Abstract

This paper explores new horizons in the study of liminality within the Threshold Concepts Framework by shifting the focus from retrospective accounts of transformation to close-up analyses of liminal dynamics. Although research on liminality has advanced considerably, its unfolding in real time remains elusive and under-explored. We argue that examining liminality in this way opens up new possibilities for research, enabling us to apprehend its processual, contextual, and emergent nature, and to better understand how students navigate uncertainty and conceptual re-coordination while learning. To advance this perspective, the paper highlights two complementary lenses. The first is microgenesis, which captures the fine-grained emergence of thought, perception, or meaning on extremely small temporal scales, making it possible to analyse learning as a series of micro-transformations that precede explicit knowledge. The second is the notion of semiotic frontiers, understood as the mental operations through which new meanings are generated in liminal space. These frontiers mark moments where continuity and discontinuity coexist, embodying the uncertainty and ambivalence that chaacterise liminal experience, while also revealing their creative potential. Taken together, these perspectives delineate a renewed research agenda for examining liminality not only through its outcomes, but also as a dynamic and situated process unfolding in real time.

Keywords: Liminality, microgenesis, preception

Introduction

Liminality has been a central construct within the Threshold Concepts Framework since its earliest formulations (Meyer & Land, 2003, 2005). The liminal space is conceptualised as a transformative in-between state in which students inhabit uncertainty, ambiguity, and oscillation between prior understandings and emerging conceptions (Cousin, 2006; Schwartzman, 2010; Land et al., 2014). The learning process that students undergo within this space typically involves epistemological ruptures, ontological obstacles, and affective tensions, which may ultimately lead to an irreversible transformation in how they understand the discipline, the world, and their own subjectivity (Baillie et al., 2013; Timmermans & Meyer, 2020; Rattray, 2016, 2024). Although our understanding of the liminal space has advanced significantly in recent years, its unfolding in real time remains elusive—echoing what Timmermans (2010) described as the “nebulous” element of the framework. Most studies to date have examined how liminality develops across broader learning trajectories, typically reconstructed retrospectively, yet we still lack close-up analyses of how liminal dynamics manifests within classrooms and other educational settings. While retrospective methods provide valuable insights into students’ reconstructed experiences, analysing liminality within interaction, in a naturalistic fashion and micro-temporal scale, allows us to apprehend its processual, contextual, and emergent nature. This shift toward real-time inquiry into liminality opens up new horizons for Threshold Concepts research. Illuminating liminal dynamics at the very moment they unfold sets out a renewed research agenda, accompanied by considerable methodological and epistemological challenges. Crucially, it enables us to strengthen our understanding of liminality not only through its consequences, but also in terms of its lived and experiential nature.

Deepening on liminality: its dynamic and situated nature

To fully appreciate the complexity of liminality, it is important to pay attention to its dynamic and situated nature. On the one hand, liminal learning is intrinsically non-linear and recursive (Land et al., 2014; Calduch, 2022), which implies that progress is rarely straightforward. Students navigate these processes through personal trajectories, generating significant inter-personal variation (Meyer et al., 2008; Rattray, 2016, 2024; Timmermans & Meyer, 2020). On the other hand, liminal learning is always situated, since every act of thought and action is adapted to its environment (Brighton & Todd, 2008; Clancey, 1999). This means that liminality cannot be understood in abstraction, but must be studied as embedded within particular practices, contexts, and interactions.

Attending to both dimensions requires moving beyond the usual molar approaches to its study and complementing them with fine-grained methods that allow for real-time inquiry. This entails focusing on micro-moments of high liminal intensity, of conceptual differentiation and change, in which transformation is actively unfolding.
However, focusing on real-time processes does not mean neglecting what comes before or after them. The notion of pre-liminal variation (Meyer et al., 2008), understood as the different prior conceptions and personal dispositions that students bring into a liminal encounter, helps us interpret what unfolds in the moment. As Schwartzman (2010) argued, the constructive destabilisation provoked by a threshold concept may result in more defensive or more reflective liminal dynamics, depending on such pre-liminal variation. Far from ignoring what precedes or follows, this perspective understands liminal dynamics as moment-to-moment manifestations of conceptual re-coordinations between an initial structure of meaning already incorporated and an emergent one (Clancey, 2011), maintaining a relation of pertinence and continuity with prior structures (Fossa, 2018), and mediated by the particular situations in which they unfold (Lave & Wenger, 1991).

Liminality and microgenesis

Building on this view of liminality as dynamic and situated, the notion of microgenesis offers a conceptual and methodological bridge for studying its unfolding in real time. Introduced by Heinz Werner (1956) to capture the genetic character of immediate experience, microgenesis highlights the fine-grained emergence of thought, perception, or meaning. Far from being discrete stages, these processes are characterised by progressive differentiation, in which vague and undifferentiated states give way to more articulated, integrated, and hierarchically organised structures (Werner & Kaplan, 1956). Rosenthal (2004) stresses that every act of thought is microgenetic in nature: what comes to consciousness as an articulated idea or judgement is the outcome of multiple recursive differentiations that precede it.
Microgenesis is characterised by unfolding on an extremely small temporal scale, which makes it possible to observe the emergence and organisation of mental or cognitive activity in real time. That is, how a thought, a perception, an action, or a representation arises and takes shape at the very moment it occurs (Parnafes & diSessa, 2013). The concept of microgenesis thus allows learning to be analysed as a series of micro-transformations that are not always visible in the final outcome, but are nonetheless key to understanding the process of knowledge construction.
The orthogenetic principle formulated by Werner and Kaplan (1956) resonates strongly with the Threshold Concepts Framework: development proceeds from a relative lack of differentiation toward increasing differentiation, articulation, and hierarchical integration. Observing students’ discourse and actions in situ makes it possible to capture the unfolding of these transformations before they stabilise into explicit knowledge. Drawing on the learning microanalysis method (Parnafes & diSessa, 2013), researchers can study liminality in real time, attending to liminal dynamics as they unfold rather than only reconstructing them retrospectively. This approach allows us to apprehend their dynamic and situated nature, moment by moment, as threshold concepts are negotiated within the liminal space.

Advancing liminality: semiotic frontiers

In the microgenesis of learning, the primary act of differentiation—the turning point where conceptual novelty emerges—can be understood as the production of what has been termed semiotic frontiers. It is within these mental operations that new meanings are generated, meanings which are essential for the process of learning within liminal space.
The idea that the first operation of psychic life consists in segmenting, differentiating, and stabilising a continuous flow of thought into discrete units is not new. William James (1890) already suggested that consciousness arises from such processes of distinction. Herbst (1976) later argued that the genesis of logic and conduct lies in the operation of producing a distinction within an undifferentiated stream of events. Similarly, Bateson (1972) described every mental process as being triggered by the production of a difference, understood as a transformed and elaborated version of the difference that preceded it. Greimas (1983), from a narratological perspective, showed how the fundamental structure of meaning is rooted in this primary act of conceptual differentiation. In semiotic terms, differentiation emerges with the appearance of a sign—a discretised form arising from an otherwise undifferentiated continuum. Crucially, this act of distinction does not create isolated ideas, but rather generates a relational system: drawing a distinction produces a boundary that simultaneously divides and connects two notions where previously there was only an undifferentiated whole (Tateo, 2018).
Lotman’s notion of the semiosphere further developed this idea, introducing the concept of semiotic frontiers as the contact zones between different sign systems. Like territorial borders, semiotic frontiers not only separate but also enable exchange and transformation of meanings. They are thus active sites of sense-making rather than passive barriers (Lotman, 2005; De Luca & Freda, 2015).
From this perspective, liminal dynamics can be conceived as the production and crossing of semiotic frontiers by students navigating the liminal space. Each frontier embodies a paradox: it separates while unifying (Marsico & Tateo, 2017). This paradox echoes the very structure of liminal space, which is marked by instability, turbulence, and affective intensity. On the one hand, crossing a semiotic frontier may generate anxiety, blockage, or regression, leaving students stuck. On the other hand, such frontiers also harbour creative potential, since destabilising established structures enables new meanings to emerge (De Luca & Valsiner, 2017).
Semiotic frontiers are thus constitutively temporal and dynamic. They are not fixed segmentations of a conceptual field but dialectical processes of stabilisation and transformation across time (De Luca & Freda, 2016; Sato & Valsiner, 2010). The emergence of new meanings can occur suddenly, as in a gestalt insight, or more gradually, through extended processes of differentiation. In either case, semiotic frontiers mark the moment when continuity and discontinuity coexist, when stability and change are simultaneously at play. Within this frontier space, students reorganise and negotiate the meaning of threshold concepts, revealing that uncertainty and ambivalence are not obstacles to learning but necessary conditions for the emergence of new understandings.

Conclusions

This paper has argued that advancing research on liminality requires moving beyond retrospective accounts of transformation toward close-up analyses of liminal learning as it unfolds in real time. While the Threshold Concepts Framework has traditionally illuminated the long-term consequences of threshold crossings, its explanatory potential is considerably deepened when liminal dynamics are examined as lived, situated, and emergent processes. Recognising liminality as both dynamic and situated helps to overcome static and abstract views of the liminal space. By attending to its non-linear, recursive, and contextually embedded character, we gain a more fine-grained understanding of how students navigate uncertainty, oscillation, and conceptual re-coordination. This shift invites the adoption of methodological approaches capable of capturing micro-moments of high liminal intensity within authentic educational practices.

In this regard, the notion of microgenesis provides a valuable conceptual bridge. It enables us to observe the genetic unfolding of thought and meaning on extremely small temporal scales, foregrounding the recursive differentiations through which vague understandings become progressively articulated. Studying liminality through a microgenetic lens makes it possible to capture the orthogenetic principle at work before conceptual novelty crystallises into explicit knowledge. Complementarily, the concept of semiotic frontiers offers a lens for analysing the mechanisms through which such novelty emerges. Liminal dynamics can be understood as the production and negotiation of boundaries that simultaneously divide and connect, stabilise and transform, constrain and enable. These paradoxical operations are not peripheral but constitutive of the liminal process: they reveal that uncertainty, ambivalence, and affective turbulence are not obstacles to learning, but necessary conditions for the emergence of new understandings.

Taken together, these perspectives delineate a new horizon for research on liminality. Moving beyond outcome-oriented accounts, the field is invited to investigate liminality in its real-time unfolding, attending to the interplay of dynamic variation, situated practice, microgenetic differentiation, and semiotic frontier crossing. Such an agenda not only promises deeper insights into how liminal spaces are configured, but also paves the way for the development of new analytical categories capable of capturing their full complexity.

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