Category: contemporary belonging

This Stanford dschool text is an illustrated guide to using core levers of design to facilitate and foster rituals, spaces, roles/responsibilities, and systems that support feelings of belonging to emerge. The book’s premise is that groups are unlikely to thrive unless people feel included and valued, and that the experience of belonging has the capacity…

This research study overviews how belonging is framed in higher education studies, particularly in relation to learners with non-majority identities: students with racial/ethnic minority identities, or who are LGTBQ+, have disabilities, or are first generation. The study begins from the recognition that marginalized identity groups experience increased stress and barriers to belonging in higher education,…

This psychology-based perspective on belonging frames the idea that there is currently a crisis of belonging in Western society, and overviews the concept of situation-crafting, or small actions that can bolster belonging, as a means of addressing it. The text emphasizes controlled-trial studies to support its claims, but encourages reflection on core values and expressing…

This US education-centred book focuses on belonging through dignity as a fundamental need, foundational to educational change and to democratic and equitable education. It approaches dignity as the core of belonging, and dignity prioritization as a path to disrupting the common cycle of equity dysfunction in school settings, particularly with regards to failed efforts to…

This paper is a meta-analysis, overviewing more than fifty other studies on individual and social level factors that influence school belonging. Its intention is to identify factors schools should emphasize to best support students. It focuses on specific themes – academic motivation, emotional stability, personal characteristics, parent support, peer support, teacher support, gender, race and…

This book’s primary argument, grounded in historical and anthropological contrasts to modernity, is that interconnectedness and adversity can lead to greater social cohesion and feelings of belonging. More military than education-focused, and critiqued for nostalgic and ahistorical representation of pre-modern experiences, the book’s focus on how wealth accumulation and personal property end up dividing people’s…

This book explores belonging within a globalized society through a political lens, framing the multiple and sometimes contradictory meanings of the boundaries of identity in multi-national and multi-cultural contexts. It focuses specifically on the concept of belonging by choice, and positions this as a distinctive feature of modern society. It explores how symbols operate in…

A higher education-focused book with a specific lens on students’ social identities – particularly race, gender, and sexual orientation –  as critical dimensions of how belonging is experienced and success is fostered (or not fostered) institutionally. Belonging is presented as a basic human need shaping students’ academic goals, achievements, and retention, and as being particularly…

This study engages in critical reading of the meaning of the term ‘belonging’ across academic disciplines, offering a two-part analytical framework. It argues that belonging signifies both a personal, place-based feeling of being ‘at home,’ at the individual level, and a discursive, political concept of socio-spatial inclusion/exclusion at the societal level. The paper asserts that…

This reflection on belonging is situated in hooks’ complex positionalities as a cultural critic and a racialized woman from Kentucky and, more broadly, Appalachia. It explores her own personal journeys from country to city to elsewhere, and her circling back to where she’d begun, in her childhood home place. The book explores the politics of…

This phenomenological research study is a business text overviewing the aspects of the work experience that give it meaning, exploring the feeling of belonging as experienced at work. Based on participant narratives from workers across the working life span, the paper outlines a structure of belonging at work composed of six themes, including discovery of…

This book is an organizational development text that emphasizes belonging as a key factor and strategy in resisting fragmentation and isolation, and in building healthy and successful community capacity. Its core premise is that cultural beliefs in individualism and in the idea that technology and science can solve our complex societal problems are inadequate and…

This study focuses on the benefits of belonging for college-aged populations, framed generally in the traditional undergraduate sense. Associations between students’ sense of belonging to a class environment and their academic motivation in that class, their perceptions of their instructor, and their campus-level belonging are correlated via survey. Academic self-efficacy, intrinsic motivation, and task value…

This study identifies and distinguishes three analytical levels on which belonging can be constructed, outlining psychological and sociological elements of belonging as well on literature on modernity and alienation. Its first level of belonging focuses on social location, the second on individuals’ identification with and emotional attachment to collectives and groups, and its third on…