Digital Liminality and Cross-Cultural Re-integration in the Middle East

Abstract

This essay develops a theory of “digital liminality” as a way to analyze the role of technology in the classroom, and in students’ lives. It is also a report on the ESL classroom as a site of intercultural exchange between instructors and Muslim students. The role of digital media in higher ed was a question I had to confront at a Middle Eastern University, where students exhibited a strong cell phone addiction. I theorized Saudi students’ immersion in their cells as a liminal phase during a university rite of passage. Digital technology exposed them to things that would be inadmissible when they were later reintegrated into a deeply conservative society. My students wrote about living between “Western freedoms,” and a world of submission, where most of them would work and raise families. In my Freshman English courses, a temporary cell-free zone was established, enabling students to defamiliarize their use of digital technologies. Students investigated their own role as “threshold people” on the verge of a new way of life, critically examining their own digitally mediated liminality. Students then did presentations about the challenges of re-incorporation in a Saudi context. Combining ethnographic fieldwork and ESL theory and practice, I integrate excerpts from student journals, providing a personal perspective on my analysis of digital liminality, and ESL classrooms as intercultural crossroads.