Undergraduate Symposium
2021: Liminalities
The Professional Writing Students’ Association presents “Liminalities,” our third annual undergraduate symposium, to be held in April 2021!
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Derived from the Latin word “limen,” meaning “threshold,” liminality refers to the space in-between.
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It is where one has left something behind but is not yet fully in something else. It is a transition filled with uncertainty, ambiguity, and hybridity. It carries the potential for disruption, subversion, and most of all, change. In this space, new meanings, new relations, and new identities are produced and old familiarities are transformed.
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A threshold itself is a space. Despite its temporary nature, its significance can be felt in our lives for many years. Regardless of what happens, we are bound to return from the threshold changed in some way. There is meaning to be found in these spaces if we stop and look around.
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What moves your mind? We mind all the things that matter most to us: in matters of the mind, the mind matters, and influences the self, others, and communities. We fill our time and our moving minds with not only those inner dialogues competing for dominance, but also with ambitions, desires, fears, and the accumulated details and debris from mindscapes across time that we sometimes scrape up against in memory and emotion, experiences, and languages - and barriers. We shape these mindscapes into writing to shape ourselves, to discover ourselves, to re-invent ourselves: always in process, always becoming. Every person has their own set of unique lived (and sometimes un-lived) experiences, and each one of these experiences expands a self that evolves or revolves - or resolves - to create mindscapes that open moments, spaces, and minds that navigate, that migrate, that resonate across timelines and cityscapes, labyrinths and languages.
2019: Outlines
On April 25, 2019, fifteen panelists who spent the past year (or two) putting into words their insightful and revolutionary ideas shared them with students, faculty, and the York community. It was a day of celebration, and of honouring the intelligence and impact of undergraduate writing and research. We are excited to share their pieces here for you to read. You will find words of change, of passion, of , and of empowerment that will make you think, reflect, and question your current perspectives.​
