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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Editors

Khaula Murtadha 
IU Indianapolis

Andrea Copeland
IU Indianapolis

Associate Editors

William B. Crow
Lehigh University

Carolyn Gentle-Genitty
Butler University

Virgil Gregory
IU Indianapolis

Jim Grim
Community Engaged Scholar

Rita Hodges
University of Pennsylvania

Natasha Howard
Morehouse College

Terri Jett
St. Mary’s College

Eric Kyere
IU Indianapolis

Brendan Maxcy
IU Indianapolis

Thu Sương Nguyen
IU Indianapolis

Mary Price
Forum on Education Abroad

Carol Rogers
IU Indianapolis

Javiette Vashan Samuel 
University of Tennessee 
Knoxville

Sarah Stanlick
Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Ellen Szarleta
IU Northwest

Laura Weaver 
Campus Compact

Claire Wallace

Olivia MacIsaac
IU Indianapolis Library

Designer

Rituals of an Unconference: 
The Emergence of Anti-Structure 
Through the Liminality and 
Communitas of Community 
Engaged Scholars
Jeremy F. Price
Associate Professor of Technology, Innovation, and Pedagogy in Urban Education 
IU Indianapolis School of Education

Bringing community engaged scholars together is always a worthwhile 
endeavor, to allow them to share their experiences, exchange their ideas and 
practices, and to commiserate around their concerns. The 2024 Unconference 
was one of these experiences, gathering like-minded researchers and scholars
in one place to bond, find new contacts, and engage in important discussions
and problem solving. At first glance, this appeared as a temporary community
of engaged scholars and cultural workers constructed around shared practices 
and epistemological assumptions. Or was this experience and others like it, 
something else, even more powerful and transformative?

As an anthropology major in the 1990's, I was continually drawn back to 
the works of humanistic anthropologist Victor Turner. Reading Turner's The 
Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (1991), Joseph Campbell's The 
Hero with a Thousand Faces (2004), and Rabbi Arthur Green's Tormented 
Master: The Life and Spiritual Quest of Rabbi Naḥman of Bratslav (1992) side-
by-side my senior year in college was a transformative experience. It crystalized 
my expanding fascination with the active interplay between structure and 
agency, societal forces and individual freedoms, and the tensions between social 
progress and the preservation of traditions.

Years later, while crafting a theoretical framework for my doctoral 
dissertation, sitting in the warm Middle East sun in Jerusalem at an outdoor table 
at a café on Emek Rafa'im (Valley of Ghosts) Street, I once again wandered 
through Turner's work, specifically Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic 
Action in Human Society (1974). This exploration of his ethnographic works 
deepened my understanding of the historical and intellectual roots of modern 
symbolic interactionism and social practice theory.

PAPER 2

Online Journal 
Development

11



12

 Turner was particularly and personally 
significant at each of these moments as those were 
times when I found myself in a state of liminality. 
Turner defines liminality as in-betweenness, outside 
of the typical cultural and societal structures that 
keep one grounded in everydayness. Liminality is 
not meant to be a permanent place or time, where 
one can transcend and live outside of structure, but 
rather a phase in which one can become transformed 
and then participate in bringing about broader 
cultural shifts. Liminality is a process of becoming, 
growing, and transforming in which the individual 
actor adopts new ways of being and doing by 
uncovering new ideas and practices through 
experience and exchange to bring that new 
knowledge and ways of doing back to their ordinary, 
everyday lives. 

 Much like Campbell's hero's journey in which 
the protagonist is transformed by acquiring boons 
and attaching oneself to a guide, liminality is not a 
solitary event. Encountering others undergoing 
parallel liminal experiences can result in 
communitas. Communitas develops through a 
shared experience of liminality so that a fluid 
network rooted in practice and experience emerges, 
joining people together in solidarity to develop, 
grow, create, and imagine possibilities.

 Everyday life is grounded in structure, 
reflecting "patterned arrangements of role-sets, 
status-sets, and status-sequences consciously 
recognized and regularly operative in a given 
society" (Turner, 1974, p. 237). From the shared 
time, experiences, and relationships of liminality 
and communitas, anti-structure emerges. As much 
as antimatter in physics does not mean there is an 
absence of matter, antistructure does not mean 
there is an absence of structure. Rather than 

representing prescribed patterned arrangements as 
structure does, antistructure emerges through 
experiences of liminality and communitas.

 Community engaged research is in many 
ways a network of liminal practices and 
epistemologies compared to the structure of 
traditional forms of scholarship in the academy. 
While traditional research prioritizes documenting, 
controlling, and predicting, community engaged 
research is inter- and transdisciplinary, pragmatic, 
and locally focused. Community engaged research 
prioritizes honoring community knowledge and 
capital, accepts diverse outputs, and values 
transformative goals. This stands in contrast to 
traditional research's reliance on gatekeeping and 
abstract metrics.

 Compared to the structures encoded into how 
we carry ourselves in our everyday disciplinary or 
departmental settings, community engaged 
research—as liminal assemblages of practices,
epistemologies, and values—is a set of networks 
and relationships that allow for the emergence of 
anti-structure and the opening of possibilities. Co-
constructing and navigating the anti-structure of 
community engaged research doesn't always lead 
to the traditional measure of academic success – 
that ill-defined concept of "reputation." Instead, it 
offers the potential for real transformation, 
benefiting both the communities involved and the 
research teams themselves.

 The Unconference provided those of us in the 
liminal status that community engaged research
practices engender a hearth to gather around in 
communitas. In gathering around this hearth, we 
sat and shared stories and concerns to support each 
other, knowing we are not alone in our endeavors 
even if it feels that way within the structures of our 
home departments, disciplines, and offices. In 
gathering around this hearth, we stood and 
discussed and planned an agenda to be with 
communities, reaching in partnership through 
research and ongoing work with the goal of 
bending structure to reflect the justice, equity, 
health, and wellbeing that we know is possible. 

PAPER 2
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13

We know it is possible because, in our liminal 
space of communitas, we imagined it together. 
That same senior year in the 1990's, I took an 
archaeology class to fulfill the "Four Fields"
requirement of my anthropology major. As an 
introduction, we read David Macaulay's Motel of 
the Mysteries (1979) which documented an 
imagined future where the world as it is now was 
buried in junk mail, uncovered and analyzed by 
archaeologists of the future. If archaeologists were 
to uncover that ballroom in Indianapolis on that 
day, frozen in time, I wonder what they would see? 
How they would interpret this assembly at the 
physical fringes of the campus, would they see a 
small village at the outskirts of a larger settlement 
on the banks of a slow moving river? A gathering 
of magicians or healers? A guild of thieves? The 
performance of a cult ritual meant to usher in the 
rains of spring?

 I write this knowing that these 
interpretations would only make sense if future 
archaeology was undergirded by the same 
arrogance that is a hallmark of contemporary 
science and social science. 

PAPER 2

While traditional research 
prioritizes documenting, 

controlling, and predicting, 
community engaged 
research is inter- and 

transdisciplinary, pragmatic, 
and locally focused.

Such assumptions and interpretations should be 
problematic now and in the future. Instead, I hope 
the archaeologists would recognize the evidence of 
anti-structure in that ballroom, the distributed nature 
of knowledge and authority, and the work being 
done to co-construct and co- facilitate mutually 
transformational infrastructures and practices for 
equity, justice, honor, and wellbeing for all 
communities.

References

Campell, J. (2002). The hero with a thousand faces 
(Commemorative edition). Princeton University 
Press.

Green, A. (1992). Tormented Master: The Life and 
Spiritual Quest of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav. 
Jewish Lights. 

Macaulay, D. (1979). Motel of the Mysteries 
(Illustrated edition). Clarion Books

Turner, V. (1974). Dramas, fields, and metaphors: 
Symbolic action in human society. Cornell 
University Press.

Turner, V. (1991). The ritual process: Structure and 
anti-structure. Cornell University Press.

PRICE | RITUALS OF UNCONFERENCE 


	1: COVER
	2: Contents
	3: Contents
	4: More info
	5: Welcome
	6: Welcome
	7: Guest
	8: Table Talks
	9: Table Talks
	Page 10
	11: Acknowledgements
	12: Paper 2
	13: Paper 2
	14: Paper 3
	15: Paper 3
	16: Paper 4
	17: Paper 4
	18: Paper 4
	19: Paper 5
	20: Paper 5
	21: Paper 6
	22: Paper 6
	23: Paper 8
	24: Paper 8
	25: Paper 8
	26: Paper 1
	27: Paper 1
	28: Paper 7
	29: Paper 7
	30: Paper 9
	31: Paper 9
	Page 32

