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This article examines lived experiences of food insecurity in the United Kingdom as a\ud liminal phenomenon. Our research is set within the context of austerity measures, welfare\ud reform and the precarity experienced by increasing numbers of individuals. Drawing on\ud original qualitative data, we highlight diverse food insecurity experiences as transitional,\ud oscillating between phases of everyday food access to requiring supplementary food, which\ud are both empowering and reinforcing of food insecurity. We make three original\ud contributions to existing research on food insecurity. First, we expand the scope of empirical\ud research by conceptualising food insecurity as liminal. Second, we illuminate shared social\ud processes and practices that intersect individual agency and structure, co-constructing\ud people’s experiences of food insecurity. Third, we extend liminality theory by\ud conceptualising paraliminality, a hybrid of liminal and liminoid phenomena that co-generates\ud a persistent liminal state. Finally, we highlight policy implications that go beyond short-term\ud emergency food access measures.

The proliferation of home health care workers is an increasingly important trend in many contemporary societies, and its impact on the division of labour and the social meaning of care work is complex. In this article, these issues are analysed in relation to a new programme of domiciliary postnatal care in Australia. Coupled with early discharge from hospital, the programme is part of a reconfiguration that disrupts existing logics of care.The insertion of paid carers into the division of labour between `functionally diffuse', informal care and the `functional specificity' of professionals' work renders their status liminal, and their spatial location within the home transgresses symbolically important boundaries. Birthing women's responses include unease and a rejection of the workers based on the construction of them as `strangers'. It is argued that these responses demonstrate the lack of a `typification' based on contextual and spatialized knowledge of home health care workers.

Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) results from cerebral damage caused by a blow to the head, for example in a road traffic accident. The frequency of TBI means that it has been characterised as the silent epidemic of modern times. The majority of those who are head-injured are young men. This paper argues that the social reaction to head injury is testament to the latent eugenicist and mentalist suppositions within modernity. The brain-damaged person cannot readily overcome disability with the assistance of the technological aids available to those whose handicapping condition is physical. The consequences that head injury has for the mind and for the `self' entail the special sequestration of those who are head-injured from modernity's concerns with reflexivity and with the paramount cultural and material importance of the mind, whatever is said about the sociological significance of `body matters'. Because TBI brings in its wake the liminality of being `neither here nor there', of young men who become once again `children', the implications for family dynamics are both distinctive and profound. The `future', around which much of modernity revolves, is denied to those whose catastrophe arose from these same modern times.

ed from any kind of wider integument. Symbolic interactionists and ethnomethodologists, in particular, have no explicit conceptualization of the supra-situational, of social structure or culture, as societal phenomena, even less of inter-societal cross-cultural or world-systemic relations the proper macrocontext, rather than the 'nation-state'.8 In dealing with the internal ordering of society, familiar intermediate categories like 'institution', 'class', 'level', 'domain', 'primary' and 'secondary' notions widely used by 'members' are not conceptualized explicitly, though they are often smuggled in because life has a habit of spilling over the edges of inadequate theoretical boxes. Nor is there any workedout temporal framework: development, history, and evolution become nonproblems, because history has to be the history of some substantive entity, such as a society, and evolution the evolution of types of society in successive epochs . To work with a social theory that mirabile dietu has no concept of society as an entity (however much we need to avoid 'systems' theory assumptions that underplay internal inconsistency and overemphasize the liminality of external boundaries) makes it impossible to produce a sociology which can answer to most of the major problems of understanding social life. Only a decade after Homans had had to argue for bringing men back into sociology, we have to plead for bringing society back in. This is by no means to denigrate whole modes of doing sociology. Anyone who fails to respond to the fine-grained and sensitive illumination of the everyday and the interpersonal provided by Erving GofFman would be a poor human being as well as a poor intellectual, for to read him is to experience a deepening of perception. It has been a mind-stretching experience for a whole generation whom he has taught, like Brecht, to look at the familiar in new ways, and the exotic as common human practice. Yet the exploration of the devices people use to manipulate others in face-toface encounters, to present images of themselves, to detect meanings informing others' behaviour in clues and cues provided or given off, is, in the end, to work within the confines of formal sociology. The usual riposte to that kind of criticism is to assert that relations are between men, and that it is only alienated thinking that persuades us, fetishistically, that we have relations with reified 'things' or 'forces'. A second, more substantive, riposte is that this kind of analysis can, with equal effectiveness, be applied to 'high level' groups, and that the Cabinet or the Politbureau is, after all, simply a small group. This content downloaded from 40.77.167.104 on Sat, 09 Apr 2016 05:57:46 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

This article examines the role of migrant workers in meat-processing factories in the UK. Drawing on materials from mixed methods research in a number of case study towns across Wales, we explore the structural and spatial processes that position migrant workers as outsiders. While state policy and immigration controls are often presented as a way of protecting migrant workers from work-based exploitation and ensuring jobs for British workers, our research highlights that the situation ‘on the ground’ is more complex. We argue that ‘self-exploitation’ among the migrant workforce is linked to the strategies of employers and the organisation of work, and that hyper-flexible work patterns have reinforced the spatial and social invisibilities of migrant workers in this sector. While this creates problems for migrant workers, we conclude that it is beneficial to supermarkets looking to supply consumers with the regular supply of cheap food to which they have become accustomed.