Category: topologies

The article examines how students experience and enact belonging and non-belonging within the digital university. Drawing on empirical data from students in the UK and Australia, the authors demonstrate how belonging is a complex, fluid, and relational concept by mapping how it shows up. Students describe the materiality of belonging, curating specific spaces, objects, and…

This article engages in a ‘rethinking’ of the concept of belonging in higher education, from a sociomaterial perspective. The paper suggests that dominant narratives around belonging often contain omissions, such as a lack of consideration for students who may not wish to or cannot belong. The authors argue that the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted taken-for-granted spaces…

The research explores first-year students’ experiences of belonging through the lens of nomadism, problematizing conceptions of belonging as bounded and static. Drawing on feminist poststructuralism, the paper conceptualizes belonging as a dynamic process and experience that is continually negotiated. The analysis produces a narrative mapping of the connections, relations, and flows of belonging that resist…

The study found that students’ sense of belonging at university is multidimensional, encompassing not only academic and social engagement, but also their surroundings, such as living space and geographical/cultural location, as well as personal spaces related to life satisfaction, attitudes, identity, and interests. Both positive and negative experiences demonstrate the complex nature of belonging in…

This article examines the concept of student transition into and through higher education, critiquing the normative and linear narratives that often permeate this area. Employing a theoretical framework that conceptualizes transitions as troublesome, rhizomatic, and as processes of becoming, the findings highlight several key themes. Firstly, students described the need to unlearn previous approaches to…

This foundational paper does not focus overtly on belonging, but is important in the topological literature in relation to educational studies. It traces trends in relational forms of thinking, making connections between sociomaterial and sociotopological forms of thinking that it asserts are not common in educational research, at least at its time of print. It…

This paper examines the discourse of belonging in relation to retention strategies for part-time, mature undergraduates in English higher education, through a sociomaterial, spatial lens. The paper argues that the dominant institutional narratives of the ‘typical’ or ‘authentic’ student as young, full-time and residential serve to position part-time, mature undergraduates on the periphery of higher…

This paper takes a topological perspective on how online distance students understand and enact the idea of the university. Located within the ‘new mobilities’ paradigm, this analysis overviews how online students conceive of the University of Edinburgh. It suggests that even for students who never physically go to campus, the material campus remains both symbolically…