Betwixt & Between : The Liminal Imagination, Education and Democracy

Counterpoints publishes the most compelling and imaginative books being written in education today. Grounded on the theoretical advances in criticalism, feminism and postmodernism in the last two decades of the twentieth century, Counterpoints engages the meaning of these innovations in various forms of educational expression. Committed to the proposition that theoretical literature should be accessible to a variety of audiences, the series insists that its authors avoid esoteric and jargonistic languages that transform educational scholarship into an elite discourse for the initiated.

Both neo-liberal and Third Way politicians and pundits have come to accept globalisation as the key determinant of social and political organization. Consequently, they have confused government’s role in the liberal democratic state with that of the globalised corporation. The result has been a discursive closure about what counts as human flourishing, and about the nature of the educational provision which best serves such flourishing – which is co-terminous with economic success. This book offers both a challenge to such an equivalence, and an understanding of the dispositions and practices that are necessary for education to sustain a robust and invigorating openness in, and for, democracy. From an oblique and whimsical perspective, Betwixt and Between renovates a range of playful and interesting metaphors rooted in experiences and encounters with and at the limen (or threshold). In doing so it weaves through laughter, trickster, poetry, and religion.