Betwixt and Between Liminality and Marginality: Mind the Gap offers an interdisciplinary thinking on "the marginal" within society. Using the framework of Victor Turner's earlier notions of liminality, the book both challenges Turner's symbolic anthropology, and celebrates its continued influence across disciplines, and under new theoretical constraints. Liminality in its simplest forms provides language for meaningful approaches to articulate transition and change. It also represents complex social theories beyond Turner's classical symbolic approach. While demonstrating the enduring relevance of Turner's language for expressing transition, this volume keeps an eye toward the validity of critiques against him. It thus theorizes with Turner's work while updating, even abandoning, some of his primary ideas, when applying it to contemporary social issues. A central focus of this volume is marginality. Turner recognized that marginals, like liminars, are betwixt and between; however, they lack assurance that their ambiguity will be resolved. This volume explores the dialogic relationship of space and agency, to recognize marginal groups and people, and inquire, without a harmonious resolution, what happens to the marginals? Have race, class, gender, and sexual orientation become the space for thinking about reintegration and communitas? Each chapter examines how marginal groups, or liminal spaces and ideas, destabilize, shape, and affect the dominant culture.

Welcome to the post proceedings of the First International Conference on Embedded Software and Systems (ICESS 2004), which was held in Hangzhou, P. R. China, 9-10 December 2004. Embedded Software and Systems technology is of increasing importance for a wide range of industrial areas, such as aerospace, automotive, telecommunication, and manufacturing automation. Embedded technology is playing an increasingly dominant role in modern society. This is a natural outcome of amazingly fast developments in the embedded field. The ICESS 2004 conference brought together researchers and developers from academia, industry, and government to advance the science, engineering, and technology in embedded software and systems development, and provided them with a forum to present and exchange their ideas, results, work in progress, and experience in all areas of embedded systems research and development. The ICESS 2004 conference attracted much more interest than expected. The total number of paper submissions to the main conference and its three workshops, namely, Pervasive Computing, Automobile Electronics and Tele-communication, was almost 400, from nearly 20 countries and regions. All submissions were reviewed by at least three Program or Technical Committee members or external reviewers. It was extremely difficult to make the final decision on paper acceptance because there were so many excellent, foreseeing, and interesting submissions with brilliant ideas.