Creating “Liminal Community”: Communal Liminal Experience and Identity Transformation among Black Women Tech Founders in Detroit

Abstract

Social inequality not only shapes resource access for minority entrepreneurs but also limits their dreams and aspirations. While scholars have argued that entrepreneurship education can play an important role by facilitating individual identity transformation, the potential of community-based identity transformation remains largely unexplored. Through an ethnographic exploration of STEM Entrepreneurial Excellence Program (STEEP), a Detroit-based entrepreneurship education program for Black women tech founders, this study examines the pivotal role of the communal liminal experience in production of alternative entrepreneurial identities of minority entrepreneurs. Drawing on classical anthropological theories of liminality, we synthesize the concept of “liminal community” to describe an interstructural social organization of individuals undergoing identity transformation and study whether it could be purposefully designed by educational programs to facilitate communal liminal experience in the fulfillment of explicitly emancipatory goals. By explicating and theorizing the specific practices that were deployed, we show how marginalized actors can extricate themselves from the constraints of normative social imaginaries and fashion for themselves alternative identities. It is our hope that these findings may serve as a useful framework for entrepreneurship education scholars and practitioners to better support minority entrepreneurs and thereby address persistent inequalities in business venturing.

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