Knowing in the In-Between: Liminality, Emergence, and the Futures We Are Learning to Imagine

We are living through a moment that resists easy naming. Old systems no longer explain the world we inhabit, yet new ones have not fully arrived. Institutions falter, expertise is contested, and the future feels simultaneously urgent and opaque. This condition is often experienced as anxiety or fatigue -but it is also a deep epistemic moment: a crisis not only of governance or ecology, but of how we know.

Anthropology offers us a useful word for this state: liminality. Coined to describe rites of passage, liminality refers to the threshold between identities- when one is no longer what one was, but not yet what one will become. It is a space of ambiguity, destabilisation, and potential. Anthropologist Victor Turner described it as a condition where norms loosen, hierarchies suspend, and new forms of relation, what he called communitas become possible.

Today, this in-between is no longer confined to ritual or transition periods; it has become collective and planetary. Climate collapse, political fragmentation, technological acceleration, and cultural polarisation have rendered dominant narratives inadequate. We are, in effect, living inside a chrysalis.

The butterfly’s metamorphosis offers a powerful, if partial, metaphor. Inside the chrysalis, the caterpillar does not gradually improve. It dissolves. Its tissues break down into undifferentiated matter, while imaginal cells- structures carrying alternative possibilities survive and re-organise into an entirely different form. For a time, what exists is neither caterpillar nor butterfly, but structured uncertainty.

This image matters because it resists the fantasy of seamless progress. Transformation requires breakdown. And breakdown, while generative, is deeply uncomfortable.

Crucially, this is not only a social or psychological process, it is an epistemological one. When the world changes faster than our frameworks can explain it, knowledge itself enters a liminal phase. Philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn described such moments as paradigm crises: periods when established models fail, anomalies accumulate, and multiple competing explanations coexist. New paradigms do not emerge fully formed; they are felt, rehearsed, resisted, and eventually stabilised through collective agreement.

This helps explain why our current moment feels epistemically unstable. Facts alone do not persuade. Expertise no longer commands automatic trust. We are not simply debating answers; we are questioning what counts as knowledge, who produces it, and by what authority.

Here, the work of Michel Foucault remains essential. Knowledge, he argued, is inseparable from power. What is recognised as truth is shaped by institutions, discourse, and exclusion. New ways of knowing do not emerge merely because people imagine differently, but because power relations shift or are actively contested.

This is where many hopeful narratives falter. Imagination without attention to material conditions; law, capital, technology risks becoming symbolic rather than transformative. And yet, without imagination, structural change lacks direction. The challenge is not to choose between the two, but to understand their entanglement.

Contemporary frameworks such as Adrienne Maree Brown’s Emergent Strategy offer one way forward. Drawing from complexity science and ecology, emergent strategy suggests that large-scale change arises from small, relational, adaptive practices rather than centralized control. Knowledge, in this view, is iterative and responsive. Truth is evaluated not by universality alone, but by consequence, by whether it supports life, justice, and resilience. (What perhaps correlated with Aristotle’s Eudamonia; commonly translated as “flourishing”, “living well” or “human thriving”- The highest human good achieved by living in accordance with virtue (aretē) and fulfilling one’s potential as a rational being.)

However, emergent approaches also face legitimate critique. Can they operate at the scale and speed demanded by climate collapse or authoritarian resurgence? When is emergence sufficient, and when is coordinated, top-down intervention ethically necessary? These are not reasons to abandon emergence, but to situate it within a broader ecology of action in systems change.

At the heart of this epistemic transition lies imagination– long dismissed as subjective or ornamental. Imagination is a collective rehearsal for alternative futures as Adrienne Maree Brown puts it. When imaginaries shift, reality follows.

In liminal times, imagination becomes a form of knowing. Arts, storytelling, ritual, and speculative practices function as laboratories where futures are sensed before they are formalised. This is not escapism; it is prefiguration; the rehearsal of worlds not yet stabilised.

Hope, in this context, is not naïve optimism. As systems theorist Joanna Macy reminds us, hope is an active practice: choosing participation over paralysis, even without guarantees. Yet hope must be held carefully. For some, calls to “stay with discomfort” can feel like a moral demand that obscures grief, rage, or refusal, responses that are also legitimate forms of knowledge.

This brings us to necessary cautions. Liminality is not inherently emancipatory. History shows that transitional periods can just as easily lead to authoritarian consolidation or violence. Not everyone experiences the in-between as possibility; for many, particularly Indigenous, colonised, or displaced communities, liminality is chronic and imposed, not chosen. Any claim to a collective “we” must therefore be made with humility and specificity.

The butterfly, too, must remain a partial metaphor. Unlike biological metamorphosis, social futures are not guaranteed. There is no inevitability, only responsibility.

What, then, does it mean to know in the in-between?

It means resisting premature certainty without collapsing into relativism.
It means holding imagination alongside power analysis.
It means valuing plural knowledges while maintaining accountability.
It means accepting that emergence is fragile, uneven, and unfinished.

Above all, it means recognising that the future does not arrive fully formed- it is co-created through how we attend, relate, and choose in the present.

We are not merely waiting for what comes next. We are learning together- how to see, how to know, and how to become otherwise.