Tomorrow morning, early, I return to Canada. My Bonnie flies over the ocean, lol. Sabbatical, fin.
This Belonging and Place project has felt like a pipe dream, even as it unfolded. Who gets to spend weeks crossing the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, spring and fall both? For work? And be welcomed in, repeatedly… wined, dined, given a tune or two, driven around, trusted with people’s practices, hopes, fears? Reflected with?
It felt audacious to hope it might be me. But it *has* been me. I am tired and I am very, very grateful.
What did I learn about belonging and place, and the University of the Highlands and islands, and education?
As much as I could. Never enough. More than I can represent in words or report or the slides I presented – in four different permutations, for different audiences – at UHI this past week. When I try to sum it up, I start to sound like a hobbit, speaking in aphorisms: I learned more than I ever expected to, and maybe as much as I dared hope?
The hardest thing about this project was that I bit off too much. Belonging. Digital practice. Place. Culture. I learned so many things that exceed my capacity to turn them into sabbatical outputs.
I got lucky. I chose my exemplar well. The project report has a tidy Executive Summary that says a lot about how UHI staff generally aspire to and model positive digital, distributed pedagogies, rooted in place, belonging, and engagement. There is something to be said for an institution being deeply grounded in the people and place it serves…yet open to fostering both to grow and change. The full public report will be available once UHI has had an opportunity to sign off on it.
But there was a lot about this project that was not solely about UHI. For me, it was about changing focus…trying to direct my attention and gaze away from AI and big universities and the spectacle of disinformation and consolidation of power that underpins most narratives in my field right now.
We cannot keep looking to the same models if we want anything to change.
I chose UHI because it is far from Edinburgh, from London or New York or Toronto, from the pull of the prestige economy of the Russell Group or the Ivy League.
Yet it is a modern university, flexibly structured with a full tertiary (translation for non-UK folks: post-secondary) range of offerings, across multiple academic partners, but it does not appear to be run entirely by Deloitte or McKinsey consultants. And it manages to do distance education without scaling it into a profit hub devoid of human engagement. And I respect that.
I have spent a lot of my life and career in places considered peripheral, on the margins of the shiny centres of power. There are struggles in these places, and never enough money, and lots of local and often deadly serious politics. They are vulnerable places. But they are as alive as the hallowed halls of any bastion of higher ed. And because some of them have not been targeted quite so early or so hard by the technofeudalists looking to siphon off publication education funds for digital profit, some may be better exemplars for resistance and thriving and remembering that we do not need to buy the increasingly poisoned hype being sold to us as the future.
UHI is a reminder that there are aspects of the participatory legacy of Web 2.0 that work really well to build student learning, engagement, and belonging.
The poster child for Web 3.0 thus far? Is NFTs. Enough said. ***
Part of my goal with this sabbatical project was to hold up a mirror to UHI. Part has been – and will continue to be – to share them as an exemplar, a model. But a third part was just to write, again, in my own voice…to build this space as a place to process the territory that I covered, literally and figuratively and in my own self, on the journey.
So again. What did I learn, about belonging, and place?
I learned about Dùthchas, the Gaelic concept of belonging as home. I also learned – in my fourth presentation in front of people who actually speak Gaelic – that the Internet had NOT, in fact, taught me how to pronounce it correctly. Oops.
I learned about Lewisian gneiss, and how in the geologic record the south of England was once as far from the north of Scotland as Lisbon and New York are today (thanks to Frank Rennie‘s book, a gift from my hosts).
I learned that even across an area that, from the outside, can seem perhaps like one touristy, windswept, bekilted place…each town, each island, each area is remarkably distinct. Maybe I knew that, a little. But I had to learn to see it for myself, across lenses of culture, and language, and land, and built environment.
I read more books this year than in perhaps the past two decades, and I learned a great deal about Scottish history, from as many perspectives as I could find. I learned about 800 years of battles petty frays and cattle-stealing, the Dál Riata and the Picts and the Lords of the Isles, chiefs become lairds, the Jacobites and the government forces and the Clearances and their aftermath. The inevitable ways in which forces of power morph and pivot and whirl, poles spinning even in barely a generation, sometimes.
I spent the year with a deadly creeping sense that we, right now, are living through the end of something ancient and something I do not know how to see beyond. Some days I think of that something as higher learning, institutions. Other days, democracy. In learning about people – my own people, in many dark turns – whose agency and ways of life were washed from history by shifting economic systems, shifting power systems, I felt a kinship and a grief, both. But I learned – or was reminded? – that we are not alone in having to stare down the end of the world as we know it. That is, I suppose, what human history is, in its sum total.
I found that perversely comforting.
***
This visit allowed me a little closer to the ancestors in another way, too. On the first of June, the day after I landed in Scotland for this visit, I took a ferry to the Isle of Coll. I was the first in my line to set foot on that island in approximately 180 years.
It is Coll that’s pictured in the top banner of this blog: the beautiful harbour, the little stone church with its turrets, the sailboats on the horizon. I chose the picture in September when I started the site: Coll does not have a UHI campus (or any campus beyond a primary school)…but that saved me from favouritism, from choosing among partner college locations for the visual representation of the project. And my dream was to make it to Coll as part of this exploration of belonging. The guesthouse I booked turned out to be literally right in the shadow of that church in the picture, directly behind it. So I felt at home.
I walked two hours down a road lined by ancient stones, to the bay where they reportedly, en masse, boarded the boats that took them to PEI. They would have walked the same road. I, ever lucky, found people to take me the rest of the way.
There are only a few Collachs – folks or families who came from Coll – left now, among the population of 200 or so who have homes there. But there is an old graveyard, by the dunes, along that road that I walked…and all the names – Macquarrie, McFadyen, MacKinnon, McVicar, MacLean – have been known to me my whole life, on PEI. I am from a place transposed wholesale from the old country.
I left a note in the sand, in that bay. The sheep who replaced us watched me from the reconstructed ruins of houses, as I wandered back to the road.
I learned this year, in the most academic part of the work that I did, that belonging is relations. It is always relational, tied to relations of connection, relations of power, relations of place.
I am going back over the ocean, Scotland, to where I belong. I thank you, for making me at home here. May we raise a glass again, someday.
Lift to me the parting glass Good night and joy be to you all
This project emerged happenstance from the confluence of a lucky trip to Scotland and my own disillusionment.
As I’ve gone on about in previousposts, in 2023, I was worn thin on AI hype, grieving the capture and enclosure of my field by forces far removed from the participatory educational ideals I’d originally valued in digital pedagogy. At #OER23 in Inverness, I was heartened by the distributed digital work UHI showcased…it was human-focused and connected and tied to place and culture. I proposed a sabbatical project that would centre on UHI: I’d do a strengths-based case study of their digital and place-based practices, with belonging as a lens.
Belonging. So human and participatory and relational.
So pleasantly far from the nexus of political and digital weaponization and instrumentalization. Right?
Lolweep. I stand corrected, I guess.
Any academic will tell you the research process is mostly about finding out how much you don’t – and may never – know about a given thing. So when you choose a new research focus primarily because the term appears to sit at the intersection of all the things you want to study, rather than because you already know things about that focus, you take a certain risk. If you choose the focus in part to try to escape the forces gathering on the horizon, you may find yourself having miscalculated.
Je ne regrette rien. But belonging is definitely having a moment…and what it ends up signifying on the other end of whatever we are marching into, as a world, remains yet to be seen.
Amidst the rise of marketization and venture capital power across higher education, the term belonging has been gaining traction these past few years. The term itself is a bit of a Rorschach test: vested interests across the sector – from the most neoliberal to the most critically-inclined – can see a bit of what they value in it. Positive Sense of Belonging (or SoB, lol) is tied, via research, to outcomes of increased achievement and retention, as well to internal personal experiences that deepen individuals’ sense of connection and engagement.
Great. Except higher ed is a fraught political field at this juncture…and thus, belonging too, grows more fraught by the day.
In this neoliberal, austerity-based era of higher education, belonging is at risk of being weaponized. Right-wing political forces have mounted a backlash against the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives that gained a very brief toehold in higher ed in the wake of the 2020 public police murder of Black US citizen George Floyd…particularly in formerly colonial nations with similarly embedded structural bias barriers to educational attainment.
At the same time, higher education institutions are making an overt turn away from use of the term ‘DEI’ and towards belonging.
It’s not just in the US, either. No anti-DEI Executive Order currently threatens non-US institutions, but here in Canada, both McGill University and University of Alberta have lined up to rename their DEI offices with some version of belonging in the title.
It may be a coincidence. It may be because it’s easier to rename something than to fight for it. It may be because belonging signifies the intent of those DEI offices more broadly and effectively, by their own reckoning. But there’s something in that tidy narrative that makes me very uncomfortable. Because belonging also allows institutions to signal bland, inoffensive investment in student experience and socio-emotional well-being, with zero mention of race, structural inequities, sector underfunding or any of the other societal and digitally-enabled disenfranchisements that actually stratify education.
Given that issues – especially disparity, inequity, or exclusion – are seldom truly addressed without being named, I am suspicious af. This is belonging being deployed as, at best, a transactional placeholder used to elide politics and power relations.
Is belonging now reduced to a buzzword? A weaponized signal of instrumentalized versions of ‘student success’?
I refuse to cede the territory. The thing that I learned once I started learning about belonging is that the term is fundamentally relational. Full stop. From Maslow in 1962 onward, across the nearly 80 resources that make up the Annotated Bibliography of this project, plus the additional 25 or so that ended up in the paper I’ve submitted about this very issue of weaponized belonging, the term signifies relational connections amid power structures. IT IS A TERM THAT DOES NOT EXIST WITHOUT POWER RELATIONS.
So. The findings below are an effort to demonstrate that belonging still can be – and fundamentally needs to be – more. For higher education practitioners to engage in building belonging, for learners and/or for themselves, some concept of relational value needs to be present.
That’s how you thread the needle of digital belonging, even in an era of weaponization. ***
As I explored at the end of my last post, what I found across the 30+ semi-structured interviews and group conversations with UHI staff was a professional culture of people clearly – if variably – accustomed to using digital tools in the service of learning, in thoughtful, critically-informed, and relational ways.
Core Digital Practices of Belonging Multiple interviewees emphasized humanizing online learning spaces and experiences through a variety of practices, with digital tools referred to as bridges rather than replacements for human connection. Clearly communicated expectations, regular announcements, location-based check-ins that acknowledge students’ embodied contexts, and personal video notes for feedback were all practices emphasized by staff as means of trying to build belonging within digital learning environments. Student choice was highlighted, particularly in relation to practices such as the use of breakout rooms to build relationships in online courses: one instructor noted that they do try to offer small-group breakouts to enable connection and belonging, but recognize that some students may not want to build those ties as much as others. More broadly, synchronous and asynchronous learning opportunities with flexible scheduling, particularly evening online classes that accommodate traditional work patterns in small Highland communities, were all part of the overall digital practice picture.
In terms of approaches that may be specific to UHI, there was mention of the development of “digitally rich spaces” in community locations like libraries and museums, alongside virtual mentoring circles and professional recognition portfolios that validate staff expertise across campuses. These practices reflect a common understanding of technology supporting rather than replacing cultural connections and community structures.
At UHI Perth, staff described online engagement as central to their approach. “The course is not a repository…we don’t just stick stuff up and it’s there, just course materials. It’s not a consolidation space, it’s actually a teaching space.” There tended to be consensus across locations and conversations that technology should support rather than drive pedagogical values.
At Sabhal Mòr Ostaig (SMO), the Gaelic partner college located on the Isle of Skye, an instructor emphasized how they establish connection when teaching remotely, taking time to personally address students at the start of class and to create space for conversation, especially when students may be quite anxious about speaking aloud in Gaelic. Similarly, in English-language offereings across multiple partner campuses, staff practices still highlighted relationality and the creation of digital opportunities to build connection through intentional and subject-relevant group work.
Overall, the institution has managed to create and support a professional culture within which most staff demonstrate a complex understanding of digital literacies and practices as pedagogical at their core, and as relational and human-centered practices. Trust and authenticity were words that came up repeatedly, both with respect to belonging but also simply in relation to teaching. Administrators, support staff, and educators all talked about online learning as a means to break down traditional barriers for non-traditional students…but as working best for those students when trust and relationality were centered.
Place as Central to Digital Learning The existence of UHI enables students to remain in local communities while accessing educational experiences aimed at respecting, often incorporating, and fostering the cultural knowledge and traditions of the Highlands and islands. At the School of Adventure Studies in Fort William, an instructor emphasized how historically, the environment and people of the Highlands have been treated merely as resources. His teaching and research both focus on educational practices aimed at disrupting that legacy, through emphasis on and respect for place and culture.
The institution’s place-based mission and its digital and distributed programs are interwined, with online programming enabling both cultural preservation and regional sustainability. A Portree staff member noted: “Something like 80% percent of those that leave an island or rural areas to go to a big mainstream university don’t come back.” The very existence of UHI not only enables people to be educated in their home communities, but also provides jobs and a ladder for professional growth across the region.
The institution also navigates the balance between traditional and contemporary language use, creating digital environments that support both formal instruction and living language practice. At Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, technology enables not just education but cultural continuity, allowing “dispersed Gaelic speakers/learners to form learning communities” while simultaneously creating spaces where “traditional and modern language uses are negotiated.” This creates what one SMO instructor described as “hybrid cultural spaces” where differing forms of expertise can be recognized and valued.
All of this exists within complex power structures, in an institution where most of the same staff working hard to create belonging for digital and distance students report fairly minimal belonging to the overall umbrella of UHI, even if – in some cases a bigger if than others – they report a strong sense of belonging within their own partner college or department.
No place is perfect. But this work is genuine belonging work. And UHI exceeds the instrumentalization and reductionism currently signalled by popular adoption of the idea of ‘belonging’ by fostering a professional culture focused on values. Educational values. Cultural values. Relational values.
The question of what it means to be a person who works in digital education has been one I’ve struggled with, increasingly, over the past decade.
I stumbled into this field in the ’90s, when the university where I was doing my M.Ed transitioned their Open Learning office and their distance programs from teleconference and TV delivery to online learning. I wasn’t particularly technically-inclined, but I was under thirty and understood email. I needed work. When I was asked to hold how-to sessions for faculty about online teaching, I fumbled at first by overfocusing ON the tech.
The core lesson I took from two years as coordinator of that program was that online education, digital education, is a human endeavour.
(A caveat:For me, this does NOT mean human as in pure or unsullied by technical and material and systemic forces. I don’t think this of this as human exceptionalism, but as relationalism. Dùthchas.
All my work owes a nearly thirty-year debt to Donna Haraway’s cyborg…to its emphasis on irony and hybridity and lived social relations, on transgressed boundaries. To me, what is human is not bounded by skin or by dominion over. To me, digital education as human endeavour meant – means – that those of us engaged in it have a responsibility to our lived social relations on and with this planet. Within our complex, crafted, technological worlds…the habitats we inhabit.)
The core lesson of my 90s work was (mostly) reinforced, for me, throughout the participatory, Web 2.0 era. The idea of the internet as a global collective resource and commons, and of digital networks embodying the principle of “the smartest person in the room is the room” grounded much of my teaching and research in digital literacies and learning for a very long time. I saw and framed ‘the digital’ as a means of amplifying and connecting, creating common resistance to gatekept conceptions of what counted as knowledge.
At the end of that 2010 post, I talk about my discomfort with the turn to monetization in blogging. “the room of one’s own is supposed to turn a profit, these days,” I said (I was averse to capitals). “i want to know what gets lost, in that shift, and what it means.” )
That 2010 post was my first public imagining of the journey that became my PhD five years later. I ended up studying academic Twitter networks, not blog networks. I focused not on what gets lost in networks, but gained: on the literacies that make networks legible and meaningful, amidst the overwhelm of knowledge abundance. In ‘the room’ of collective intelligence that the Web 2.0 theorists liked to talk about…how did individual contributors understand their practices? Their connections? How did networked literacies of academic status and affinity differ from the institutional versions we’re acculturated to?
I’m still drawn to those kinds of questions. In what gets lost in technocultural change. In how humans make sense of the ways they engage with each other digitally. In how we make meaning and knowledge.
The difference in 2025, as opposed to 2010 or 2015, is that ‘how’ increasingly gets represented not as meaning-making by a collection of human nodes tied by digital communications, but as a space of automation, weaponization, dehumanization.
(A reckoning: let’s be honest. Digital education was always already *that,* too.
Audrey Watters published a post titled Swords into Plowshares yesterday, for her son, Isaiah, five years gone today. It is, among other things, about Haraway, about how educational technology and computing and AI are swords, not plowshares…in the Book of Isaiah sense. They remain ever rooted in the violence and surveillance and imperialism that spawned them...which has been weekly more visible since the ascendancy of Trump 2.0. But it was always there. She talks about edtech godfather Seymour Papert’s Robin Hood act of bringing computing from the military-industrial complex into the classroom as “a reallocation of technology, not a repudiation of its underlying origins or epistemology.”
Audrey’s post took my breath, on many fronts.)
I worry now, that those of us who came into our own in the participatory era of educational technologies did society a disservice by circulating the idea that “the smartest person in the room is the room.” Folks, I don’t think ‘smart’ works as a counting noun. The whole idea is useful only if ‘the room’ is grounded in some concept of collective meaning-making, some sense of relationality and kinship across boundaries.
Our current discourse on so-called Artificial Intelligence – which covers a plethora of actual processes, some of which quite fascinate me – is breathless and vague, black-boxed, actively decoupled from any discussion of the venture capital hype that underpins it or the biases and mastery learning assumptions its outputs reinforce. It’s a discourse that demonstrates the triumph of business jargon and thinking in the world of tech, even edtech, wherein ‘digital transformation’ simply means efficiencies and profits, and FOMO serves as both carrot and stick.
Under that business jargon is what Ursula Franklin – another giant to whom I owe much of how I think about the digital – would call a ‘culture of compliance’ built around technocratic control and prescriptive technologies. Hyper-rationalist reductionism to things that can be counted.
The thinktank dudes quoted by CBC make zero acknowledgement of the limits of their profit-focused, competition- and growth-centered perspectives…which do not even begin to address the scope of AI’s impacts on society.Or habitat.Or habits of mind. They are already captured within the AI culture of compliance and they replicate it every time they open their mouths. And even CBC, who once platformed Franklin for her 1989 Massey Lectures, now only platform right of centre thinktank dudes in their articles on AI. Apparently I’d need a thinktank job and preferably a tie – and different anatomy – if I want to fight epistemicide beyond the reach of this small blog.)
I think that is a key problem with AI itself – it allows us to ignore the limits of our own perspectives. It disassembles the web of knowledge production, replacing it with discrete outputs disconnected from their origins. It allows outputs to stand in for meaning-making, slop to stand in for The Commons, and the environmental cost of it all to go unacknowledged.
To me, AI – even where it can be folded into Haraway’s cyborg kinship – cannot be the smartest person in the room. Because the version of it being sold to us is one that will destroy the room, the whole habitat.
And that is not smart.
Automation and AI, jammed into everything we use like high-fructose corn syrup for the mind, serve as dominance wet dreams. We cannot meaningfully consent to their omnipresence.
AI may someday be “unfaithful to its origins,” in Haraway’s words. But in the meantime we do not need, I think, to passively enable it to serve as a Trojan Horse for total neoliberal, fatalist capture of higher ed via digital infrastructures. ***
All that to say…talking about digital practices in education is not simple or clear-cut. Over the years, I’ve been in conversations and conferences and committee meetings that felt like landing on the moon, for me. The ascendency of AI only amplifies those gaps in foundational premises.
The reasons I chose UHI as an exemplar for this project on belonging and relationality across boundaries, in digital education, are rooted in how UHI leaders and staff talked about at the #OER23 conference.
But the fact that UHI might as well be on the moon from the perspectives of the centripetal forces that gets shorthanded as ‘Silicon Valley’ doesn’t hurt either.
UHI is situated far, geographically, from the military-industrial dominance machine of Silicon Valley. It also sits relatively outside the correlated higher education prestige economies that translate that shorthand into educational currency.
These are strengths, as I see it.
My goal with this project was to turn the idea of peripherality on its head and centre an alternate, place-based understanding of what digital can be and do…one in which I could still focus on connection and Haraway’s cyborg partiality and kinships, and trust that some legible shared understanding could emerge. I think it did.
But – to mix two metaphors – UHI is no Brigadoon, sheltered from that orbit of Silicon Valley and neoliberal austerity, in any sense. It has borne the full weight and impact of those dominance narratives and their violence this past year, in the form of austerity and cuts. I return in a few weeks to Scotland. I do not know if all the people who took time to contribute to this project are still employed.
Rather, it is my premise that it is the dominant players in higher education who are sheltered and isolated – to their detriment – from what smaller places know and do and practice, and why. From the knowledges that have escaped the total pull of that Silicon Valley centripetal force. From perspectives that question or alter the received version of the value of technologies…that resist total neoliberal capture, even as they are squeezed by it.
Ursula Franklin asserted, in her 1990 Massey Lectures, that we lived even then in a society where it was no longer acceptable to question the fundamental value of technologies and their products.
This belonging project is an effort to make visible knowledge and perspectives that can – even now – offer a different model for digital educational technologies. Because Franklin also asserted: “question we must….our real world of technology is planned and run on the basis of a production model that is no longer appropriate for the tasks that we want to undertake.” And at UHI, digital tools have been used as something beyond a production model, for purposes that I understand as tasks that *we* – loosely structured – want to undertake, in service of some conception of belonging and society. ***
The UHI teaching staff I spoke with appeared, for the most part, fluent in the connective capacities of digital tools, and inclined to identify how specific technological affordances supported learning and belonging in their work. Staff consistently emphasized that digital tools, used intentionally, *can* serve as enablers of community, presence, and connection rather than barriers to it.
Culture of compliance discourse in relation to digital tools was quite low, and in relation to Generative AI, almost absent. The perspectives of the thinktank representatives quoted by CBC above – “we should rush to use AI so we don’t fall behind” – did not show up in the transcripts at all. Combined with the various descriptions of professional development that emerged from the interviews, a key strength of UHI appears to be a culture of digital literacies development beyond mere technical skills. This seems to be fostered both through the centralized Learning & Teaching Academy as well as within specific partner colleges.
In any institutional context, two key factors – distance and scale – tend to shape the way digital tools are deployed. Many UHI programs are distributed across multiple partner colleges and locations, and therefore rely on synchronous and asynchronous distance learning methods for course delivery. This makes distance a necessary factor in much of the programmatic and pedagogical decision-making, but scale appeared to be less of a driver. For the most part, classes at UHI were reported as or spoken about as relatively small: few conversations dealt with large-scale online courses or with the stressors of needing to add more students to a course.
UHI’s distributed nature, as an institution, led one participant to frame it as “its own natural laboratory” for developing digital education practices. with a focus on “making active and creative use of technology and using technology in effect ways.” Participants’ approaches tended to recognize that digital education is not merely about content delivery but about creating genuine relationships mediated through technology.
An implicit examination of “when should we use technology?” preceded many responses to how it was used. ***
Later this week, I hope to outline specific digital practices that emerged from nearly thirty conversations with more than forty UHI staff, across teaching, administration, and professional support roles at the nine partner colleges I visited last fall. They will be excerpted, as in all my findings posts, from the upcoming strengths-based case study report that will be submitted to UHI.
I understand that these posts are essays, not ‘findings,’ per se. They are my effort to think out loud through the piles of ‘data’ that my interviews generated. They are my homage to Haraway and Franklin, too…and my effort to continue to try to make meaning in long-form writing, even in an age of AI and diminishing eyeballs.
But I have spent more than twenty years in and out of digital learning conversations, across North America and around the world. I used to hear more of the kind of discourse that emerged at UHI. I think it is even more important that we hear it now.
What do YOU hear, where you are? What premises guide your approach to how you talk about digital education, if indeed you do?
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.
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.
The photo memories feature on Facebook – and yes, I should ditch Meta…and no, I haven’t yet – reminded me this past weekend that it’s been two years since I first landed at the University of Highlands and Islands, for #OER23. My first time seeing much of Inverness in daylight. Everything was April sunshine and the daffodils, the dose of spring beating out the weather we’d left behind in Canada. Small things and happenstance are the way the world turns. The unseasonal warmth – and the sense of warmth and community from and among our UHI hosts – basically sparked this entire sabbatical project.
The presentation I gave at #OER23 in Inverness encapsulated my career dilemma as a longtime digital educator: all the participatory practices and literacies I’d spent decades trying to cultivate were being entirely enclosed by extractive digital platforms. And my entire LinkedIn feed was turning into an AI optimization circle jerk fest. Evergreen, I know. I wanted to turn my sabbatical focus to something built on digital infrastructure but grounded in values I could recognize: an inquiry that framed education as a human-centered endeavour and a public good. I cold-called UHI.
How would they feel about me undertaking a strengths-based case study of their approaches to digital education and belonging? Yeh? Cool? Cool. ***
Two years, one amazing return visit to Scotland, and many hours of reading and coding and worrying about the state of institutions in this age of collapse later, this post outlines the first set of findings from my UHI Visiting Fellowship. I’ll be releasing – and workshopping – a formal report for UHI itself, at multiple campuses, later in the spring. But I’m also sharing findings here in the open because a key aim of this project is to disrupt received notions of and tensions about ideas of periphery and centre. In looking at belonging and digital practice through a UHI lens, my goal is to centre UHI and treat it as an exemplar for other practitioners, educators, institutions….anyone, really, thinking about what belonging means in a global world.
On Small Places as Exemplars The founding assumption of this entire project is that, much like small things and happenstance, noted above, small places can punch above their weight, *if* we pay attention.
Educators in small or regional or rural places in the Global North (or educators anywhere across the Global South) often find our attention directed wholesale into the what I think of as the Black Hole of Academic Hegemony, in which what happens at Harvard and a few other Anglosphere institutions gets treated as if it applied universally. Big studies and trends and ‘best practices’ and media tidbits about universities are distilled from the Ivy League, or Stanford, or London or Zurich or maybe Melbourne or the National University of Singapore…and the power of that discursive centre erases its own situatedness entirely from view. The rest of us on the so-called peripheries – ie the vast majority of people actually involved with higher education around the world – seldom see our worlds or classrooms truly reflected in this discourse.
But people on the peripheries *do* learn to see academic discourse, as a result, with one eye on the hegemonic norm and one eye on specific, respective contexts. That capacity to speak from two worlds at once is a gift, IMO, and one I wanted to tap in this project.
Nearly a hundred years ago, in one of the foundational texts on education as a human-centered endeavour, Dewey asserted that reflection is key to learning and growth; that we do not learn from experience alone but from active reflection and application of ideas (Dewey, Experience and Education, 1938). Living and working in places far enough from the centripetal pull of the Black Hole means forever distilling and translating the core principles of whatever tidbit the discourse puts forward, just to be able to use it. Engaging with dominant discourses from a peripheral place fundamentally demands reflection.
And no place is peripheral to itself, or its people. Thus I am drawn to exemplars grounded in people’s overtly stated, specific positionalities… particularly those that also make reflexive reference to broader norms and realities. I see the view from small places and contexts as mapping the gaps between the Black Hole and specific worlds…offering situated reflexions and understandings that can be centered without absorbing or erasing other realities. Thank you to the many staff of UHI who offered me the gift of their reflections and understandings.
My plan is to share brief summaries and highlights from the findings of the thirty+ interviews and conversations that I got to engage in across the Highlands and islands of Scotland in fall of 2024.
Findings: Sociomaterial Intersections In the spirit of diving into the deep end, though, the first of the ‘findings’ I want to share is perhaps the most complex: the sociomaterial and sociotechnical intersections that last fall’s conversations on digital practices and belonging made visible.
Wait. What am I on about?
Sociomateriality: A theoretical perspective emerging from the field of organizational change, framing social and material aspects of technology and organizational processes and norms as intertwined and mutually constitutive, emphasizing the reciprocal influence of people and materials on each other.
Topology: Topology in social sciences is an approach that maps spatial relationships, connections, and power dynamics within social systems, identifying patterns and trends in order to explore structures and change.
Fundamentally, this project takes a sociomaterial and topological approach to its own research questions, trying to map how digital and cultural factors – what I’ve tended to call affordances in my digital work – combine with geographic and temporal/historical factors and power relations to shape people’s understanding of what belonging means in the institution.
This will not be the only post in which I explore the sociomaterial elements of the project findings, but is rather an attempt to introduce sociotechnical and topological perspectives as a ‘way of seeing’ in relation to this research. This post approaches the federated sites of UHI as a single institution: later posts will share specific site-based topologies and findings, particularly in relation to Gaelic and Highland and Island cultural preservation.
I’ve made the decision to write out findings narratively here, in broad strokes. I’ll highlight common themes and ground them a little in some of the perspectives that guided the journey. The annotated bibliography shared on this site outlines some of the academic literature used to ground the study, and myself and the former graduate student who worked with me on the bibliography recently submitted a literature review overviewing the shifting meanings of belonging for publication. More on and from the key takes on that paper – translated to plain language – in the next post in this series.
Basically, this project is me trying to explore my way to a deeper understanding of belonging and practice using all written meaning-making formats available…reports, open public posts, formal papers, bibliographies. Lordy. Who *designed* this study?!?
(Me. I blame me).
Topological approaches treat the idea of belonging as situated, relational, and process-based. In the context of digital education at UHI, a topological and sociomaterial approach tries to trace (some of) how belonging operates within, across, and beyond online and face-to-face constructs of ‘learning.’ The set of themes below are an effort to represent these entanglements. They serve as a multi-layered map to how UHI staff attempt to cultivate belonging, across a distributed, multi-campus institution grounded in a rural and culturally distinct landscape.
That landscape itself is a part of the map, and not only in the literal sense. The Scottish Highlands hold mythic power in all kinds of conflicting ways, from romantic literary stereotype through cultural idyll – or backwater – to stark nature preserve. All these narratives – cultural, historical, environmental, economic – factor into the way place shapes belonging, and for whom. The complexity of conversation around the Highlands’ reputation as remote – from what? – or depopulated – by whom? To what ends? – can only be touched on in the summary themes below. I draw on topology as a refusal of the old colonial lie of terra nullius, and as a way of making people and culture and language part of mapping
‘Learning in Place’: Digital Education as Weaving and Bridging The interviews revealed what might be called ‘hybrid cultural spaces’ where local and global educational values and technological and pedagogical practices interact. Historically, the Highlands and islands regions have had access largely only to practical and vocational education, with students needing to leave to seek higher education. UHI’s model distributes programs across its federated of local campuses and learning centres, often using digital learning as a means to enable people to (largely) learn ‘in place.’ Online programs enable people to remain rooted in their communities, while accessing educational opportunities that were previously unavailable without relocation.
Two key metaphors dominated the ways people spoke about UHI’s relationship to communities and to the intersection of digital practice and belonging: weaving and bridging.
One participant framed UHI’s programs, particularly online programs with low barriers to participation, as “open threads that might draw people or weave people into the fabric of higher education.” The institution – mostly discussed by participants in the context of their own individual campus – was also narrated as responsible for weaving together formal and informal learning pathways that serve both individual students and the broader communities.
The metaphor of weaving was thus used to conceptualize ties to higher and further education as well as to classmates in other communities across the Highlands and Islands. It was drawn on across the study on as a way of discussing the intentional work done on campuses to make belonging happen for students. It also emerged, in one case, as a means to talk about how UHI reinforces belonging in regional communities through the creation of opportunity and capacity to stay ‘in place.’
UHI’s college and learning centres were also, across multiple participant interviews and conversations, articulated as some form of transformative ‘bridge’ between traditional or local values and contemporary educational needs and opportunities. Digital and especially online learning practices were narrated as a key element in the building of that bridge…as well as keys to the fulfillment of the responsibility to ‘weave’ students into some sense of belonging.
Culture and Digital Technologies as Entanglements The intersections of technology and culture at UHI are complex, particularly in the sense that technology and modernity were regularly framed across interviews as needing to align with community and cultural values. Participants noted that the Highlands region historically maintains relatively traditional or conservative cultural values and power structures that can resist change, requiring UHI to be “quite calculated, or at least cautious” in how it introduces approaches that might threaten conventional power relations, practices, or social understandings.
Several staff mentioned the challenge of balancing the incursion of new technologies with pedagogy, with one noting that technology serves as a “magnifying glass” for pedagogy.
UHI has used distance and digital technologies from its inception, but participants emphasized a tendency to use technology in service of openly-stated human and educational ends rather than “solely for the sake of being shiny or innovative,” in part because the latter could be perceived negatively, as external impositions or “getting above one’s station.”
The overall focus on technology to support rather than supplant a human-centered concept of culture and belonging led to specific focus on participatory digital engagement and development of digital literacies. Multiple participants addressed the varying levels of digital literacies among their diverse student populations, including recognition that mature students sometimes need additional support developing the digital competencies necessary for academic success. Their framing extended digital literacies beyond basic technical and material skills to include building relationships, enabling participation, engaging meaningfully in online learning environments, and humanizing synchronous/ asynchronous spaces.
Technologies were also framed as a conduit from the local to the wider world, used to share the ways in which communities are “resource rich” in culture, music, and historical knowledge, as well as talented and capable professionals and educators. Beyond course offerings, digital technologies are used at UHI for professional development, mentoring networks, resource sharing, and community engagement initiatives aimed at respecting local contexts while connecting people to broader opportunities. One participant emphasized how technology enables “place-based education while maintaining local connections,” while another noted that UHI preserves local expertise and enables experts to remain in small communities that might not otherwise offer professional employment paths.
Power and Prestige: Layers of History Shaping Educational Perceptions As an institution, UHI balances competing versions of academic legitimacy: it must maintain scholarly credibility in a nation academically dominated by the prestige of ‘the ancients,’ while ensuring its educational offerings are “really focused on what the region needs economically.”
Top students were repeatedly referred to as being expected to leave the Highlands and Islands for higher education, unless family responsibilities tied them to place. While staff spoke passionately about higher learning and the academic quality of many programs, they also recognized and accepted that the process of building UHI as a first choice institution might be a long-term growth process.
The ways UHI staff discussed the sociomaterial power and prestige structures of academia reminded me of my framing, further up in this post, of the relationship between small places and the wryly-named Black Hole of Academic Hegemony. They clearly speak from two worlds, even with reference to academic prestige cultures within Scotland alone. Additionally, their perspectives are layered with complex histories: some situated the historical relationship between the Highlands and Islands and formal concepts of education as reaching back to Celtic ecclesiastical and community bardic traditions. Others referenced the Scottish Enlightenment, both as aspirational national history and as tool of historical harms of cultural erasure and assimilative education on Highland Gaelic.
The language of education over ‘barbarity’ that established SSPCK schooling throughout the Highlands in the 1700s rhymes darkly, for me as a Canadian, with our own legacy of Indigenous ‘residential schools’ established a century later, though the power relations in Scotland were less totalizing. The living tensions in whom education is seen to serve, and how, were resonant in the project data, however, and something I wanted to foreground early in my sharing of findings.
Constructing Belonging in Digital Spaces Overall, what emerged from these interviews was a complex picture of how belonging is constructed, conceived, and limited by UHI’s distributed digital nature.
Belonging at UHI was framed as operating differently from traditional universities, prioritizing “connection to place and community while enabling educational advancement through flexible, digitally-enabled pathways.” A key strength highlighted by many was that digital programming allows students to maintain local lives while accessing education, creating what one participant descibed as education “mediated through technology and wider participation in the world” rather than simply “online learning.”
Yet this model creates tensions around identity and community within the institution as a whole. The distributed nature of UHI means belonging becomes multi-layered, operating at program, campus, and institutional levels simultaneously. Most staff stated their primary sense of belonging as being to their local program or learning centre, rather than to the institution. The reliance on digital practices to navigate what staff describe as “balancing distinct identity with UHI integration” and “managing centralization pressures while maintaining cultural autonomy” means that a cohesive sense of belonging to UHI was difficult for most participants to access.
The sociotechnical reality of UHI highlights both the potential and limitations of technology as a factor in shaping belonging. While digital tools extend access and preserve local embeddedness, and appear to be used extensively to create in-course engagement and connections, they cannot fully create a sense of place that supersedes the local sense of place in which people live embodied lives.
Nor, necessarily, did I expect them to. But the message was clear.
I haven’t been able to write since US election day.
I live in Canada…admittedly, a four-minute drive from the tunnel to Detroit, but still. I am writing about a university in Scotland. These are all distinct nation-state compartments, each with its own colour on the map. But still.
Academic confession: I feel shame about my struggle to compartmentalize. I do not do well at simply sitting down to write, as if assertions and citations lie unbirthed inside me and mere discipline will call them into being. I do the discipline part: I sit. I type. I end up swallowing the words on the page, closing the laptop, walking away.
I am aghast, but the issue is not that I am aghast. My sense-making processes are overwhelmed. And overwhelm is the point – along with cruelty – but that knowledge does not magically gift me new coping mechanisms.
I am a patterner. Writing, for me, is a process of attunement, to connections and histories and power relations and trajectories. I am a sociotechnical researcher, tracing materialities and cultural forces and lived experiences in tandem. My methodology for this sabbatical project is topology: descriptive mapping of how elements of a set relate to each other. My epistemology is one of situated knowledge, a view from a body. I am thus ever in the set: no distance, no pretense of objectivity.
The process of writing is a matter of making a mark, staking a small claim on the world, seeing how the world looks from the vantage of that claim.When the patterns and realities inscribed by the act of writing are too much for me to process, there is no way out but through.
And though topology is mapping, there is no map to follow. It is mapping in an older register: Beyond Here There Be Dragons. *** I know I am not accustomed to the dragons being *thisclose*.
I was born into a time of relative historical stability and a location and positionality of relative privilege. Maps as I grew up with them were *fairly* stable, even as the labels on the USSR and Zaire and Burma became obsolete. Old liberal order post-colonial maps are pleasant convenient fictions of stability, but also guardrails, of a sort. So long as we’re not in Kazakhstan or Congo or Myanmar or another site of (localized) upheaval at a Very Difficult Time, they promise, these guardrails constitute us as subjects of a stable world with known boundaries and hierarchies.
(The hierarchies, notably, are inescapable. *Their* purpose is to constitute us as subjects of the raced, gendered dominance structures of capitalist patriarchy, material vestiges of what Donna Haraway calls the “polluted inheritance of the Enlightenment.” Some subjects are far more equal than others. We all know the calculus, even as it varies in its local stratifications…and in how we align to reinforce or challenge it, politically.)
But this baked-in inequality isn’t enough for the dragons. They want to kick down the guardrails, erase the subjecthood and supports of as many as possible who don’t look like Fox News hosts, and – in spite of already sitting on hoards of gold – unleash all kinds of damage to increase their coffers, inside and outside the borders of their map.
Perhaps reading 20+ books about Scottish history this past year makes me wary of assuming that the maps and the historical distinctions of a nation perched just above an Empire can be solid things, forever.
Living at the southern tip of Canada the past few weeks, amidst the tariff threats and a level of fifty-first state bluster unheard of in my lifetime, feels uncomfortably like living in Austria right before The Sound of Music.
Those are very different types of trajectories, of course. But both were entirely unthinkable in the Canada-US context even a couple of months ago.
Many do not believe in dragons anymore, or in Nazis, no matter what salutes they see on TV. I do too much work in patterns to be nearly so comfortable. *** The forces at work to undermine the old order and its institutions have been at work in higher ed for a generation now. My university is spiralling financially, leading my family to spiral through the fall as my partner sought out another job before the hiring freeze took half our income on December 31. The university I partnered with for this sabbatical project is undergoing its own “structural changes” at the moment. Out of respect for the people I interviewed in depth back in September and October, I have been wary of releasing findings about belonging in that space right now…because I know the space is shifting under their feet.
The dragons and their wanna-bes have AI to sell us, purported to do what institutions of education do, only better. They wield their carrots of promised ease and efficiencies and their sticks of fear and FOMO both at the blinding speed of a hype cycle about to crash. They frame the narrative so that it is difficult to focus, most notably, on what handing over our flawed, fragile, polluted inheritances to automated decision-making will do to all the complex things that have no right answers and all the humans trying to live with dignity on margins that do not show on maps. (Edit: Audrey Watters posted on some of these impacts today…you should read her post).
I designed this sabbatical project on belonging and place because I did not want to hop astride the hype cycle and write about AI. I use it, sparingly but intentionally. I understand what it can do at a technical level but also a little of what it can take away from us and I am wary. Yet my institutional computer installed a whole new Apple Intelligence suite automatically, in its last update, and now each time I sit down to write I need not only to grapple with myself and my brain but against the design of my very tools in order to struggle through this connective act of writing and thinking. And I wonder whether reflexive writing for its own sake is perhaps more valuable than I give it credit for, in a world threatened by dragon logic.
And I force myself to write my way through, to make claims on this careening world, and hit publish.
Scotland was the longest trip I have taken on my own in twenty years…the kind of trip long enough for day-to-day mundanity to emerge, long enough that even the Scottish brogue lost a little of its shine and began to sound everyday. In the best way 😉
In the days after I made it home, my family members trickled homeward, too – elder child from college for the first time, partner from a work trip to Australia. The family unit, briefly reunited. Long enough for us to curl up in our well-worn grooves and familiarities, pushing all the old buttons. In the best way. ***
But that was a blink. Another work trip for Dave. Back to college for the elder kid.
And me, bumbling blithely through my days, like Olaf the snowman trying to do whatever it is professors do on sabbatical. Is it coding? I hope it’s coding.
I stick my fingers in my ears and try to ignore the strike mandate looming over the Ontario college system, the hiring freeze at our university. Stiff upper lip; queer shoulder to the wheel.
And then I sit back from the data and laugh, because what I’m coding right now, across hundreds of pages of transcripts from my Scotland interviews, is uncertainty.
This belonging project was always meant to have a mental health facet: to interrogate the protections a sense of belonging can – optimally – create amidst the transitions and becoming of education. The theoretical underpinnings of this work frame belonging as “situated, relational, and processual,” a sociomaterial practice. (Annotated bibliography for the project coming soon, by the way. Bear with me)
So I was ready to code for relational practice and cultural practice and digital practice, all intersecting and situated.
But nested in my transcripts, as in Every Other Layer of the personal and political Matryoshka doll that is the world as I can bring it into focus right now, is uncertainty, everywhere. Uncertainty of belonging, uncertainty of definition and category, uncertainty of futures. Uncertainty that any of us as educators can carry all that is being laid on us right now.
Not in the best way, FWIW. This is not the kind of familiar I think we want to grow comfortable in.
There’s a post-lockdown shock that seems visible in this data. Many interviewees noted changes in student needs and behaviour and engagement, yes, after the emergency online pivot – a disassociation and distancing from conventional expectations, in a sense, with both the challenges and the potential for widening participation that are implied in that. But there’s something more that I’m coding and I’m trying to make sense of it.
We live in so many layers at once. Relentless change. Our sector in austerity. The US election looming and climate change breathing down our necks and billionaires continuing to behave as if the only futures that matter are their own and those of their bottom lines. The horrors of Gaza. Other rippling horrors I do not even know to name, and escalating geopolitical instability making it likely more horrors will emerge.
What does it mean to live and teach and learn amidst collapsing systems? What happens when you have to confront collapse?
There’s a distinction in the way interviewees talk about the pre- and post-lockdown systems they work/ed in, inhabit, aim to be citizens and educators in. The one-two punch of ‘the unprecedented’ followed by the abandonment of a multitude of pretences traces a tree ring in the conversation, a mark of environment on individual…but over and over until it is clearly not an individual mark. I wish I’d asked more questions about this, while I was in Scotland. At the same time, I doubt this is unique to Scotland.
I wonder if most of us who grew up otherwise sheltered by accident of birth from the direct impacts of war, genocide, blatant and visible corruption and unfettered capital have a similar tree ring in our psyches, marking the last five years or so? What does this do to belonging, even in the midst of privilege? ***
I remember the shock of standing in front of my evening class – our final class of the year – on Thursday, March 12, 2020. The Ontario government had announced at 4pm that schools would be closed for at least two weeks following the impending March Break. I’d spent an hour on the phone frantically scrambling to figure out whether my March Break trip to NYC was refundable (spoiler: mostly. Small mercies). My students, pre-service educators set to go out on practicum immediately following March Break, had questions I had no clue how to answer. I could barely fathom telling my kids they were going to be off school for three weeks. Unprecedented.
I could not actually have imagined a world in which they’d be off until September…and then only back sporadically for the year following. I could not at all imagine that most of the first year B.Ed students in front of me would graduate fourteen months later having barely set foot in a face-to-face classroom again. Unprecedented.
Nor could I have imagined that nearly two full years later we’d stagger out of lockdown into million dollar blockades at the international border bridge in our city. The bridge was a kilometre from my younger kid’s school, that year. The protesters, ostensibly mad about the lockdown that was now ending as well as about the vaccine mandates that were a condition of its end, were armed with signs that read “keep kids in school.” Their blockade meant my kid missed additional days of school due to the security risk their illegal protest created. Unprecedented. Also – at least for me – unfathomable.
There is a great deal I have not yet fathomed about my own experience of the lockdown window. In the years since it ended, I know my own institution has put significant effort into a comprehensive mental health plan…but I stopped clicking the wellness-branded mental health-related links back during the lockdown.
They do not help me feel belonging. They do not help me confront what it means to live and work in the shadow of system collapse. They do not help me process my own tree rings, or the recognition that I do not want this current version of the familiar to become comfortable. ***
There are so many other threads to this line of coding…stratification, histories, musings on how GenAI hype is being deployed to distract us from our tree rings and posit a future unreliant on collective human cooperation because…well…the recent past and current state of the world. I’ll wander my way through these ideas eventually, along with the annotated bibliography.
But for the moment…I’m curious whether the idea of a collective post-lockdown mark on us resonates, beyond the boundaries of my data. What are your post-lockdown tree rings? And what sits with you now, becoming familiar but still uncomfortable?
– the opening stanza of GUN LASADH AN TAOBH TUATH, in its English translation written by Meg Bateman for the formal opening of UHI
The first time I came to the Isle of Skye, I was nearly twenty-nine. It was Hallowe’en. Only one little girl came to trick or treat at the backpacker hostel. I think my backpacking companion and I ended up eating the whole remainder of their fun-size Mars bars.
I’d never had British chocolate before. I was smitten.
I hadn’t travelled before either, in a sense. I’d lived and taught on all three coasts of Canada at that point – and stretched outside my culture and comfort zone – but I’d never really been a tourist. I’d been jealously enchanted by friends’ stories of Europe, of South America, of Japan. And here I was, finally, in a hostel bed of my own, riddled with insomnia and still pinching myself, anxious and exhausted and as smitten with the experience as with the chocolate, in spite of myself.
I remember that the north of Skye in its stark fall carpet reminded me a little of the Arctic, lichens and mosses colouring the hills when there are no trees to speak of. I remember that it took my breath.
(I never even made it to the Fairy Glen then, and still Skye took my breath. I rectified the oversight of the fairies this past weekend. Highly recommend).
The Fairy Glen, Isle of Skye
Somewhere in a box is a black-bound sketchbook from that trip long ago, filled with the tight triangular font of my own hand. I wrote in straight lines across the blank pages, in coffee shops and bus stations, jotting out small travelogues of the places my friend and I found ourselves. Impressions. Funny stories. My own internal narrative, spilled out diary-style. I was on a journey away from a marriage that would not see out the year. I was overwhelmed. The writing grounded me, helped me navigate between the strange, confronting minutiae of my own foreignness – why did everything smell of lard? – and the vast shadow of loss.
I had just completed my Masters degree, literally a week before. Somewhere in the journal, feeling deeply bardic, I toyed my way through the idea that Skye itself was a university: rich in history, geology, language, music. I believe the term “the inescapable physics of rocks” may be recorded as the end to that particular train of thought.
I was clearly more bard than physicist. 😉 ***
– part of Part II of GUN LASADH AN TAOBH TUATH, in its English translation written by Meg Bateman for the formal opening of UHI
I do not come from that bardic line: the McMhuirichs, Clan Currie. But I did not know that about then.
Nor did I know that Skye had its own Gaelic college, Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, the only entirely Gaelic medium centre of higher education in all the world. It would have been, at that time, being woven into the fabric of what would become the University of Highlands and Islands.
I did not know then any of the learned traditions of the old Gaels, or make any connections between here and the Celtic monasteries of Ireland and Iona.
But yesterday, at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, on the green southern edge of Skye, I got to interview a medievalist who reminded me carefully of those connections and also the fractures that invisibilize them. Then the poet and scholar Meg Bateman, whose poem for UHI was sent to me back in the spring, when I’d used the term ‘constellation’ in a presentation about this sabbatical project. I interviewed a lecturer based in Belfast whose mother is from PEI, and a teacher educator who grew up in Cape Breton. The locating of self in place was a constant source of connection, almost pedagogical.
My first conversation with the Principal asked about a mutual acquaintance in PEI, a scholar of Island Studies.
Another interaction inquired about my Stewart family, or rather my Stiùbhart family…and told me that my mother’s people, the McNevins or McNivens, were once NicNevins or witches of fairy queen lore.
I remain smitten. So long as there are no burnings. 😉
From greetings to the hum of lunch conversation around me, from the Principal to the gentleman serving baked potatoes, all was Gaelic. I caught more words than I’d have imagined. I met a former UHI Vice-something or other from Inverness who has come to Sabhal Mòr Ostaig for the year and is living in residence as a student of Gaelic. I was shown a PEI-based thesis, and recognized the name of its author as one I’d seen on the introduction of a text on PEI Gaelic history that I’ve literally had open in a tab since summer. I went outside to meet my next interview, and shared that coincidence. That PEI text? May have been introduced by the thesis writer, but it had been WRITTEN BY THE FATHER OF THE WOMAN I WAS ABOUT TO INTERVIEW.
I have never felt so at home away from home.
Katie Wight of UHI SMO & myself, with the long-open tab on my computer to her father’s work
All was webs of connection, built on fractures that run deep and old but have not fully swallowed a people or a language. And they were generous, though my very presence served as a black hole, sucking the Gaelic from the air, at least for a moment.
I will try to learn before I return, again. ***
Hard-won skills and reclamations are not simple victories. What you do not want lost must be chosen, again and again.
The journal that I scribbled in on Skye years ago was one of many in a series that I kept over a period of maybe a decade from my early twenties to my early thirties. It was neither first nor last, but it was the one in which I learned to write about travel and the day-to-day unfamiliar. The voice I brought to my blogging, later, had its roots in that writing, though I wrote for myself… a future self. To preserve something.
It was a way to record and think, yes, but also a companion. I could sit in pubs and write, and be left alone because I was clearly and actively busy. I could pass time jotting things down or reading them over.
But then I blinked and I no longer journaled. I preserved the habit of writing, if intermittently. But I succumbed to the new and dominant form, and wrote online. I thought I would keep journalling, too, now and then.
I have not journaled in nearly twenty years.
When you do not choose a thing, it morphs quickly into an artifact from the past.
The friend and I who travelled Skye this past weekend made it around the top of the island, on some staggering single track roads. We stumbled on the MacArthur cairn at Duntulm, framed against the sky, looking out to Lewis and Harris. It honours one of the old Gaelic schools of this place, and I have not been able to stop thinking about it.
It reads: This cairn is to commemorate the MacArthurs, hereditary pipers to the MacDonalds of the Isles During the 18th century their school of piping stood at nearby Peingown
Thig crioch air an t-saoghal Ach mairidh gaol is ceol The world will end, but love and music endureth
“He’s from Cornwall, actually, which is why he moved here…it’s so like home.”
“Why move it out of the pub? The Wee Free people don’t come anyway…”
“I’m in the middle of my three weeks holiday, but they say the job’s gonna be done anyway…I take it as a sign there’s gonna be nothing to come back to.” ***
I am eavesdropping, though it is more accident than choice.
I’m in a bookshop on Stornoway harbour on the Isle of Lewis, in a corner chair, Morris-upholstered. On the shelf is a cookbook I have at home. It is one of those early fall days on a northern island where the sun is high and the water sparkles, blindingly. I have been effectively alone for six days, isolating with COVID. I tested clear this morning.
My release from isolation makes the human conversation around me enchanting. My ears perk up at all these negotiations of the world. Many are debates about religion and Sunday shopping – the last Tesco in the UK to be closed on Sundays is planning to open here come November – but not all. The conversations weave in and out, young dudes. Older women. Mixed groups whose ties I cannot scry. Opinions and prejudices and economics and humour all intermixed. A young server convinces a patron to take the bigger slice of cake left on the tray.
Here, I hear snippets of Gaelic, casually, for the first time in my life. I took six months of DuoLingo Scottish Gaelic lessons during lockdown, learning cultural bangers like “I like turnips” and “You are stupid, Ian,” neither of which I wish to test out in practice. Still. To recognize the cadence and the roll of the language in daily conversation moves me, even if I catch little meaning.
But to hear Gaelic spoken in the street also sparks a sorrow I hadn’t anticipated, a catch in my breath. Four generations lost from me, this language of my ancestors.
I had never noticed how the word belonging has ‘longing’ in it, hidden in plain sight. ***
But there are things even older than Gaelic. Things whose people – whoever they may have been – are so long gone from this earth that none can claim them, or even fully grasp them.
The Callanish (Gaelic: Calanais) standing stones are the oldest works of human hands that I have ever seen. Older than the pyramids, Stonehenge, the Great Wall of China.
I posted this picture and only managed to be a thousand years off. They’re not 4000 years old. They’re 5000 years old. I cannot get my mind around it.
Nor can I capture it in words in any way that isn’t clumsy. They are surreal, if tonnes of stone – by its nature, not so ephemeral – can be surreal.
It is a pilgrimage, walking up to the circle at the hilltop, between guardstones that flank the muddy path. The view is unbroken in all directions, nothing but sheep and small clusters of houses, hills and water. And then these ancient, sacred stones, warmed by the sun. Rough and textured. Almost friendly.
That’s the extraordinary thing, the one I bumbled over in the post above. It’s not meant to be “look, I touched them!”
Rather, it is that they are so accessible as to be touchable. I felt awe and humility in their shadow. But I also felt at home. To touch them is to remind the body that they are of the earth and we are of the earth.
Apparently they were not seen as friendly, locally, for a long time. My former colleague from Windsor lives on Lewis, and works for UHI. She picked me up today after my coffee shop exploits, and took me to Callanish. Her granny grew up at the foot of the hill…where no one talked about the stones. Some of the church stories suggested they were evil, men turned to stone for refusing Christianity.
‘The false men,’ they were called – “fir bhrèige,” in Gaelic.
We are all so very small.
We are a superstitious and migratory lot, we humans, fraught with longings, across time and space. We strut and fret our hours and leave our breadcrumbs, on hilltops or in coffeeshops. All – whether comment or monument – only strange snippets, often to be misunderstood, much of the time.
And yet. So much beauty in it all, even that which I know I do not understand.
“Well, that’s not an Inverness accent,” remarks the man pouring coffee.
I am walking from campus in towards the city. I’ve stumbled into some sort of children’s fair, lured by bright bunting triangles strung about a park and a food truck emblazoned with a Coffee Roasters banner. I am staying in student residence for the week, and there is no coffee maker.
My smile is one of genuine recognition, not deflection. The man is speaking the language of my childhood. His words could be wielded to exclude or to acknowledge, depending on whether I am being spoken about or to. But his gaze is direct and friendly: it seeks to place me, not Other me. He is also holding coffee. So I hold forth: a little blurb on where I am from, what I am doing here. In its own way this is a script of hospitality. I’ve had the same conversations in small towns in Turkey, in Ireland, in North Carolina.
To say “you’re not from here” can carry entirely different power dynamics, true. The sensibilities of my childhood do not carry in the modern cosmopolitan everywhere/nowhere, in which to mark another as an outsider can carry a kernel of threat or ignorance…or at the very least a whiff of commerce, a prelude to somebody selling something.
It turns out the coffee man is not even selling coffee: it’s free, for people at the children’s fair.
I have no children in tow, but he will not let me pay. ***
On my first night in Inverness, my host drove me from the train station to my digs on campus, past road signs incongruously plastered with mythical place names. Culloden. Cawdor. Quite a one-two punch on a single roundabout.
We shall be kings hereafter, I whispered under my breath. And then I laughed at myself.
I know these are actually just roads, not Narnia-like gateways to destiny and tragedy and the misty distant past. But they sound like that to me.
This mythic territory is, most recently, the newly-reinvented landscape of Outlander, with twenty tourist tours available to map a Netflix-altered history and hunger for romantic kilts and castles.
I have avoided the Outlander/Sir Walter Scott version of Highland romanticism and lost cause tourism thus far. I am not out here in a Royal Mile kilt buying Stewart keychains and tea towels. But the idea of a Narnia-like gateway to the old order of the Gaels still thumps something deep in my imagination. Or my gut. I have tried very hard to keep it in check all week.
I know it’s a weird thing to live in a place that other people experience as mythical. I spent my teenage years in puffed sleeves, part of PEI’s Anne of Green Gables tourism-industrial complex. I took pleasure in denuding innocent tourists of their belief that Anne was an historical figure.
One summer, at the main Parks Canada Green Gables house in Cavendish, I played all the characters except Anne on the nightly walks on the red dirt laneways of the Haunted Wood. Marilla’s long skirt and apron as a top layer, Diana Barry’s swiss dot dress underneath, Gilbert’s knickers hiding under the pantaloons. A tour guide would escort throngs of visitors through the woods, with Anne & I popping up to enact vignettes from the story at various points. Scene concluded, we’d race onward, me discarding layers of clothing as I ran. Once I failed to strip down fully and did an entire scene as Gilbert, Anne’s erstwhile boyfriend, with my bright blue Diana bow stuck on the top of my head. Oopsie.
And yet. I may have cut my teeth on disillusioning tourists, but I am an English major for whom Cawdor conjures up all the magic of the Scottish play. And I am a Stewart, a descendent of the Jacobite Stewarts of Appin, defeated at the last battle on British soil. I grew up on Brigadoon.
***
The thing about Scotland is that – as a country – it’s three raccoons in a trench coat, passing as a single coherent entity. Go to the Culloden museum if you have any doubt.
Everybody outside Scotland loves Scotland, foreign and quaint but not too foreign, great collection of accents, progressive, bit of a witchy vibe. Of course, there’s also Trainspotting. And I am in the territory of the Gàidhealtachd, perhaps one of the first cultures to experience the dubious ‘first oppress, then appropriate’ nature of colonial empire: bagpipes, anyone? They were outlawed for forty years, as instruments of war. A piper was put to death. But a hundred years later, Queen Victoria decided she was into them, and now you’d think that the British military and royals – piped in and out of their official events – had fought on the other side of Culloden.
Long united with its more dominant partner in the project of Empire, Scotland left behind its Declaration of Arbroath for Union and – like Canada to the US – gets to be the little sister who shrugs and says “it wasn’t me!”
(I say this all with love, Scotland. Please don’t send me home. They’re very nice raccoons. And a charming tartan trenchcoat.)
Sometimes mundanity is a strange gift, in that it breaks the spell of myth and makes it easier to get your feet under you. I have had a good healthy dose of mundanity this week, living in student halls for the first time in thirty odd years. I have done my shopping, found my favourite puddings at the local TESCO: the rhubarb crumble and the chocolate ganache, both improved with clotted cream. Screw cholesterol. I dealt with a broken heater, and a COVID diagnosis that interrupted some of my travels and interviews with absolutely lovely UHI staff…though we went online so not too much work was lost. I learned many of the staff are less Highlanders than I, by heritage…but they are of this place. The myth of the place is not the work of this school. The work of this school is an antidote to the romanticism that render the Highlands a largely empty tragic past, a place of once and future kings.
It is tempting, as an outsider, to imagine you understand a place. I don’t.
But I understood enough to accept the coffee man’s free coffee, his hospitality, last weekend at the park. Here’s to whatever’s next.
I cut my hair last week. Short short. On the first day of school. Not MY first day of school, admittedly…I am on sabbatical, not teaching this year. But September is the fresh start season.
A drastic haircut can be breathtakingly freeing. At nineteen, I walked into a SuperCuts with a big 90s mane and walked out shorn. I felt unmoored and at the same time entirely myself, in a way I had no language for at the time. The sharp dopamine hit of having to confront the shape of my skull has lured me back to short hair at least once every decade since.
The dopamine is not necessarily – entirely – related to the actual end result. It’s the intentional shedding of form, the release, that triggers it.
Ten days on, I still look unfamiliar to myself. I don’t know what it means for a menopausal human to intentionally make the self LESS visible. But the haircut I’d been sporting for six+ years demanded a hair dryer. Hairspray. Time and cultivation and limited atmospheric humidity. And tomorrow – if the gods don’t toy with me – I take a smallish suitcase to Scotland for nearly a month, with student accommodation and rain in the forecast. In cutting off the pompadour, I was releasing a standard that was about to exceed my grasp. Vanity is a highly protective instinct.
I noted on Facebook that while I went in aiming for 90s Winona Ryder, I seem to have landed more in my elder Eliot Page era. Here I am. Fresh start.
***
The question of what era I’m in is less flippant than it seems on the surface. This is a season of shearing, hair and moorings both.
I am a teacher on my first sabbatical. I am a mother whose elder child – now eighteen – has grown and flown for college, while the younger turned sixteen on Tuesday and got her driver’s permit. I am an only child whose mother – four provinces away – is in a shifting stage in her own life. I am a partner whose spouse’s contract ends in December and who got an email from our mutual institution this week confirming an immediate hiring freeze. I am a higher education worker watching my field and sector grow increasingly enclosed by business jargon and Generative AI hype that fails utterly to address our existential crises. I am mortgaged to the hilt.
As befits the life arc and every stereotype of middle age, I am also solidly in my genealogy era. I spent a month this past summer in Prince Edward Island, still ‘home’ even after six years in Upper Canada. I dragged my cheerful mother through derelict cemeteries and church hall basements in search of an ancestor; her great-grandfather, my great-great. Donald McNiven came to PEI from an island off the west coast of Scotland in the 1840s, in what I was raised to think of as the Irish Potato Famine. That blight and much of the ensuing human devastation actually extended to the Highlands, if in slightly different political form.
In the Hebridean islands, where my mother’s people came from, the famine was the last gasp of a class of Gaels – the cottars – whose livelihoods had been squeezed into near oblivion by the rise of market capitalism and commodity boom/bust cycles as the ancient clan lands financialized. Some cottars were cleared – forced to emigrate – by landlords, along with the more aspirational economic migrant classes of their so-called betters. Others hung on, though as cottars held no land and lived on the edges of crofting families’ small and increasingly divided plots, their place in the order of things largely fades from record. Then the potatoes – which in two generations had come to form nearly 80% of Highland diets – rotted in the ground.
The grandparents of this ancestor of mine had sailed for PEI some thirty years before the famine, with their young adult children and – if baptism records on the Isle of Coll are accurate – all but seven of the McNiven name. But one of those adult children returned to Coll, perhaps unhappy as an emigrant. One sandbar island is not the same as another, and while Scots settlement communities in the early 1800s on PEI were largely Gaelic and populated by kinship networks, home and belonging are complicated things. This returning McNiven raised his family on Coll, amongst a drastically reduced extended family and dwindling economic prospects. Until the potatoes rotted. His son Donald then re-emigrated to Bonshaw, PEI in the late 1840s, settling not far from uncles, aunts, and cousins who had been there a generation.
I didn’t know all this til this past summer. There is much we still don’t know…likely never will. We do know my great-grandfather John was born in 1859, the eighth of Donald’s nine children. In the span of John’s seventy+ years, he and many of his generation of settlers assimilated into the emerging middle-class world of Anglo-Scots Canadians, unmooring themselves from both stigma and Highland identity. John moved the fifteen miles from Bonshaw to the capital, and became a businessman, an Oddfellow, a Masonic Grandmaster. No longer cottars or Gaels, our family line became generic Protestant Scots in the upright ascendancy sense. John’s obituary from the 1930s never mentions his parents. We never did find my great-great-grandfather’s grave…only a monument to the extended family, who in PEI morphed – almost to a one – from McNivens to MacNevins.
***
I looked, though, because I am headed to the Highlands tomorrow. As my sabbatical project, I will serve as a Visiting Fellow with the University of Highlands and Islands (UHI) this year. UHI is a distributed institution, spread across 12 campuses and 70 learning centres. It enables students to stay in rural, remote communities – or travel to new ones – and gain an education, often through an extensive infrastructure of digital practice. I have worked in institutions with similar mandates to UHI, both in the Maritimes and in the Canadian Arctic, early in my career. As my field careens toward Generative AI and credentialism, I want to look instead at belonging, in a place that fundamentally has to consider what it means.
I am interested in UHI’s potential as an exemplar for how we might build and foster educational opportunities that strengthen belonging, among students and higher education workers and communities, in an uncertain world. Sometimes the best exemplars are not the big dots on the map, the dominant centres of prestige. Sometimes, when looking for models, it is interesting to invert ideas of centrality and periphery and see what you turn up.
In the coming weeks, I will visit nine UHI campuses and talk to staff about digital practices and pedagogies, and the socio-material ideas and experiences that constitute what they understand as belonging. Later, I’ll hold an online focus group for students, as well, and will return next spring to hold up a small mirror of findings to the institutional community. I am incredibly grateful to UHI Dean of Learning & Teaching, Keith Smyth, for his enthusiasm and support in making this project possible.
I am also a little terrified. I am an outsider. I do not want to get it wrong. I like to think I understand peripheral places and sandbars…but I am acutely aware, at the same time, that I myself do not belong to the Highlands and Hebrides.
In PEI, I have a not-uncommon name, shared in full – first and last – by at least five others that I know of. In a province that into my childhood was still stratified entirely by the colonial settler identities of a century before, my name is an immediately legible marker of Scottish identity. But the first time I actually made it to Scotland and was asked my name in a bar, my “Hi, I’m Bonnie” was received with a laugh and an “Aye, ye are, lass, but what’s your NAME?” I was mortified.
It had never occurred to me that in Scotland, Bonnie – a literal adjective – is a bit of a ridiculous flex as a name.
Diasporic communities lean in, as a means of trying to hold on to the ephemera that is culture. We mark ourselves, often without recognizing that we are signalling belonging NOT to those in our spaces of origin – where and if they remain – but in our contemporary mosaic societies. bell hooks says this better than I in her reflection on belonging and identity and race in Kentucky (which will – as I get organized – soon be one of the core texts populating the ‘annotated bibliography’ section of this site)…
“Living away from my native place I became more consciously Kentuckian than I was when I lived at home. This is what the experience of exile can do, change your mind, utterly transform one’s perception of the world of home.” ― bell hooks, Belonging: A Culture of Place
The dual purpose of this site is to be a space both for the academic work that grounds and emerges from this project, and for documenting my reflections on getting to DO that work, travel journal-style. Or old school blog style, really. If the Air Canada labour agreement announced in the middle of the night last night doesn’t implode in the next 24 hours, I get to explore belonging at an intersection of practices and throughlines that my career and cultural upbringing should make legible to me, but in a place still entirely unfamiliar and not my own. I feel like I’ve won the lottery.
Many years ago, I wrote myself through unmooring. I blogged, then, “to leave a mark in the snow,” as I framed it. It seems like hubris, now, in a sense. In a time when AI can write jaunty summaries of my research in a blink, the question of “why would I make the effort to write?” is one that haunts me, as an educator.
But when I do not write, there is only snow.
So I will write, on this sabbatical, to try to make meaning as I go. Maybe in order to keep going. In the personal sense, in the generational sense, in the sense of my cultural and professional contexts. These are what I have. And I carry them all, like awkward bundles in my arms, stumbling – shorn, my head high – into whatever is next. Fresh starts.
