School of Social and Political Sciences - Theses
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ItemExperiencing and transcending a liminal condition : narratives of ailing Polish immigrants in Melbourne, Australia( 2004)In addition to facing problems typically associated with (re)location, migrants must often come to terms with changing bodily states due to disability, illness, ageing and other forms of ailments in locations that may be foreign culturally and linguistically. Ailing immigrants experience two forms of disruptions which result in a double condition of sustained liminality: spatial/social and bodily. Using narratives of ailing Polish immigrants to Australia, this thesis explores these disruptions as well as the strategies through which the participants (re)ground their transformed body/selves in new locations. The project is embedded in a constructivist approach which stresses the importance of the participants' subjective experience of spatial/social and bodily (re)locations, their experience of sustained liminality, and of the strategies they use to transcend this doubly liminal state. Theoretical and methodological concepts which guide this work are elaborated and expanded on in the first sections of the thesis. The next section is devoted to exploring the narratives of the ailing Polish immigrants in order to uncover their spatial social and bodily disruptions and uprootings from familiar locations, and their consequent alienation from their changing body/selves. The final section uses the narratives of the participants to reveal the frameworks within which they attempt to transcend the liminal condition of their ailing immigrant bodies in order to make their locations familiar and their transformed body/selves less alien. This project argues that making sense of new locations is a human experience. For the ailing immigrant, however, the experience is problematic because the transformative movements they are subjected to require a continuous effort to (re)locate their selves within monumentally different spatial/social and bodily contexts. (Re)grounding strategies are a way of making sense of the world and of doing away with the subjective alienation from the self. This thesis recognizes the process of (re)grounding as central to the experience of the ailing immigrants, and argues that the end results of (re)grounding strategies, whether successful or not, are in fact less important than the process itself. Through the (re)grounding process, the self becomes familiar, regardless of its spatial/social or bodily location