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This special issue celebrates the impact of Baumeister and Leary's paper on the need to belong on its 25th birthday. This seminal work identified the importance of social connections for humans, suggested that the human need to belong is analogous to our needs for food and water, and identified the invisible hand that guides much of the research in social psychology. The first three articles in this special issue provide examples of how the need to belong has expanded from Baumeister and Leary's original conception of a need for close relationships to a broader need for all kinds of social connections. The next two articles demonstrate the impact of the need to belong. The final two papers give the final word to the paper's original authors, Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research exploring how working-class women experience UK Higher Education (HE) work has made evident recurring themes around social segregation and corresponding difficulties with feeling they belong. This paper develops this work by exploring the ways in which UK, HE based working-class women lecturers talk about their sense of belonging. It was found that, in contemporary UK HE, lecturing work is located within a marketised space where caring for students is central and the deployment of emotional labour to seen to be a necessary requirement to meet those demands. In addition, this labour is understood to be work that working-class women can readily take up, and as one of the few vehicles to enable feelings of value and belonging. However, this work is also devalued, unaccounted for and potentially harmful to those who do engage in it, therefore shoring up/ reinforcing a class and gender stratified UK academy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically examines the ways ageing migrants perceive and experience a sense of belonging in a mediascape during the pandemic. It underscores how 15 elderly people from Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) backgrounds in Victoria, Australia stayed connected among their networks in and beyond Australia by accessing and consuming COVID-19 information via traditional and digital channels. By analysing the data based on conducting remote interviews in 2020 and 2021, the findings highlight the paradoxical nature of mediated belonging. On the one hand, ageing migrants forged connections at a distance with their familial and social networks by circulating and consuming COVID-19 information. This practice provided ageing migrants an assurance of their safety and their networks. On the other hand, differentiation and racialisation stirred frustrating, polarising and exclusionary-mediated environments. In this case, they deployed connective strategies to negotiate connections and belonging. In sum, this paper reveals the possibilities and politics of mediated belonging fuelled by intersecting structural and technological divides. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The changing social, cultural and physical characteristics and uses of public spaces by migrants are of longstanding interest to social scientists. Often embedded in uses of public spaces are splinters, resonances and connections to home and migration. This paper examines the religious spaces that Sri Lankan migrants engage with in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia. To untangle the complexities associated with these spaces, we integrate a framework of belonging that encompasses rituals, relationships and restrictions. A multilayered dataset, which includes interviews with the Sri Lankan diaspora, (auto)ethnography, field observations and photography, revealed that within the Sri Lankan diaspora, individuals often used religious spaces to maintain rituals and identities. The data uncovered that some participants in the diaspora used religious spaces to gather and socialise with other diaspora members while others had dynamic relationships with these spaces – that is, the meanings attributed to religious spaces were at times fraught with tensions and hostilities towards religious practice and feelings of welcome. In this paper, we offer a snapshot of a growing diaspora in Australia and their negotiations to belong (or not). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper, relying on a thematic review of the literature, aimed to explore the influence of culture on human relations, particularly on love. We highlighted the innate need of humans to belong and be part of a community and, moreover, partake in an intimate relationship. Most humans yearn for intimacy, and thus it was defined and described. In our Western culture, intimacy is often found in marriage, usually built on love. Love, if not nurtured, may fade, and so we described what happens when it does. Romantic relationships, where love is usually expressed and actualized, were examined, including how it is shown, how time affects love, and what causes love relationships to be marred by loneliness. The main part of the paper is devoted to examining the effect of culture on love, its expression, and on romantic relationships. While love may be universal, its development, expression, and importance in intimate relationships differ depending on the culture and era in which it occurs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on gender in fisheries often argue that women's contributions are important to the functioning of fisheries and are worthy of recognition. However, this has so far failed to consider how women experience and practice belonging to fisheries. This paper structures the analysis of women's narratives around three conceptualisations of belonging: i) how women perform place-belongingness; ii) the politics of belonging; and iii) more-than-human co-constructions of belongings. To develop the conceptual approach, the paper synthesises these three concepts with an understanding of belonging as fluid and adaptable to particular situated relationships. In doing so, the paper explores how women's gendered belongings are co-constructed and performed in the male-oriented UK fisheries contexts. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews, the paper finds that women's practices of belonging make and maintain fishing communities and places, and that women's practices of belonging both confirm and challenge longstanding notions of who belongs in the fishery – with women fishers challenging socio-spatial exclusions in fishing. Women's belongings in fishing were further co-constructed in relation to the more-than-human such as fishing materialities, smells, non-human animals and the ocean. The concept of belonging helps to highlight the processes of becoming with fish, fishing and the fishery – even when there are no clear identities and identifications available for the women involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how storying can be used to uncover experiences of student belonging throughout their time in Higher Education. It adopts a framing of belonging that is fluid and which recognises shifting notions of belonging over time. A focus on storying is particularly useful for understanding belonging as it enables university staff to listen carefully and with empathy to what matters to students, what shapes their experiences, and how to communicate these in a way which invites positive action. Through storying with undergraduate student articulations gathered through a survey, interviews and focus groups at a university in the UK, the paper identifies the multifaceted and connected spaces of belonging, temporalities and relationships that come to affect student belonging. Ultimately the paper argues for the collective responsibility of staff and students to create a space of belonging for all, rather than the prevalent discourse which often puts the onus on an individual to "fit in". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I look at the widespread, and often much debated, abandonment and reuse of church buildings in the Netherlands. I focus on the striking case of the Roman Catholic Chassé Church that, after years of being left abandoned, was converted into the Chassé Dance Studios and Hotel. Based on ethnographic fieldwork at the site, I show that the transformation process of the Chassé Church took place within a field of contestation in which different groups involved, articulated distinct modes of understanding the site and attributing it with value. I argue that these registers of valuation all centre in important ways on notions of home. Consequentially, while the repurposing of the church building represents the loss of a home for some, it has been co-opted as an instrument of home-building by others. For the latter, the site has played an important role in their quests for local belonging, feeling at home in the neighbourhood and, to some extent, delineating a national culture. By tracing such emotions of not only attachment and belonging, but also loss and nostalgia, this paper calls attention to the everyday affective dimension of processes of religious heritage making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I analyse forms of belonging and un-belonging created in a situation of permanent liminal legality in one’s place of residence. The concept of liminal legality zooms in on spaces of social existence in everyday lives in a context of legal ambiguity. The focus of the paper is Eritrean and Ethiopian migrant communities who resided in the Sudanese capital Khartoum in 2021. The majority had lived in Khartoum for decades, or were even born there, but remain without any hope for full legal status or citizenship in Khartoum. Based on 30 in-depth interviews with Eritrean and Ethiopian migrants, I analyse the complex and ambiguous forms of belonging and un-belonging this liminal legality produces, and how aspirations are created and shaped by it. I argue that in certain aspects of everyday life, liminal legality does not hinder a social existence as quasi-citizens of Khartoum. At the same time, important aspirations are being curtailed by liminal legality. This creates forms of un-belonging that undermine social existence. I conclude that migrants are subject to the enduring power of the nation-state in defining who belongs and who is excluded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Queer experience is often considered at odds with 'the South;' moreover, notions of Southern belonging are commonly formed through experiences with place and are riddled with contradictions. Utilizing qualitative data collected from twenty-three semi-structured interviews, this paper seeks to understand the ways lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) students, faculty, and staff at a large state college in Metro Atlanta understand their identity in place, and negotiate experiences of belonging within a rural, suburban, and urban Southern milieu. By engaging the qualitative interviews of LGBTQ + people as stories of place, this paper queers essentialist and one-dimensional understandings of 'the South,' Georgia, and Metro Atlanta, by attending to the ways gender identity/expression and sexuality are produced through and felt in place. These queer feelings provide the context to consider the everyday negotiations of belonging that take place and the ways LGBTQ + Southerners live, love, and resist in 'the South.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rejecting theorizations of refugee camps as humanitarian spaces of exception and bare life, recent research has emphasized how camps are sites of material struggle, and how refugees are agential political subjects. While valuable, this research bifurcates between the material dwellings of refugee camps on one hand and the political subjectivity of refugees on the other. In contrast, this paper examines how Palestinian refugees reproduce a sense of collective belonging within the physical space of the camp and through material practices of care. This research centers the voices of Palestinian children to understand how they view their inherited refugee identities in the context of multi-generational displacement. Using participatory digital storytelling, this research illustrates how, for some Palestinian refugee children, a sense of longing for a future return to their past homeland motivates acts of care in the present that produces a sense of belonging in the camp. The creative agency that refugee youth demonstrate in articulating this entangled temporality of belonging challenges top-down models of youth socialization and refugee subjectivity. The importance of visual and narrative practices in reproducing refugee-ness suggests a wider role for creative methods in research with refugees. This paper introduces place-based digital storytelling as one such method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indigenous student completion rates remain very low relative to non-Indigenous students. Some universities have higher Indigenous student completion rates than the national average but research-based evidence of these universities as 'success models' is limited. Drawing on findings from interviews with Indigenous university graduates and staff as part of a National Centre for Student Equity in Higher Education (NCSEHE) funded research project, this paper discusses findings relating to one success factor that supports Indigenous student completions: Indigenous centres/units as key places to build a sense of connection and belonging for Indigenous students. The paper discusses the importance of Indigenous centres/units in providing a space where Indigenous students can connect with each other, with staff, and with their own cultural identities. The paper then discusses the development of strategies that can be adopted by all universities across Australia to strengthen and improve the completion rates of Indigenous students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the career experiences of women academics at three South African universities. To understand the experiences of women academics, we conducted an intersectional interrogation of the politics and practices of belonging in departmental cultures. The sample consisted of thirty women academics whose interviews were analysed through a discursive thematic frame. We found that while all participants experienced gender-based discrimination which hinders academic progression, the barriers experienced by black women academics are compounded by the intersections of race, gender, and motherhood. Patriarchal and racist institutional, disciplinary and departmental cultures served as further challenges to belonging. On the other hand, through counter storytelling and refusal, women created alternative spaces of sociality where suffering co-exists with pleasure, refusal and survival. Ultimately, the paper suggests refusal as a generative theoretical lens to surface the complexity of women academics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobility is high on the agenda in both policy and research and being mobile is a positive descriptor, not least for young people. The downside of the focus and value placed on mobility as the path to success is that 'immobility' has clear, negative associations: being immobile equals being 'stuck', a 'failure' and not being aspirational. In this paper I seek to problematise dominant representations of decisions to stay in regional and rural locations as 'immobility' that indicates a lack of aspiration or agency. More specifically, by exploring how the participants in this study negotiate belonging and aspiration in ways that are both classed and gendered, the paper contributes to more nuanced representations of the lives of young people living outside of urban spaces. The paper is based on a qualitative study of the everyday lives and imagined futures of young women with interrupted formal education, focusing on a disadvantaged location in regional Victoria, Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focus on geographical mobility is consolidating within youth studies. Mobility now increasingly characterises contemporary youth, and seems to play a crucial role in marking the transition to adulthood, conveying the complexity of youth cultures. Moving abroad represents an opportunity that fuels the transition to adulthood, by enabling young people to experience cultural diversity, experiment with practices of cosmopolitanism and reframe their sense of belonging in terms of places, times and relationships. The paper draws on a qualitative study of young Italians who have recently moved to Berlin, and explores the relationships between the transition to adulthood, mobility, cosmopolitanism and sense of belonging. It highlights the deep structural and cultural roots of their mobility practices: mobility is present from an early age in their desires, regardless of their class of origin or educational qualifications. Their mobility practices also involve a daily reworking of their sense of belonging, which sees them navigating family and friendship bonds, and new relationships of intimacy that 'make home' and often arise in the context of a cosmopolitan generation on the move. The paper shows how these young cosmopolitans piece together this mosaic of belonging and explores its link with the coming of age process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As mainstream cultural products, it is increasingly recognized that movies can influence the way places are perceived, exploited and materially transformed, particularly in tourism development. The relationship between movies and places has been widely explored in geographical research, but the role of animated features is still relatively unexplored. Thanks to its extremely precise geographical connotations, Disney-Pixar's animated film Luca (2021) is an exceptional case study. The film is set in Cinque Terre (Liguria, NW Italy), an area that in the last twenty years has been affected by over tourism phenomena. By examining how the movie has been received by local institutions, residents and tourists, this paper aims to provide new insights into how such products can contribute to create meaning of places and influence local attractiveness. In particular, the paper focusses on Destination Marketing Organisations' reactions to Luca's release and how it was perceived by residents and tourists, by analysing the results of a survey we administered in 2021. The results show the positive impact and potential issues of geographically defined animated films particularly in terms of sense of belonging and authenticity perception amongst insiders and outsiders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a recent study in Ireland with young male migrants, this paper discusses how narratives of home in migration and sense of belonging in domestic spaces for male migrants are linked. Using photovoice method, the paper focuses on the temporal aspects of the relationship between home and belonging: the present 'real' home which constitutes the lived spaces of migrants and the 'aspired' home that is postponed to a future time when families of one's own are formed. The main argument of this paper is that migrant masculinities are reproduced in relation to current structural inequalities and the absence of significant others that prohibit a meaningful home in present time in these young migrant men's lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on interviews with British passport holders who moved to the United Kingdom to start University, this paper explores slang and accent as sonic spatial identities. The paper analyses the inclusions and exclusions in belonging as articulated by British mobile young people through their sonic spatial identities. In doing so, the paper extends wider conceptual debates on embodied belonging by arguing for a need to further explore the sonic as a register of belonging. It argues that research on sonic spatial identities needs to be more attuned to mobility in order to explore and challenge wider discourses of exclusion. The article concludes by offering suggestions as to how to develop research in belonging and identity on an everyday sonic register. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a conceptual framework of spatial belonging. The aim is to enrich our conceptual understanding of space and belonging in higher education, with a provisional spatial belonging framework for researchers and practitioners to critically reflect on the different ways in which higher education spaces can facilitate and shape belonging and inclusion for students. Understanding spatial influences on student belonging is key to appreciating the nuances and multidimensionality of their experiences, especially for underrepresented students whose belonging at university is often more precarious. Drawing on theories from education, sociology and geography – especially Foucault's (1986. "Of Other Spaces." Diacritics 16 (1): 22–27) heterotopia, Lefebvre's (1991. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell) spatial production, Massey's (2005. For Space. London: Sage) spatial relations and literature on spatial justice – four dimensions of spatial belonging are proposed as a lens to better recognise the influence of multiple spaces on student belonging. The physical dimension includes the material and visible aspects of space and how that can shape student experiences and belonging, while the digital dimension considers the role of technology, especially virtual learning and hybrid spaces. The relational dimension highlights the importance of social relationships and connections, which transcends physicality and digitality, and likewise, the structural dimension focuses on the wider societal system and how dominant discourses shape the way space is experienced by different students. By examining the physical, digital, relational and structural spaces, the spatial belonging framework provides an innovative conceptual insight into student belonging in higher education. This paper lays the groundwork for future research to examine how multiple spaces intersect and contribute to student belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the life-stories of three young people who were born in Switzerland, but whose parents fled Bosnia due to the Yugoslav disintegration wars. These biographic portraits present three different ways of relating to and identifying with the country of origin, and (dis)engaging with its violent past. The paper highlights the ways in which young people are exposed to histories of violence and how these become personally relevant to them. One way of relating to this violent past is through family histories and memories, but these often remain obscure and fragmented. At the same time, young people encounter the legacies of the conflict outside the family and the home: in different diasporic and non-diasporic social spaces. The paper identifies the crucial role of diasporic divisions resulting from the conflict, social encounters in different contexts, and exposure to alternative historic narratives, in the development of young people's sense of belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on findings from the From Adversity to University project, a unique widening participation initiative developed by one university to support a diverse range of people into Higher Education through engagement with a 12-week bridging module. This small-scale case study presents an in-depth exploration of how learning space shaped students' experience of a bridging module during the COVID-19 pandemic. Space is conceptualised through a theory of embodied cognition which recognises the complexity of social, cultural, and cognitive inter-relations between space and students' learning experience. An interpretative narrative methodological approach was taken, drawing on the Listening Guide [LG]. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with five students who completed the bridging module during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. All had been affected by homelessness and most were in recovery from alcohol and/or drug addiction. For all participants, there was a complex and dynamic interconnectivity between learning spaces and their experience of the bridging module. The findings demonstrate for the five students how learning spaces (including the flexibility of the space) contributed to participants' sense of belonging, recovery from drugs and alcohol addiction, mental health and well-being. Implications of the study point towards the need for further research into the connection between learning space and the creation of a sense of belonging particularly for students from marginalised groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Social & Cultural Geography is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this paper, I examine an implementation of gracious space and its influence on student learning. Gracious space is a facilitation model for group meaning-making that promotes vulnerability and connectedness, "a spirit and a setting where we invite the 'stranger' and embrace 'learning in public'". The course in which gracious space was implemented was an undergraduate writing-intensive sociology seminar on arts-based research methods offered through the university's honours college. Drawing from students' reflections at the end of the semester, I examine how the students' impressions of gracious space speak to community development, vulnerability, taking learning risks, and socio-emotional awareness. The final discussion bridges the analysis to critical conversations about the importance of creating learning environments that increase dialogue and connection among diverse bodies, promote community-building, inclusion, and equitable learning opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many migrant mothers residing in Paris find themselves in a situation marked by legal precarity, which causes them to be suspended between disparate possible futures for their families. This paper examines the case of one such mother. This paper proposes the notion of the "space of hesitation" to denote the way in which legal precarity creates a specific timespace for migrant mothers like Um Ahmed in which they perform their mothering. This timespace is at once marked by the juggling of multiple, disparate futures, and by the sense of a stand-still as it remains uncertain which of these possible futures will materialize. Um Ahmed therefore operates in a mode of hesitation as to what skills and cultural sensibilities she needs to cultivate in her children, and struggles with a profound self-doubt of her motherhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior research documents the gendered inequalities Latina immigrants confront as they negotiate the realities of life in the United States, a hostile national context for immigrants. In response to these dynamics, this paper examines how Latina immigrant mothers negotiate their intersectional identities as mothers and immigrants within the contexts of a gentrifying sanctuary city and its schools and an anti-immigrant federal environment. Drawing on three years of participant-observation and 87 interviews with 40 Latina immigrant women, I argue that these women use the school district's programmes as spaces to recognise and affirm their motherhood and immigranthood and mediate the impact of illegality through a process I conceptualise as intersectional recognition. The dynamics of intersectional recognition, and the gendered solidarity and advocacy it produces, are facilitated in part because the city situates itself as a welcoming place. Yet immigrant women abut the limits of this intersectional recognition and solidarity in the face of constrained socio-economic mobility, restrictive immigration policies and rising housing costs. This research sheds new light on how women navigate their intersectional identities as immigrants and mothers and the mechanisms that support and inhibit Latina immigrant women's inclusion in their communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to clarify the dynamic interplay between immigration and nationality legislation and policymaking in post-imperial and pre-Brexit Britain. In 1981 and 2002, the years on which this paper focuses, three pieces of legislation were enacted marking watershed moments for British policy regarding immigration and nationality. The British Nationality Act of 1981 established 'British citizenship' in the statute book. The Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act of 2002 claimed to introduce new meaning and value to the acquisition of British citizenship by introducing a citizenship test and pledge. Furthermore, the British Overseas Territories Act of 2002 expanded the geographic scope of British citizenship by, in theory, providing citizenship to all those eligible in the existing dependent territories. Debates on the meaning of Britishness and the political projects linking immigration and nationality legislation to it, continue today in government, academia, and the media, all of whom are competing to have a tangible impact on policy. This paper addresses two questions. First, how can we account for the protracted nature of the debate on Britishness, and government efforts to enact immigration and nationality legislation based upon it? Second, if the meaning of Britishness has evolved over time, how has it been shaped by the course of these ongoing political debates? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Social & Cultural Geography is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this paper, I examine how performative practices of care that are primarily focused on academic achievement and learning outcomes have contributed to the creation of geographies of exclusion within mainstream schools for students with disability. Through a study of a 12-year-old student diagnosed with autism in a secondary school in Melbourne, Australia, I maintain that performative care makes certain groups of students 'intelligible' by responding to their needs while rendering others as unrecognisable care subjects in schools. The cognitive ableist bias underpinning performative care provides students with academic abilities with the necessary permissions to develop a sense of belonging to the mainstream school while creating boundaries of exclusion against those who do not embody the qualities of performative student subjects. I maintain that an approach to care as a public good and a relational ethics can help create more inclusive social geographies within mainstream schools for students with disability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is centred on exploring how young people from Sikh and Hindu backgrounds, who are British born and living in the London area understand Britishness. By utilising transcripted interviews from eighty respondents, this research uncovers and presents the core perceptions and understandings that these young people have about British national identity and the ways in which it is accommodated (or not) alongside other important sources of belonging in their lives. This paper presents the diverse ways in which these young people understand Britishness. In particular, 'thick' and 'thin' conceptualisations of Britishness and the role of family structures in shaping belonging are examined. It is suggested that any discussion of how ethnic minorities relate to national identity requires a better understanding of the diverse ways in which this form of identity is understood and accommodated. This, in turn, will encourage a more inclusive and productive debate on the role of national identity in multi-cultural Britain. This is particularly salient in a post-Brexit Britain where the themes of nationality and belonging have been brought into the socio-political fore once more, and newer immigrants are facing the challenges of feeling included and becoming British. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper becomes a mapping of a PhEmaterialist research project, an apparatus entangled with re/making the world that applauds difference in education. Feeling-thinking-making with critical posthumanist work, we affirm that school climate matters and encourage educators’ attention to the fluxing materiality of school climate created through everyday schooling events. Daydreaming aptly accounted for our slow PhEmaterialist-inspired theoretical work, a transgressing and transversing of conventional conceptions of ‘school climate’, ‘methodology’ and ‘pedagogy’. Our school climate project emerges as an experimental mapping of eventful research, a slow research creation process where we attuned to emergent affirming pedagogical relationalities. Students worked alongside researchers over six weeks at an Australian community school, enacting research creation in the making of school climate. Da(r)ta created include voice recordings, reflective notes, written responses, photographs, narratives, soundscapes, zines, posters, drawings and maps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we study the concept of 'belonging' within the context of inclusive education. We see inclusion and belonging as two entangled concepts and focus on inclusion as an ethical process. We do this by analyzing the Flemish documentary Inclusief [Inclusive] to investigate the idea of belonging as building and finding roots. As a method we carry out a close reading of two episodes of the documentary and plug in theory to gain a deeper sense about the meaning of belonging in two students' life stories. In our writing process these fragments become tangible. Through the stories, we see how belonging emerges. We come to understand belonging in inclusive education as connected to the dynamic interplay with the context; listening with care; and radical relationality. By combining these elements schools can invest in becoming inclusive communities of care, and contribute to every student having a feeling of belonging. This paper explores the relation between inclusion in educational contexts and the sense of belonging of disabled students. The authors argue for a system approach to aim for inclusion instead of through case-by-case assessment. Through close reading of two episodes of the Flemish documentary Inclusief, the authors find that belonging is enhanced through the teachers' careful attention to the students' relations with each other. The authors state that creating space to enhance every student's belonging is carried out through listening with care and being open to many connections between the student and others. The interplay with the environment proves very important to stimulate a sense of belonging with every student. The authors argue that caring communities arise through close connections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Polish Tatars are a minority Muslim community who have lived on the Eastern borderlands of Poland for over 600 years, forming an integral part of Poland despite distinct social and religious customs. I argue that food practices among Polish Tatars in the Podlasie region, rather than being merely a symbolic means of expressing difference, actively create community as forces of both exclusion and inclusion. Affective bonds are reinforced through the bringing together of individuals in the space of the kitchen to cook and consume Polish Tatar food during holidays, but fears of assimilation and loss of identity are reinforced by a perceived weakening of these practices among the youth. Food practices in restaurants represent the community as a type of familiar alterity that is both distinct from, and yet a part of, wider Polish society, while simultaneously mosques complicate binary conceptions of food as belonging exclusively to one group. The contested consumption of pork and alcohol connects Polish Tatars to the wider Polish population as "our Muslims," while also creating boundaries with non-Tatar Muslims. In this paper, food is understood as an agentic force that actively crafts group boundaries of belonging through processes of inclusion and exclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the meanings and practices of multiculturalism among young people from refugee and migrant backgrounds in one of Australia's most multicultural cities. It is based on a three-year ethnographic study exploring refugee and migrant youth engaged in sports and arts in the suburbs of Melbourne known as "migrant", "ethnic" and "multicultural" areas. The result of the study indicates that multiculturalism from below can happen differently from the "place making" strategy or "ethnic enclave" idea in which ethnic minorities are viewed as creating their own ethnic colonies in isolation from the mainstream society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Mashhadi Jewish community spread from its origins in Mashhad, Iran, to different countries in Europe, Israel and the United States from the mid-twentieth century onward. This paper discusses how the Mashhadi diaspora reframed their religious and ethnic identification in order to meet modern demands of exclusive belonging. Having lived as crypto-Jews in Iran roughly from the 1840s until the 1920s, the Mashhadi Jews have developed a distinct social identity with sharp communal boundaries, but also a narrative of the past that reframes ambiguities and their immersion in the Persianate context anew, after the Persianate societies in which their identities were integrated, dissolved into modern nation states. Departing from an exclusive focus on conversion, the paper traces the development of these narratives and new traditions as a way to establish a Jewish identity outside of Iran, rendering religiosity the main venue for performing authenticity and belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

LGBTQ families have to navigate parenting in a heteronormative world. Like many other parents, LGBTQ families create playgroups to support their parenting endeavour. Drawing on research into how family and parenting identity influences playgroup participation and choices, this paper reports on interviews with members of an LGBTQ playgroup in a city in Australia. The group provided a space for many LGBTQ families to be supported and nurtured in their parenting and LGBTQ identities. However, as with any group, some families were not present or did not feel welcomed in the group. This paper examines how the playgroup drew its boundaries, who was included and who excluded, and the mechanisms that created these boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Cavendish banana is Australia's most popular fruit and marketed as emblematic of Australian nationalisms. In July 2017, the disease-causing fungus Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. cubense was confirmed present on Australia's largest Cavendish banana farm, in the worst disease incursion that Northern Queensland Cavendish monocrop plantations have yet faced. Confronted with the potential collapse of the industry, banana growers and Biosecurity Queensland officials have deployed a biosecurity response centred on measures of border control and containment. This paper examines the othering of the disease vector Panama Tropical Race 4, revealing biosecurity attempts as embroiled in cultural preoccupations with invasion. In so doing, this paper establishes that the biosecurity concerns regarding Northern Queensland bananas are not just with the economic and biological productivity of nature, but entangled in post-colonial anxieties over who belongs within the landscape. Following the entangled relations between the disease and Cavendish bananas reveals cultural nuances and multispecies relations. These shape and are shaped by industry and government efforts as experts attempt to maintain governance over entities as they appear to slip from human control. This paper finds that the anxieties and narratives of Australian post-colonial politics are deeply imbricated with the logics of ecological protection, agricultural productivity and the banality of everyday nationalisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses different sources of students' expectations of university, beginning with a thematic analysis of 21 semi-structured interviews with a diverse set of students at a UK University. We find that students draw on several different sources to develop their ideas of what university will be like; some of these sources are trusted more than others, and some present a more realistic view. The broader challenge of independence emerges as a contributory factor in students' sense of successful transition to university, mediated by different types of socio-cultural capital. We draw upon Ulriksen's distinction between 'expectations' and 'anticipations', as one that illuminates how much influence universities can realistically have in shaping prospective students' ideas about university life. We show that universities must be open and realistic in the information and support they offer to incoming students, in order to help students form expectations of university life that are accurate and more likely to be met. Universities are also likely to benefit from understanding individual students' expectations better, via personalised support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When attending predominately residential universities, commuter students are the minority and typically have poorer outcomes than residential peers. Research demonstrates commuter students identify factors impacting on their persistence and success, include time taken to commute, lack of social integration and a poor sense of belonging. In contrast, most students studying in UK college higher education are commuter students. They are already embedded in local communities, with their family and friends outside of university, and have a different sense of university belonging. Data collected during 13 online focus groups over six months explored college higher education commuter students' sense of belonging and persistence. Reflexive thematic analysis identified that in contrast to the much-researched notion of belonging being important to students' persistence, in this group of non-traditional commuter students, the notion of mattering was more important. Students spoke about how college higher education staff, particularly their personal tutors, demonstrated students mattered, and this feeling was reciprocated. Feeling like they mattered helped them to engage with learning and persist with their studies. This paper offers insight for higher education providers with high proportions of commuter students, and recommendations about how providers can foster mattering in their students to develop their persistence and success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a study of Singapore's integration and naturalisation processes, this paper examines how the Singaporean state has negotiated the twin challenges of embracing cultural pluralism in its population while also forming a common national identity. Employing Benedict Anderson's conception of 'bound serialities', it argues that the Singaporean state has developed a framework of multiracialism to imagine the Singaporean nation through three serialities or collective identities. First, the Chinese, Malay, Indian and Other (CMIO) categories organise individuals into groups that have clear cultural identities. Second, the CMIO categories constitute a fixed image of the multicultural Singaporean nation. Third, being Singaporean requires an ethos of accepting the cultural differences that the CMIO structure represents. However, such a top-down imagining of the multicultural nation is increasingly challenged by the arrival of new citizens who embody alternative imaginings of their own ethnic and national identities, raising questions about the continued effectiveness of Singapore's multiracialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on a study that examined how more inclusive classroom communities might be achieved. Its particular concerns were to explore the contribution children's perspective might make to this work and to generate findings that would be meaningful for practitioners. The study was underpinned conceptually by the Framework of Participation, an established research tool in the field of inclusion. Data were collected through group discussions, involving 56 children (aged 4–11), across seven primary schools in England. The discussions focused on two related areas, belonging and learner diversity, and how these might matter to the children's learning. Four key themes were identified: feeling comfortable and being safe; learning as the main activity; being friends and getting on together; sharing values and behaviours. The paper argues that listening to children's views is valuable not only for research purposes but also as an integral aspect of strengthening their sense of community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How the transition to adulthood is understood by youths can be influenced by social context and cultural background/s. Employing a voice-centred relational methodology approach, underpinned by a framework of identity and belonging, this paper reports on one aspect of a larger qualitative study designed to better understand the transition to adulthood as experienced by Australian Sudanese and South Sudanese youths. The findings of this study suggest that the perspectives on the transition to adulthood held by participants were based on feelings of possessing certain character traits and values they associated with the identity 'adult'. These findings are relatively consistent with previous research. Yet, the utility and value of this transition was also presented by participants as being inherently collective (i.e. to contribute within one's community). However, several barriers relating to social belonging were identified by participants to influence, and in some instances, impede a successful transition to adulthood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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After the fall of Suharto and the retraction of discriminatory laws in Indonesia, many Chinese Indonesian Voluntary Associations (CIVAs) have reemerged. Over the past two decades, hometown associations have proliferated in order to channel support to, express love for, and generate identification with the kampung halaman, or hometown. These associations do not refer to qiaoxiang (侨乡), or the ancestral villages of overseas Chinese in China, but rather hometowns around Indonesia, and members consist of local, Jakarta, or overseas-based Chinese Indonesians who engage in developing their hometowns socially, culturally, politically and economically via a series of activities. The rapid revival of hometown and other types of CVAs in the Indonesian contexts indicates the resiliency of this form of social organization as a diasporic mechanism through which to construct community, articulate feelings of home and belonging, while contributing to regional place making within diasporic imaginaries of hybrid Chineseness. This paper presents a qualitative analysis based on ethnographic research in the city of Singkawang, West Kalimantan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the life experiences, identities and trajectories of young Dubai-born Indians living in the Arab Gulf. It seeks to contribute to an emergent body of research on the formation of diasporic identities and forms of belonging among South Asians in the Gulf, which underscores the ways in which migrants articulate forms of cultural belonging in a context where they are denied the right to citizenship. Building on the notion of the 'educated person', the paper argues that education constitutes an important, yet overlooked, basis for forms of cultural belonging in Dubai. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research that evaluated first year students' transition into university found that the values of 'being, belonging and becoming' were important in particular within the first few months and within the first year of university. From our previous work, we reported that three things matter to students: the academic staff they work with, the nature of their academic study and the feeling of belonging. This paper provides a further illumination to our work by reporting on the qualitative data collected in the same study. The study included 530 students from five cohorts over a five-year period. As part of the Student Experience Evaluation instrument, open-ended questions probed students about their early experiences of belonging and transition into university. This original research uses rich data to illuminate the scales and items from previous quantitative data analysis to explore 'belonging', triangulated with research from the field. This paper is timely due to increased emphasis placed on learning and teaching with the introduction of the Teaching Excellence Framework. Student satisfaction is not a simplistic measure and this study articulates the complexity of student belonging in Higher Education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how local place attachment and group identity are conceived by those who manage civic cemeteries, and those who, by their memorial practices, co-create them. Engaging with debates about (post)colonialism and belonging, the paper presents evidence from both interviews and photographs, conceptually framing the meaning of these with reference to Lefebvre’s spatial triad: of space as perceived, conceived and lived. It identifies a disjuncture between the way cemetery managers view group and individual identities, and the way this manifests in memorial practices. Formal ‘representations of space’ are influenced by neo-colonial narratives of ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ whereas greater diversity and categorical transgressions are apparent in spatial practices. This has implications for the management and articulation civic identity and contemporary understandings of belonging beyond as well as within public places of memorial and remembrance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Landscapes as dynamic relations between people and worlds are always incomplete. They are partial understandings, evolving knowledges, edited images and unfinished stories of our designed and undesigned environments. Gaps within and between landscapes can reveal histories omitted and individuals silenced, but this open-endedness of landscapes can also provide opportunities to contribute and participate. In this paper I explore how landscapes are always under construction and I argue that their incompleteness offers potential for new practices. I question, how traditions of mapping can reflect dynamic realities of landscapes; how design and representational practices that attempt to fix time and complete space can work with incompleteness; and how designers and researchers can embrace such landscapes as open-ended, collective endeavours. In this paper, I discuss a mapping project called 'Incomplete Cartographies'—an experiment with in-progress cartographies, incrementally informed by situated narratives, and producing new forms of belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how young refugees settled in rural Norway and Denmark experience their new places of residence. We find inspiration in the idea of ‘contradictions of space’ (Kinkaid [2020]. “Re-encountering Lefebvre: Toward a Critical Phenomenology of Social Space.” Society and Space 38 (1): 167–186.) in exploring how young refugees navigate issues in rural life from housing, education, work and social life to their material surroundings, including the weather. Which experiences result in feelings of meaning and orientation, and which spur feelings of disorientation and contradiction? The empirical material is based on fieldwork and qualitative interviews with young refugees and local volunteers in rural Norway and Denmark. Despite several differences between rural areas in the two countries, young refugees’ experiences from within show many similarities and common experiences between them. The harsh weather, empty streets, lack of familiarity with the more formal community life in rural areas, long distances from sites of education, etc. create feelings of disorientation and contradiction, while socializing with other refugees provides feelings of community and belonging. Taken together, the two aspects drive their decisions to stay in or leave the rural area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite existing empirical work that explores the multiple ways in which students develop a sense of belonging in higher education, there is a dearth of comparative research about the extent to which the concepts of community and belonging are central to what it means to be a student and how students in different national contexts (beyond Anglophone countries) construct community and belonging. Drawing on qualitative data from students from six European countries, we provide an account of conceptualisations of community and belonging. Specifically, this paper extends discussions around community and belonging in higher education through comparative inquiry. Notwithstanding the individualised and consumerist framing of students accompanied by market reforms in higher education across Europe, it shows that the notion of community and/or belonging features prominently in students' narratives. We also demonstrate how a sense of community and belonging is experienced on different levels. Crucially, the emphasis placed on community in students' sense of belonging varies by the country, pointing towards the continued influence of distinctive national traditions, structures and norms of higher education. Our analysis contributes to wider debates about the development of a European Higher Education Area and its impact on European homogenisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While there has been a proliferation of research on the experiences of nonelite students in elite settings, scholarly attention has predominantly focused on institutions like the Ivy League or Oxbridge, leaving other geographical locales, notably in Europe, understudied. Past research has primarily concentrated on the initial entry to higher education, with limited attention given to postgraduate levels, which this study aims to remedy. Through interviews with a cohort of final-year Ph.D. students at a highly prestigious European graduate school, this paper specifically delves into the social integration of Eastern European students navigating their fit among a predominantly Western European, elite-university-educated student body. Employing the concept of ‘segregated inclusion,’ the study illustrates how cultural and socio-economic differences contribute to stratified social relationships, ultimately impacting the extent to which Eastern European students can leverage their membership in an elite university. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]