An Atlas of Liminality
Amara Bains, Technical Lead for Evaluation, ARACY - Australian Research Alliance for Children and Youth
Creating a national atlas on child health and development is as ambitious as it is necessary. Having recently joined ARACY, a partner of ANCHDA, I am preceded by numerous dialogues and processes that have led to the herculean task of creating an atlas, and I am intrigued by what seems to be a very deliberate choice of words to describe what will be the end result of multiple collaborations.
Originally used by Gerardus Mercator in 1585 to describe a bound collection of maps, the atlas as we know it, was born. But it was not just this collection of maps that created the atlas, it was his descriptions of the countries and his thoughts on the creation of the universe attending those maps that truly created the atlas.
Growing up in the olden days, i.e., pre-Google maps or Google Earth, owning a giant tome containing maps of the world and its countries accompanied by countless intriguing facts was de rigueur in most households. It was a critical resource for completing homework and planning overseas trips, but without those facts and figures or descriptions and stories of cultures and customs, the countries spread flat across the pages would have held little interest – or meaning. There would have been little to distinguish one country from another – calculating distances, essential for planning a trip, and making informed decisions about which place to visit would have quickly descended into un-inspiring drudgery without the narrative.
Considering this, I thought about the type of atlas that would identify gaps, priorities and new directions for research in multiple fields and improve outcomes, decrease inequities, join-up evidence for coordinated investment, commission and planning. What data or information is needed and exactly how would you navigate the data to identify these new directions or to improve outcomes? What would make this atlas superior in its tasks compared to other repositories of data on the health and development of children and young people?
The answers to most of those questions will reveal themselves as the collective wisdom brings forth this atlas. We have, of course, to accompany this reveal, the erudite minds of the collaborating partners of ANCHDA which have developed several different methods to collect and present data, precisely the reason why an atlas, a single repository of multiple perspectives, is necessary. Using the Children Headline Indicators, as the framework to chaperone the collegiate data sets together in the atlas, will go a long way to providing a connected statistical snapshot of the nation’s children at any one time. But will it be enough?
When is data an atlas?
The value of data in assisting decision making is not disputed, but we are learning – thanks, in part to all those machine learning and convolutional neural networks driving artificial intelligence development – that humans have some special abilities that can turn the hum of a revelation concealed in data into a choral hallelujah if a flourish of nuance is added to it.
For rarely in our human existence are there purely ‘black-and-white’ circumstances, rather, we, as humans meander through our lives in a palette of colour, sometimes moving to the adjacent colour but sometimes jumping to the opposite or perhaps even staying in the same colour but plunging into its depths.
For many of us when presented with a table of numbers, or even a graphical representation of some longitudinal progress we can’t help but see an oversimplification of our kaleidoscopic lives.
Fortunately, to add the spectrum of our experience to those crisp numbers is qualitative data - the narrative, the nuance and the flourish that can elevate the reach and catalyse the ‘light-bulb moment’ of our numbers.
At ARACY, we have developed The Nest – a child-centred, evidence-based framework for understanding children and young people’s social and emotional wellbeing. The Nest is a metaphor crafted by one of the child participants during the development of the essential components of social and emotional wellbeing. It is the use of metaphor that allows humans to create shared meaning and grasp similarities. Metaphor, importantly, creates an abstraction that can propel you into a previously unthought-of territory. It is a vehicle into liminality – the space between the known and the unknown. The space of possibilities.
Using the Nest to guide the qualitative data collection on the range of children’s health and development experiences will create a richness in the Australian National Child Health and Development Atlas. It will amplify the atlas as a tool of liminality.
The betwixt and the between
Arnold van Gennep was the early 20th-century pioneer of the study of liminality. Originating in the field of anthropology, liminality is used to describe the space where transformation can occur. According to Horvath et.al (2009), it is within the liminality where the “in-between situations and conditions characterised by the dislocation of established structures, the reversal of hierarchies, and uncertainty about the continuity of tradition and future outcomes” reside. Where we once were is now thrown into doubt. But it is the observation by Horvath et.al. that perhaps connects an atlas of liminality to ‘new directions’ and ‘improved outcomes’:
Lived experience transforms human beings—and the larger social circles in which they partake—cognitively, emotionally, and morally, and therefore significantly contributes to the transmission of ideas and formation of structures.
The COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020 gave us all a taste of that liminal space – the in-between what was and the what is to come. As Thomassen (2009) asserts, individuals in society are aware of the liminal state and they know that they will leave it.
If our child health and development atlas is an atlas of liminality, it will need to capture the degree to which the children experience liminality – this is where the qualitative data becomes the essential companion to the quantitative data. This is where the story and the experience add meaning to the facts and figures, where imagination and innovation can shine and where children can influence the decisions being made about their lives.
References:
Horvath, A., Thomassen, B., & Wydra, H. (Eds.). (2015). Breaking boundaries: Varieties of liminality. Berghahn Books, Incorporated.
Thomassen, B. (2009). The Uses and Meaning of Liminality. International Political Anthropology, 2(1), 5-28. http://www.politicalanthropology.org
