Seeking the ‘Just’ in Liminal Spaces: Rebordering Conception, Definition, and Praxis of Education in the Global South

Reflections from the BAICE 2024 Conference

Away from scholarly or abstract conceptions, we drew on a literal understanding of ‘liminal’ as something ‘on a boundary or threshold […]’^[2]. Liminality, for us, was the potent space where new ideas and frameworks emerge from the testing of entrenched perimeters. This was exemplified in the visceral struggle of our participants (belonging to different stakeholder groups) to redefine themselves against systems that aren’t built for them. In Nigeria, it was mothers of children with neurodevelopmental disorders; in Pakistan, it was headteachers reimagining leadership under strain. In South Africa, India, and within Tibetan refugee communities, our stories were about rethinking inclusion, crisis response, and the process of research itself.

The session was built around five provocations, presenting distinct yet interconnected perspectives on how education, in its many forms, is being re-bordered. For each of us, the subject matter and participants in our research represented a breaking of norms. Equally, we ourselves, guided by a common research mentor, wished to challenge through our work, conventions around the topics, processes and perspectives that comprise ‘legitimate’ research. By exploring the intersections of disability, gender, race, class, and refugee status, we collectively sought conceptual and methodological innovations for ‘just’ and transformative education systems. By ‘just’ we mean education systems that confront and dismantle culture, economic, social, and geographical barriers through inclusive policies and transformative practice, ensuring equitable opportunities for marginalised communities^[3].   The foci of the five provocations were the following:

1. Re-bordering Agency: Mothers transgressing boundaries to transform the education of their children with disabilities in Nigeria (Basirat Razaq-Shuaib)

In Nigeria, children with disabilities, particularly children with neurodevelopmental disorders (NDD) remain sidelined despite progressive legislation meant to safeguard their educational inclusion. This injustice places mothers in a constant state of crisis, having to continuously renegotiate the absence of support for their children’s education, resulting in truncated educational journeys and extra costs. Utilising an Afrocentric lens, the presentation explored how mothers carve out new pathways within fraught spaces, harnessing resilience and strategic resistance to transform their children’s learning experiences. Through the re-bordering of education and its purpose, these mothers re-engineered spaces where their children could flourish. Questioning the legitimacy of expert knowledge and transgressing prescribed sites of learning, this research flipped the narrative from what is broken to what is possible without excusing the government’s inaction. In doing so, it made a case for context-relevant policies that reflect the ingenuity already at work in the face of systemic neglect.

Provocations: Who defines what education should be like for children with disabilities? What do we do when the prescribed ways of educating children don’t appear fit for purpose and able to serve all? Whose knowledge counts in the how of education for children with disabilities?

2. Transgressing Expectations: Headteachers Redefining Headship in Karachi’s Low-Income Schools (Camilla Hadi Chaudhary)

Researching with headteachers of schools catering to low-income communities in Karachi, this piece interrogated what constitutes inclusive headship within resource- and time-constrained school environments. Examining headteachers’ reflections of their practices, the study found they actualised situated ‘transgressions’ in order to support their students and create pathways to their inclusion in environments that were fraught with financial and structural inequities. Headteachers’ commitment to supporting their students transgressed prescribed professional expectations, upturning commonly held perceptions about them lacking professional motivation. By bringing to light these practices we begin to re-border understandings of inclusive headship. Furthermore, by creating micro- spaces for change within their schools and in their students’ conditions, these headteachers introduced liminality into contexts where extreme inadequacy of resources had created semi-permanent states of crises.

Provocation: How can transgressions become process for ‘just’ goals? What is the role of policy and training?

3. Transgressive Spaces of Inclusion: Reimagining a Pedagogy of Play for Autistic Children in South Africa (Stephanie Nowack)

The South African education reform underscores the importance of inclusion and play in fostering learners’ holistic development. However, most autistic children are educated in special schools, where play policies overlook geo-political and neurodivergent dimensions. Building on the experiences of predominantly Black participants, this research illuminates the intersectionality of autism and race, historically overlooked. The research delves into transgressive spaces of education by exploring educators’ experiences with a pedagogy of play (PoP) in South African autism schools. Through immersive exploration in pre-school classrooms, findings indicate that educators in these settings emphasised exploration, enjoyment, and empowerment, underpinned by trust and structures, which form the core of a PoP. The research highlights the importance of harnessing learnings from these liminal spaces.

Provocations: How can we harness what can be learnt from transgressive special schools? Why are they rendered invisible if this is where the education of autistic children in South Africa is taking place?

4. Leveraging Crisis: Pandemic Responses in India’s Under-Resourced Schools (Nikita Jha)

The COVID-19 pandemic drastically affected schools across India, particularly those operating with minimal resources. This presentation examined the experiences of an educational NGO in Punjab, where schools found ways to innovate and adapt in the face of crisis. Without governmental support, these schools found avenues to balance education provision, community engagement, and compliance with regulations. The research shed light on how roles, spaces and processes were recast by schools during the pandemic, transgressing traditional notions of schooling. This adaptability and resilience offer important lessons on how non-mainstream schools can effectively navigate crises, emphasising the need to centre these experiences in future educational responses to emergencies.

Provocation: What can we learn from the crisis experience of such ‘invisible’ schools? What ‘legitimate’ learning role do these schools occupy within the education ecosystem?

5. Improvisation as transgression: Reflections from an ethnographic study with Tibetan refugees-in-exile (Surya Pratap Deka)

The final presentation explored the potential of improvised fieldwork practices in research, using fieldnote writing as an example. It highlighted how an ethical dilemma in the field left the ethnographer at a loss for words, and how this disorientation was captured on paper through a doodle. Workshopping the doodle highlighted the improvisational nature of fieldnote writing and its epistemic value in inscribing and articulating untranslatable field experiences. These multi-modal improvisations challenge the conventional methodological view of writing as a passive transcription of experience. Building on this example, the presentation argued that improvisations are not exceptions but a feature of deep-immersive fieldwork—and of social life more broadly. In fact, improvisation in the face of uncertainty is a defining reality for the Tibetan refugee community-in-exile as they navigate the liminal experience of statelessness in their daily lives. Taking improvisation seriously in our research can redefine the methods-practice boundary, expanding the conversation from how methods shape practice to how, in turn, field practices can transform methodological thinking. In this particular case, it also serves to honour the lives of the people we study.

Provocations: How have you navigated fieldwork contingencies and uncertainties? What new insights have arisen from these experiences? How do your fieldwork improvisations challenge the methodological status quo and contribute to a more context-sensitive and just research agenda?

Concluding reflections

By challenging geographical, methodological, and pedagogical boundaries in education, this symposium sought to probe what constitutes just research, especially when held against taken-for-granted, Northern frames of reference for educational best practices. We each examined and made visible the transgressions that materialise in the interactions between subject and context, individual and structure, policy and practice, and between institutional structure and field reality.

We believe that illuminating the liminality, the capturing of transgressions doesn’t happen by chance, but needs to be a conscious part of the research design. Data on its own is not valid or accurate- it is also the lens that we, as researchers. bring to it- the questions we choose to ask, the methods we employ, and the research processes we participate in. In each of our contexts, we entered the field, not to simply reproduce deficit discourses of education, which abound in the field of education and international development, but rather to also seek out the transgressions, which make systems function despite the many challenges. The BAICE conference theme provided us with a way of rethinking how these transgressions are essential for transformation, but remain overlooked within competing agendas of international funding bodies, simplistic notions of ‘what works’, and so on. Educational transformation needs more acts of transgressions to be identified and supported, and not silenced.

Finally, as a research group, we are bound by a conviction that ecosystems of knowledge production and practices (both research and otherwise) do not have firm answers, but invite conversations that beckon further inquiry, challenging us to confront the hidden hierarchies and biases embedded within the very frameworks we rely on, given that all of us operate in an institution which is deeply anchored in (and promotes) Northern knowledge structures. We seek not only answers to these challenges, but a reimagining of the questions themselves—a call to unsettle the boundaries of what we deem possible, and in doing so, to cultivate a more expansive, inclusive vision of justice. In our manner of doing so, as a collective research group, we also aim to transgress and reimagine what it means to be a doctoral student and supervisor in a higher education setting.

About the Team

The six participating scholars are based at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, and are members of the Cambridge Network for Disability and Education Research (CaNDER). Dr Basirat Razaq-Shuaib is an advocate for parental wellbeing and disability inclusion in Nigeria, author of three children’s books, and founder of The Blooming Mum as well as the Winford Centre for Women and Children. Dr Camilla Hadi Chaudhary is co-convenor of the South Asian Approaches to Researching Education (SAARE) Network and the Climate and Sustainability Education Seminar (CASES) Series at the Faculty. Dr Stephanie Nowack is a South African psychologist focusing on early childhood education and development, and completed her doctorate at Cambridge as a LEGO Foundation and Cambridge Trust Scholar within the PEDAL and REAL Centres. Surya Pratap Deka is a current Gates Cambridge doctoral researcher at the Faculty. He is the Communications Officer at BAICE and the founder of Flourishing Minds Foundation, an education non-profit based in India. Nikita Jha is a Gates Cambridge doctoral researcher at the Faculty, and a mentor at Project EduAccess, a non-profit supporting access to higher education among marginalised communities in the global South. Dr Nidhi Singal is Professor of disability and inclusion at the Faculty, and Vice President of Hughes Hall College.

---

^[1] Transgression and transformation: (re)bordering education in times of conflict & crises

^[2] Oxford English Dictionary. (July 2023). Liminal, Adjective. OED. https://www.oed.com/dictionary/liminal_adj?tab=meaning_and_use#308505961

^[3] British Association for International and Comparative Education. (2024). Just learning: Teachers, curriculum, pedagogies and literacies. In Transgression and transformation: (Re)bordering education in times of conflict & crises (BAICE 2024 Conference).