Dùthchas: Belonging as ‘Home’
This past summer, preparing to delve into this sabbatical project, I read Scottish social histories and scoured my mother’s PEI Scots history bookshelf, trying to wrap my mind around the sociocultural and socioeconomic shifts that rang the knell for the old Gaelic order of the Highland clan system.
I was trying to grasp a world – and worldview – two hundred years gone, one that that the aforementioned shifts largely erased, except as historical record. What I found was Dùthchas.
I’d never heard of Dùthchas when I proposed this project on Belonging & Place in the summer of 2023.
Dùthchas is a Gaelic term for an ecological, kin-based, place-based idea of the interconnectedness of people, land, and culture. Often framed as a concept of belonging or ‘home,’ as well as birthright, Dùthchas historically held that clan members had inalienable rights to settle in the territory of their clan…that land was a communal entity to which people belonged, rather than the other way round. Land as root of collective identity.
Dùthchas speaks to a relational sense of belonging and place. Tied up in Dùthchas are ideals of heritable trusteeship, and responsibilities as well as rights. The term encapsulates the spirit and purpose of this investigation, in the heritage language of the Highlands and Islands.
My eloquent response to stumbling upon the idea of Dùthchas? I quote: ‘Well. Damn.’
Some things resonate beyond expression, in the best way.
In weaving Orwell’s 1984 – written on Jura, in the Hebrides – with Dùthchas and resistance to capitalist concepts of private property, Bunting notes:
“When you lose a language, you lose the world view that it encapsulates, and in the case of Gaelic, it is one which challenges some of the most deeply embedded assumptions of modernity such as capitalism and individualism.”
Dùthchas showed up a few times in the conversations I had in Scotland last fall. I did not ask about it, but I recognized the term when I heard it: I *almost* found the courage in one of those instances to ask for a slow repetition, so I could learn to pronounce it properly.
I got caught up in my own embarrassment, my hesitation. I have very little Gaelic.
The Clearances were a violation of Dùthchas. Chiefs acculturated into Lairds by economic and religious and cultural forces from the Statutes of Iona through the Improvers and The Enlightmenment allowed a whole class of people to be folded into history, disappeared from the land of their belonging. A dispossessed people were shipped to colonial territories to become dispossessors in our turn.
I come from these people – cottars and crofters from Coll, from Skye, from Argyll, from Perthshire. They passed down to me no land inheritance in the contemporary sense, no language but English.
And yet the Dùthchas concept of relational collective identity, of places to which one can have responsibilities as well as rights, resonates for me even as an Anglo settler-colonial subject generations removed from belonging to the land of my ancestors.
Dùthchas. Damn. Sometimes there is a way to get back homeward.
***
Methods of Resistance: Surfacing Belonging Amidst Change
Dùthchas has been proposed as a research methodology (Meighan, 2022) of self-decolonization. The relational responsibilities it foregrounds are now woven into my understanding of this work. The concept is apparently also tied, loosely, to the Welsh idea of Cynefin, a decision-making framework that has guided my own thinking about systems for many years. Again…damn.
What I wanted to know, with this project, was how people think about belonging in the face of our contemporary sociocultural and socioeconomic shifts. Especially the ones that lap, this time, at the doors of colleges rather than cottages.
In recent decades, the mission of higher education institutions has inched closer and closer to market discourses of automation and efficiencies…the language of neoliberalism and strategy and privatization deployed in tandem with aggressive managerialism. The Cynefin framework – kin to Dùthchas – has long taught that the complex, human problems of education are seldom addressed by ‘right answer’ solutions and managerialism and automation.
Against this backdrop of stress, McKinsey promises that GenAI will usher in a ‘cognitive Industrial Revolution.’
I know what the original Industrial Revolution did to the cottars of the Highlands and Islands from whom I descend. As I’ve thought about them this past year – who they might have been, how they might have felt – I’ve had to grapple with the reality that my own professional class may not be so different, in a strange way, beyond the obvious status distinctions. Public education and knowledge are a backbone of democracy…just as a labouring class with the right to scrabble out a living from the land in exchange for service were a backbone of feudalism.
Until feudalism came to an end.
Even before McKinsey’s pronouncement of revolution, everything in my field was turning to AI. I’d already watched the enclosure of participatory digital engagement by platforms: I’d done my PhD on Twitter at its peak…which was also the #gamergate era that seeded its demise. That consolidation of techbro power via automation and surveillance was – and remains – a trajectory I want to resist. So when I set out to talk with members of my own professional class – higher education staff – about the intersections of belonging and knowledge and place, one of my premises was that belonging is relational, emergent…that it cannot be reduced to a step-by-step replicable process. That it belongs in what Cynefin would call the ‘complex’ domain.
I had wandered into this work reading about topologies of belonging, and the annotated bibliography that grounded the project was intended both to check and expand my assumptions. What came through in the bibliography (and the lit review paper currently out for review) is that belonging *is* fundamentally a relational concept. Straight back through Maslow and Dewey, belonging shows up as a complex, human concept focused on relationships…to others, to place, to common purpose.
Maybe never know when the ‘we’ that we understand ourselves to represent is about to disappear, be folded into history.
But we can make a record of what we understand.
***
Findings: Belonging
I conducted more than thirty interviews – most individual, some with pairs or small groups – with staff across the University of the Highlands and Islands’ partner colleges and campuses last fall. The interviews generally took 60-90 minutes. All were recorded and auto-transcribed by Teams. I asked questions about place, and culture, and questions about belonging and practice.
Below is a summary – a record – of the common purpose and understandings that emerged in the coding of transcripts about belonging as a whole, across subthemes. These are excerpted from the report I am compiling on the project, for UHI. The excerpts make visible what emerged as common across participants. They are an attempt to mirror UHI back to itself while also sharing some of its strengths – including the spirit of Dùthchas that I see woven through the worldviews expressed – with the broader academic community and the world.
Place-Based & Relational Belonging
Across UHI, the concept of belonging shows up as fundamentally intertwined with connection to place and community. In more traditionally-structured universities, institutional identity or belonging might take precedence, but UHI staff tended to consistently emphasize locality over brand, and spoke to the importance of enabling students to remain rooted in local communities while pursuing further and higher education. This place-based conception of belonging recognizes the strong ties that exist between Highland geography, culture, and identity. Staff frame their role as not just educators but as enablers of a form of belonging that resists the historical ‘brain drain’ from the region, and frame UHI as a place that supports students to maintain their community connections while advancing educationally.
Multiple staff members were adamant and direct about the belief that meaningful connection emerges through deliberate relationship-building practices rather than from institutional structures or technological systems alone. Across campuses, educators described investing significant pedagogical effort into creating ‘authentic human connections’ in both physical and digital teaching environments, and framed belonging as tied to actively-cultivated classroom rapport. Beyond the classroom, this relational conception of belonging encompassed references to peer connections, community ties, and professional networks within colleges and across the institution as a whole.
As one interview participant expressed, belonging at UHI means that “everybody in this region can reach their full academic potential without ever having to leave their job or leave home.” This reflects the broadly and consistently-articulated belief of UHI participants that education should strengthen rather than sever local ties.
Digital Belonging Through Intentional Practice
The distributed structure of UHI necessitates a deliberate approach to belonging, particularly – though not exclusively – in digital spaces. The interviews reveal a deep understanding that educational belonging requires trust-building, with digital tools used strategically to foster connection. Staff across campuses described belonging as the result of intentional, human-centered practices that bridge distance through authentic participatory connections. One instructor emphasized the importance of understanding that student experience and student relationships don’t stem from “the flicks and tricks” of technology, but from creating genuine opportunities for relational ties to be built. Another staff member who teaches synchronously online noted that “you have to work harder at it when you’re on a screen.”
Asynchronous learning was noted across interviews as central to UHI digital offerings, and particularly important for working students. Pedagogical practices such as recorded lectures and video responses to student discussion posts were highlighted by interviewees as ways they try to humanize their asynchronous courses and, by extension, build belonging.
This conception of digital belonging as emerging when technology serves as ‘fertilizer’ for relationships rather than as a substitute for human connection seemed to be broadly shared, among both institutional leaders and staff. The interviews generally ascribed meaningful digital belonging as requiring careful attention to online design and pedagogy as key means of supporting authentic interactions.
Cultural Navigation and Belonging
UHI staff across college affiliations, locales, and cultural identifications all tended to frame belonging as requiring respectful navigation of traditional Highland and Gaelic values, particularly in relation to the idea of educational transformation. Staff recognized the complexities of local hierarchies and relationships, and reported carefully introducing progressive approaches that balance respect for traditional values with opportunities for growth and change. This means that belonging at UHI includes distinctive dimensions shaped by the institution’s tertiary mission across geographical barriers.
Across the interviews, an ongoing tension emerged between the value of localized accessibility through online delivery and the need for some traditional campus experiences in order to build engagement. Staff described creating safe spaces for student transformation and identity development, with particular attention to supporting non-traditional students and diverse learning paths. However, staff at a number of partner colleges also acknowledged the significant challenges in building educational belonging without structural supports such as student unions or common rooms.
Flexible pathways that honor place, enable transformation, and recognize the multiple worlds students inhabit were identified as a key strength of UHI. Multiple interviewees noted that students who learn at home need to navigate traditional community expectations, especially in relation to gender and status trajectories, with sometimes more progressive educational ideals. The very existence of a higher education space in the community was framed by one participant as helping sustain community roles and relationships for students who do not ‘belong’ by the standards of traditional norms. Another interviewee’s perspective was quite different in its framing of the intersection between school, community and gender norms in particular: “Students that are coming in that are transitioning, it might be that they’re transitioning here in the college, but when they go home, they have to go back to the person that they were… but there is that safety for them here, in that they know that when they come here, they can be that person.”
A ‘live and let live’ aspect of Highland culture was highlighted in several interviews that the institution was said to reflect and also reinforce: a cultural attitude that is “surprisingly accepting of diversity despite the region being rural and relatively homogeneous demographically.” This cultural value suggested that pragmatic tolerance may be an important cultural element of local belonging, one that involves striking a balance between respecting traditional community roles and values while still enabling personal growth and transformation. Rather than directly challenging conservative attitudes that might exist in some Highland communities, UHI campuses were generally seen as creating space for diversity and individual expression while acknowledging that students may navigate different social expectations in their home communities.
The interviews reveal that for many Gaelic and Highland origin staff members more broadly, belonging has a particular cultural mission dimension, and UHI serves as a hybrid cultural space where academic and community knowledge intersect. For staff working in Gaelic language and cultural programs, belonging was particularly framed as a balancing act between preservation and evolution. Helping students and communities maintain authentic connections to local cultural heritage was a distinct focus for Sabhal Mòr Ostaig (SMO) and Gaelic language staff, who framed belonging through the lens of cultural preservation and linguistic community. Tensions around maintaining language authenticity while enabling global participation, supporting both heritage speakers and new learners, and connecting historical resources to contemporary practice through digital archives and tools were all highlighted as aspects of belonging efforts at SMO.
Professional Identity & Distributed Belonging
Beyond place and culture, staff at UHI also conceive of belonging through the lens of professional identity and development. The interviews suggested that UHI’s strengths in these areas are particularly visible in its scaffolding of workplace learning, pathways for growth, and capacity building across local professional communities. Staff generally agreed that feeling connected to their professional fields and having opportunities for advancement is a crucial dimension of institutional belonging for them, and also for their students.
The distributed structure of UHI creates challenges for the development of a professional sense of institutional belonging, however, with staff (and students) navigating multiple simultaneous modes of connection to program, campus, and the broader institution. The interviews revealed tensions between local campus identities and UHI as a whole, with staff often reporting stronger ties to their immediate campus communities while grappling with what it means to belong to the larger UHI network. What broad-based sense of institutional belonging was reported tended to be tied more to UHI’s potential and mission or to specific Learning & Teaching Academy initiatives than to overall institutional realities. The interviews suggest that institutional belonging at UHI remains a work in progress, with staff committed to its unique mission even while reporting frustrations and constraints on their ability to fully realize its potential. Despite these challenges, there remains a powerful sense of pride in UHI’s distinctive approach to education, with staff deeply invested in an institutional model that prioritizes connection to place and community while enabling educational advancement through flexible, digitally-enabled pathways.
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