterranean countries as periphery. Chapter 1 also highlights how Mediterranean detectives are ‘intellectual’ detectives who refer to Mediterranean history, culture and myths. This characteristic has a double function: on the one hand, it emphasises transculturality as a key feature of the Mediterranean basin; on the otherhand, it promotes a discourse on the dignity of crime fiction.

Because the birth of the Egyptian novel came so late in the Arabic literary tradition (1914) and coincided so closely with the country’s independence from the British, it is no surprise that questions of national identity and authenticity are an overlying preoccupation. What is perhaps surprising is the extent to which these questions are enacted in the arena of courtship and marriage. In the canon—as in the capital—liminal space remains prime real estate in the economy of desire. For those in Cairo who are unwilling or unable to marry at a conventional age, traditional values and familial structures, combined with a culture of surveillance and patriarchy, results in a thorny romantic landscape. All of this is exacerbated by neoliberal policies that stretch the preexistent wealth gap, as well as the increased privatization, militarization and monetization of public space. This chapter will explore possibilities for desire through liminal spaces in a select survey of (mostly) 20thcentury Cairene novels: Tawfiq Hakim’s 1933The Return of the Soul, Naguib Mahfouz’s 1947Midaq Alley, Latifa al-Zayyat’s 1960The Open Door, Enayat al-Zayyat’s 1963Love and Silence, Gamal al-Ghitani’s 1976The Zaafarani Files, Abdel Hakeem Qassem’s 1987An Attempt to Get Out, and Alaa al-Aswany’s 2002The Yacoubian Building.

This chapter discusses Rushdie’s work in the context of processes of migration, the crossing of borders, and the question of identity formation. These themes are central to Rushdie’s work, which reflects his own journeys. His novels have featured prominently national and transnational migrants. Indeed, Saleem Sinai’s journeys in Midnight’s Children traverse the entire subcontinent. Focusing specifically on Shalimar the Clown and The Ground Beneath Her Feet, and with reference to The Satanic Verses, Shame, and a selection of short stories and essays from Imaginary Homelands, this chapter explores how Rushdie has approached the question of migration, identity formation, and the position of being in diaspora. The representations of community, home, and belonging and of the diaspora condition emerge in his works through border crossings, liminal spaces, and the sensory and somatic disorientation of the migrant.

The common law takes a bounded approach to persons and objects: something is either a person (subject) or a thing (object), but not both. This conceptualisation of persons as bounded selves and objects as separate from persons represents an encumbrance that goes to the very heart of law. The person–thing binary is so fundamental that it both structures the law conceptually and dictates its practical applications. This chapter explores the consequences of this legacy in relation to ‘everyday cyborgs’ – that is, persons with attached and implanted medical devices. Drawing on Graeme Laurie’s work, it argues that recognising the inherent liminality of everyday cyborgs (and everyday cyborg technologies) allows us to look beyond law’s binaries more fully to account for the ‘spaces in-between’. The chapter finds that Laurie’s liminal analysis of law and his framework for processual regulation give us much needed analytical tools to begin to look beyond boundaries, beyond binaries and beyond bodies.

Taking a lead from Graeme Laurie’s willingness to ‘think outside the box’ – typified by his more recent work on ‘liminality’ – this chapter has as its thrust the idea that medical jurisprudence needs to speak to more than the leading cases and the nice doctrinal questions. It also needs to get the regulatory environment right for the upcoming technological developments – in genetics, robotics, additive manufacturing, nanotechnologies, artificial intelligence,, machine learning etc. – that promise to transform medical practice. Following this line of argument, medical lawyers should think outside the box of Law 1.0, where traditional legal principles, concepts and precedents are applied to new technologies and novel applications; engage with the regulatory challenges, including the challenges of regulatory connection and effectiveness but particularly that of regulatory legitimacy, that are the subject of Law 2.0 thinking; and join the embryonic Law 3.0 conversation, which contemplates not only smart technological solutions to regulatory problems but also humans being taken out of the loop (as both regulators and regulatees).

This chapter reflects on liminality, a guiding concept in the project that brought both authors to Edinburgh and has featured prominently in Graeme Laurie’s most recent work. It introduces the concept of liminality and discusses Laurie’s framing and use of the term before going on to illustrate how both the concept and Laurie’s approach to it have shaped and facilitated further research on the ethics and governance of reproduction. The chapter considers the wider implications of Laurie’s contributions to the field, drawing out some of the key themes of his work on liminality, namely the processual, the experiential and the ‘quality of in-between-ness’. It provides new perspectives by applying these themes to research on the ethics and regulation of surrogacy as well as artificial womb technology. The chapter argues for the relevance of liminality as an analytical framing device, to reveal important lessons for ethics and law beyond the realm of health research regulation. Finally, the opportunity is taken to reflect on Laurie’s guidance as a project leader and the ways in which the authors’ own liminal identities in the project laid the foundation for their future as researchers.

The Introduction begins with a vignette illustrating the productive tension between a festival’s stated goals and the cultural work performed by its constituent parts. It introduces the book's main problematic: the ways and degrees to which international theatre and multi-arts festivals stage, represent, exchange, market, and negotiate cultural difference, broadly understood to include ethnic, national, Indigenous, queer, disability, and other cultures. It proceeds to outline the book’s major definitional fields (festivals and interculturalism) and scholarly debates around the key characteristics of festivals (their liminality, transformational qualities, and cosmopolitan aspirations). It then outlines the contexts (festivalization, eventification, creative city theory, globalized neoliberalism) within which festivals operate, the scope, methods, and theoretical frames within which the book operates, and the chapter breakdown and festival taxonomy that gives the book its shape.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) medical devices are able to optimise their performance by learning from past experience. In healthcare, such devices are already applied within controlled settings in image analysis systems to detect conditions like diabetic retinopathy, for instance. In examining the regulatory governance of AI/ML medical devices in the United States, it is argued that the development and application of these devices as a technical and social concern whether in research or in clinical care must proceed in tandem with their identities in regulation. In the light of emerging regulatory principles and approaches put forward by the International Medical Device Regulators Forum, and endorsed by the US Food and Drug Administration, conventional thinking about clinical research and clinical practice as distinct and separate domains needs to be reconsidered. The high connectivity of AI/ML medical devices that are capable of adapting to their digital environment in order to optimise performance suggest that the research agenda persist beyond what may be currently limited to the pilot or feasibility stages of medical device trials. If continuous risk-monitoring is required to support the use of software as medical devices in a learning healthcare system, more robust and responsive regulatory mechanisms are needed, not less.

In this introduction, McMillan introduces key concepts and definition discussed throughout the book, including: liminality, ‘the embryo’, process, and ‘legal status’. The regulation of emerging technologies may be described as the governance of processes in persistent flux, and in some cases, it is the regulation of what we do not yet know or fully understand. Reconciling process with progress, therefore, has not been easy. Nonetheless, the regulation of the embryo in vitro, and all the practices that law currently allows are, in essence, regulating for processes of change. Considering that it has been over 30 years since the 1990 Act was passed in its original form, is it time to legally reconceive ‘the embryo’? In this book McMillan calls for, and considers, the basis for a more coherent and robust intellectual defence of the ways in which we justify the different manners in which law treats different types of embryos created purposively towards different ends. The main questions that this analysis seeks to answer are the following: Overall, does law reflect and embody processual regulation, if so, what does this look like? And if not, what form could it take if reform were thought to be desirable?

The analysis in this chapter emphasises that there can only ever be two places that law, in its present state, can lead embryos to: a woman’s womb, or its own destruction and disposal. Ultimately, this chapter has been developed with a view to answering: how might we use a liminal lens to bring lessons from ‘the gothic’, from conceptualisation to realisation? This chapter addresses the latter in four sections. First, it briefly takes stock of the analysis and ‘lessons’ highlighted by the book so far, before going on to synthesise this analysis, and in doing so, considering the ways in which law can lead embryos out of liminality. Second, it focuses on the roles of persons in embryonic processes in vitro; and Third, it draws out the contours of a context-based approach, including what the approach is not; Finally, it, discusses the potential effects of a context-based approach for the issues (i.e. the contours of the ‘legal gap’) discussed in Part One of this book. It suggests that a context-based approach has the potential to justify affording embryos in vitro different ‘statuses’ depending on the relationally guided and defined pathway on which it is, or onto which it is put.

This chapter introduces liminality, an anthropological concept, before going on to explain why human embryos may be described as liminal beings. As an entity in a state of constant and rapid change, embryos sit ‘betwixt and between’ the various realms of legal categorisation. As such, the core problem for law is two-fold: ‘the embryo’ has neither a fixed status, nor is it possible to ‘fix’ its status. Law, accordingly, struggles to capture and regulate what embryos are ontologically (as opposed to what the ‘embryo’ is descriptively). The challenge in capturing these ontologies is perhaps part of the problem; if, indeed, this is what law has sought to do. This chapter argues that an embrace of liminality - both as a state embryos are led into, and as a lens for analysing that state - fully reveals the multiplicity of contexts in which embryos are used and created. This chapter shows that a liminal perspective demonstrates that there are vital aspects of embryos - some of which the law itself creates - that the law might better recognise, namely its contextually variable and relational qualities

Taking inspiration from Edna Longley’s notion of the ‘cultural corridor’, this chapter emphasises Post-Agreement literature’s commitment to Northern Ireland as a place of interchange that enables and envisages various crossings. Rather than accepting the ‘post’ as a temporal marker that designates a distinct break with what came before, it contends that contemporary Northern writing raises awareness of what remains to be worked through and addressed. If critics have suggested that literature from Northern Ireland reflects its ongoing political state of liminal suspension, this chapter seeks to recover the recalcitrant dynamics of literary liminality as a crosscurrent to the homogenising and teleological thrust of the progress narratives underpinning both the Agreement and Brexit. This emphasis on the active energies suggested by the motif of crosscurrents allows a revision of the more passive concepts of the cultural corridor and suspension and foregrounds the potential of contemporary Northern Irish literature to establish new affiliations and reconciliatory discussions.