The politics of student belonging: identity and purpose

ABSTRACT

Belonging is considered to be a positive foundation for students’ well-being and success at university; however, in this article, we argue that it is time to think about belonging more critically. This research highlights how students experience and create multiple belongings. Drawing upon empirical data from interviews and video blogs with students in the UK and Australia, we identify how calls for integrated, uniform, approaches to building belonging in universities are unhelpful. Instead, we foreground the situated and political ways in which students make and curate meaningful and purposeful connections and safe spaces. Our research points to the personalised nature of belonging. We show how individual learners often enact belonging in ways that disrupt or challenge institutional assumptions and expectations. We advocate for critical discussions between staff and students related to the affordances of embracing the multiple ways students choose to belong, at different times and in different spaces.

KEYWORDS:

• Belonging
• inclusion
• video-blogging
• higher education
• undergraduate

Introduction

Recent research, policy, and practice have begun to engage with the complex concept of belonging in ways that are having significant impacts on higher education. Recognising the urgent need to support diverse populations of students, to respond to concerning statistics reporting poor student mental health and wellbeing, and to redress some of the ongoing isolation following the COVID-19 pandemic, belonging has become a term that appears to promise a great deal – if we can just support, or ‘build’ it effectively. However, belonging is a complex sociological idea, and a troubling tension exists between sectoral desires to fix and foster an abiding ‘sense of belonging’, and the multiple, affective, and material ways in which diverse individuals experience belonging. In this article, we draw upon student narratives (both verbal and visual) that examine the ways in which they experience, create and conceptualise belonging. In particular, the values and judgements that students make about belonging as well as the experiential sense of enacting belonging. We tease out some suggestions for more critical ways in which we might understand students’ diverse experiences, as well as offer a warning against the pitfalls of potentially simplistic definitions or solutions.

Belonging and inclusion

Emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic, there is renewed scrutiny on the purposes of higher education. A recent report from UNESCO (UNESCO 2021) identifies the need for all higher education institutions to place equity front and centre in order to promote lifelong learning, identifying how educational equity needs to ‘embrace humanity’s many forms of knowledge and expression’. (p.26) UNESCO is unerring in its criticism of universities who have prioritised research ahead of widening access to, and participation in, learning opportunities. The report calls for a new ‘social contract’ for education that considers and recognises each learner’s sense of identity whether that be ‘cultural’, ‘spiritual’, ‘social’, or ‘linguistic’; identifying how this recognition ‘in curriculum, pedagogy, and institutional approaches can directly impact student retention, mental health, self-esteem, and community well-being’ (ibid, p. 27). Such calls to action have resulted in higher education systems in some countries engaging in broad and systematic discussions of their genuine purpose (e.g. Australian Universities Accord). The need for meaningful discourse in this field is imperative as Ashwin (2022) urges the sector to look beyond the university as the central organising unit of purpose and instead consider much broader societal educational purposes, in order to avoid perpetuating educational disadvantage.

As the student population increases and diversifies, the sector needs to work creatively to support each learner to achieve inclusivity but importantly this needs to be on their terms and related to unique circumstances. In her vision of the inclusive university, and drawing from critical theory, McArthur (2021, 7) states a need to:

move the debate on the inclusive university forward by not seeking to simplify it through definition, but by embracing its complexity through contested ideas. … [the] common aim is a society inclusive of everyone as both flourishing individuals and members of that society.

We draw from this argument to consider the notion of belonging not as a vague ‘“feel good” idea that lacks conceptual robustness and thus serves very little purpose’ (ibid) but rather as a complex concept experienced in a myriad of unexpected and unique ways.

Traditionally, notions of belonging in higher education policy have been somewhat individualised and the university is positioned as the ‘subject’ of this belonging. Despite the diversity of the student body and the dynamic/temporal nature of belonging, key metrics are used to gauge a student’s sense of belonging, and a relatively homogeneous perspective of the positive nature of belonging is prevalent. Discourses of belonging are in danger of perpetuating neoliberal cultures of meeting students’ expectations of university as consumers and placing the onus on educators to provide certain learning experiences to students whilst simultaneously placing the responsibility for ‘achieving’ belonging squarely on the shoulders of the students themselves (Gravett, Ajjawi, and Shea 2023). This mirrors academic staff discourses of not belonging as an individualised (in deficit) case of imposter syndrome rather than structural exclusion and othering (Rickett and Morris 2021). Importantly, such neoliberal discourses have been repeatedly critiqued for placing profit ahead of equity and inclusion (Giroux 2002).

Achieving a sense of belonging is used increasingly to describe an ideal educational state, put simply, feeling like you belong within an environment is key to feeling like you should be there. Achieving belonging has reported strong psychological benefits (Allen et al. 2021). Of course, belonging is not limited to education but is equally important in work, relationships and also, society in general. Having a singular ‘sense of belonging’ has been regarded as a key ingredient to student success and retention, but, as Marshall and colleagues (2012, 135) contend belonging is ‘a complex, multi-layered concept with many facets of perception’. We start with outlining key notions of student belonging in the literature, highlighting barriers to belonging before showing the multiple belongings students experience within contemporary universities and how these are both situated and political.

The discourses of belonging at university

Belonging is becoming a prevalent discourse within the ‘feeling’ university – for example, in their large survey of students, Blake and colleagues (2022) identify four foundational components of students’ feeling of belonging as connection, inclusion, support, and autonomy, often conflating belonging and inclusion. These discourses that inform ‘best practice’ tend to adopt traditional perspectives of belonging as psychological and individual. Belonging is often thought of as an internal feeling or a fundamental human need (Baumeister and Leary 1995). In these conceptions that drive measurement and broader policy, achieving belonging is generally positioned as a positive endeavour something that should be fostered in students, who are typically passive and ready recipients of this welcoming. Student belonging encompasses feeling accepted, respected, valued, and supported by the institution, staff, and other students. Strayhorn (2019) describes belonging as: ‘a feeling or sensation of connectedness, and the experience of mattering or feeling cared about, accepted, respected, valued by, and important to the campus community or others on campus such as faculty, staff, and peers’ (p.4). A sense of university belonging has also been linked to students’ positive self-perceptions of social acceptance within the institution and scholastic competence (Thomas 2012).

And yet this institutional perspective and positive discourse elides the politics of belonging. This is important to consider if we are to meet our educational responsibilities for diverse students and diverse societies. Yuval-Davis (2006, 202) notes that constructions of belonging ‘reflect emotional investments and desire for attachments’ – these emotional components of belonging and identity ‘become more central the more threatened and less secure’ people feel. Belonging, then, can be understood ‘as a practice and a product of the relations of power embedded in the field of higher education, constructed around the privileged identities of the “typical” or “authentic” student: young, full-time and residential’ (Thomas 2015, 41).

Students themselves recognise belonging as something more complex, for example, the term sense of belonging is being used to refer to how students negotiate ‘feelings of being accepted, included by and connected to their institutions’ (Ahn and Davis 2020, 622). This positions students in a more active space. Belonging is then a choice they make based on nuanced ethical judgements, intentions, and decision-making, in relation, with others. Thus, belonging is always an ongoing process of negotiation (Guyotte, Flint, and Latopolski 2021). Belonging and the politics of belonging cannot be separated. Contrary to notions of belonging as uniform and universal, experiences of belonging are classed, racialised, and gendered experiences (Read, Archer, and Leathwood 2003; Wright 2015), and also ableist (Nieminen and Pesonen 2022; Pesonen et al. 2023). Expectations of sameness around who gets to fit in and who is othered creates an ‘us’ and ‘them’ discourse (Yuval-Davis 2006).

Belonging involves negotiation of ethical and political values. This is a political act in the sense that belonging can be tied to notions of power, that is, who has the power to define who belongs and how belongingness is conveyed (O’Shea 2021). Institutional definitions of belonging tend to be based on individualised notions of the learner where the onus for achieving belonging is often placed on the individual – failure to achieve belonging is then also the ‘fault’ of the learner. Those who cannot ‘fit in’ see themselves as in deficit, rather than recognising how institutional structures are complicit in their othering (Reay, Crozier, and Clayton 2013; Rickett and Morris 2021). We follow Healy (2020) to differentiate between those who choose not to belong (not-belonging – as a form of self-defining) and those who long to belong but are unable to achieve this state (unbelonging).

Students may choose not to belong or find that the opportunities available for this belonging are neither accepting nor inclusive of them (Gravett and Ajjawi 2021). The positive correlation between extraversion and belonging is mediated in part through engagement with extracurricular activities, but this puts pressure on students to be social with a feeling of missing out if they choose not to adhere to expected norms of belonging behaviour (Winstone et al. 2022). Often expected belonging activities tend to exclude part-time, online, mature students, and those with caring responsibilities (Thomas 2015) as they are campus based and buy into the ideal of the young, unencumbered student – think for example, about social activities (clubs, societies, Orientation activities) geared towards creating a ‘sticky’ campus by inculcating a belonginess amongst participants. In one belonging ‘intervention’ students are given gifts branded with university logos (Hausmann, Schofield, and Woods 2007) reducing belonging to simple commodification. For some students deliberately choosing not to belong can be a purposeful act of resistance and non-identification (Nieminen and Pesonen 2022). Alternatively, experiences of stigma might lead students with disabilities for example to mask who they are (Pesonen et al. 2023). Some students feel pressure to belong through particular activities and spaces (Gravett and Ajjawi 2021). Those students who feel outside the expected norms of student identity may overtly reject the belonging overtures made by the institution and/or they may feel a sense of longing and isolation.

We need to handle belonging with criticality and care; understanding when unbelonging equals exclusionary practices that are harmful, and when not-belonging is either a choice or a natural experience as we move between connections and spaces. To do this, we now turn to students themselves to understand their experiences and conceptions.

Methods

This research was conducted in two universities, one in Melbourne, Australia, and the other Surrey in the UK. The universities offer some contrast, the former being a digitally intensive and relatively younger university, while the latter is a more face-to-face research-intensive university. However, both universities attract a diversity of students, who are spread across a number of under-served or underrepresented student groups. Funded by a Society for Research in Higher Education, UK, grant, we first sought and obtained ethical approval at each university, the Deakin Faculty of Art and Education Human Ethics Advisory group (HAE-22-009) and the Surrey University Ethics Committee (CENT 21-22 003 EGA).

Students were recruited through university-associated social media announcements, and email/notices in diverse units of study virtual noticeboards. To be included, they must have been over 18 years of age at the time of recruitment, studying for an undergraduate bachelor’s degree at their respective university. Thirty students took part in this research, 15 in each institution.

Students took part in an audio-recorded semi-structured interview and/or a video blog. Vlogs are a ‘participant-directed method’ which places the camera in participants’ hands (Sutton-Brown 2015, 170), and captures the material and affective aspects of participants’ everyday lives. Vlogs allow participants to record their experience in their own time using their own devices. These short video narratives are made with the video function on a mobile device and accompanied by brief self-narration on the theme. Students could choose to show themselves or simply their spaces and objects of belonging. Interviews were conducted by the researchers through Zoom technology.

The questions/ conversation starts provided in the interviews and vlogs included:

1. Tell us what a typical day of study might look like for you?

2. Tell or show us your learning spaces? What specific objects (table, bed, screen, laptop, mug, pet, etc.) do you need when studying?

3. What does belonging look and feel like in these spaces?

4. Who / what helps you to belong to the course, university, etc.?

We analysed transcripts of interviews and vlogs informed by reflexive thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke 2019). This involved multiple iterations of immersion, memo-writing, discussion, inductive coding and interpretation, and identification of patterns of shared meaning around a core concept. We met regularly to collaboratively question the assumptions we were making in interpreting and coding the data, we also did this through our writing. Hence, our themes go beyond description categories or apriori understandings of belonging from the literature. Although we are implicated as co-producers of the data, we influence our interpretations of the data. We are three established higher education researchers, in Australia and the UK, who bring our own multiplicities of identities including: minority ethnic background, caring responsibilities, first in family status, we all identify as female and have significant roots in equity research and practice.

We also analysed the visual material by taking account of the nature of the spaces shown, the emotive language used in describing these as students walked us through them, and the objects they oriented to, alongside their descriptions. The videos, narrated from the students’ insider perspective, enabled interrogation of contextually-based meanings offering new insights into the socially constructed realities of these students.

Findings

We generated 6 interviews and 13 vlogs with 15 participants at Deakin University, and 13 interviews and 9 vlogs with 15 participants at the University of Surrey (total of 30 students, 19 interviews, and 22 vlogs). Our data identified the ways in which students experience, create, and conceptualise their experiences of belonging. Participants described acts of belonging that were purposeful and strategic that contributed to the university and were meaningful to them. Students did this in four key ways: by (1) actively seeking belonging; (2) making purposeful connections, (2) emotionality and taking risk, and (3) curating safe and personal spaces from which to connect with self and others.

Making connections – active belongings

Forming connections was a key part of how students made senses of belonging, whether it was as simple as posting on a discussion board, trying to join online lectures live, chatting with unit chairs, or working and volunteering. Students generally described belonging as relational (relating to what’s around) and involving feeling connected.

Shared interests and values were actively considered when speaking about belonging, an active process of identification: ‘I do still feel a sense of belonging, but it's mostly to do with connection and shared interests and valuing other people when they're doing the same thing as you’. (Li vlog)

Students also spoke about taking ownership of their belonging activities through proactive strategies such as volunteering, participating in online discussions or even contributing to policy documents, as a female law student described:

I’m volunteering … That’s another way to feel connected and be a part of and have an influence on some of the university’s policies and resources. I’ve also volunteered for a lot of different policy feedback things. That gives you a sense of belonging and ownership. (Kate interview)

Importantly, the intent to belong and connect is not always considered to be an objective of learning activities and course outcomes but clearly for some of the participants in this study, seeking out the belonging in certain course and university activities was a deliberate choice.

That sense of not wanting to ‘miss out’ (Winstone et al. 2022) was also evident in our students’ reports, of wanting to ‘make the most of everything’ of their time at university:

I do like to participate in as many programs and volunteering activities just to immerse myself in that university experience. (Claire vlog)

This involvement in extracurricular activities is not equally available to all students who have different responsibilities and timescapes. In addition, proactive attempts to enact a sense of belonging were not always successful. The examples below show how identity intersects with feelings of belonging. Both show the role of power in unbelonging, which involves the maintenance and reproduction of the boundaries of the community of belonging according to hegemonic political powers (Yuval-Davis 2006) – in the first quote belonging was negotiated by student status (she describes her ‘mature age’ and ‘part-time status’ as limiting belonging) whilst in the second, achieving belonging was thwarted by the realities of a stratified higher education system.

In the classes, I find it quite difficult to get a sense of belonging because I’m a part-time student. It’s really hard to connect and feel part of the class because everyone already knows each other. (Nat vlog)

For one of my previous units, the unit chair would not answer and it was very hard to communicate with him. I would even write on discussion board and on MS Teams, even emailed him, but he took like two weeks to answer me and it was very difficult. When he did answer, he wouldn’t reply to any of my inquiries. He told me things like, ‘There’s 400-plus students, we can’t help everyone with everything.’ Yes, I didn’t really feel like I belonged then because it was very difficult to get the help and assistance that I needed. (Laila interview)

In these examples, enacting belonging was desired for a variety of reasons but this was somewhat delicate work, at times thwarted by the very systems put into place by the institutions. For some learners, achieving belonging was perceived as an important undertaking but how this was achieved differed across students.

Seeking communality – purposeful belongings

Student connections were described as purposeful. Students described wanting to have and make purposeful and meaningful connections with the university community. Many participants spoke of the need to seek out a sense of wider or ‘meta’ belonging. This was about choice which is political (a form of resistance to the student as consumer discourse) along two dimensions, a focus on contribution rather than passivity and seeking to contribute beyond the university. Far from an individualistic and consumerist focus, students spoke of ‘feeling like you're part of a greater whole’ or ‘being a part of something larger’ or ‘learning within a community for a bigger purpose’.

This notion of connecting with others for a broader purpose carried through in a variety of extracurricular activities (e.g. joining societies, taking part in mentorship programs, and playing sport) and feeling like they were contributing to something communal beyond themselves as individuals; making a ‘positive impact on a community’.

[Taking part in a student-as-partner program] is a great way for me to interact with teachers and like-minded students to complete research for the university. It has made me feel much more connected to the university and a sense of belonging because I feel like I’m not just completing my own studies in my degree, I’m actually contributing to the greater good of the university. (Claire vlog)

Fewer students described belonging through curricular activities, Imran who was studying a health degree, in his interview spoke to this, again using the word contributing:

A subject does not have that rapport building or doesn’t make you feel like you’re contributing to anything, I think that’s where I just drop out of that subject and lose a bit of interest. When it gets really engaging and there’s rapport built and even students are talking and engaging constantly, not having those awkward silences that feel like a lot of wasted time. It’s constantly moving on and you’re learning things so yes, those are really good and that’s what makes me really feel like belonging to something. (Imran interview)

Students repeatedly drew on belonging as emerging through contributing to activities within and outside the university, and within and outside their courses of study.

Taking the ‘first step’ – risky belongings

Students described needing to make the first step in connecting and belonging. To take up existing opportunities or to create their own through connecting with peers. They described it as tricky or overwhelming at times but, for many, rewarding when successful.

It was quite tricky actually. Going into it I knew I had to make at least one friend, just so I have motivation to go to class. During a presentation that we had, I private messaged her [another student], and I complimented her on her presentation. Then the next class we had, we didn’t know each other by then. She messaged me, she’s like, ‘Oh, you're from this class?’ I was like, ‘Oh, yes, hi.’ Then we were just getting to know each other. When we found out that we’re both planning on doing psychological science, we started messaging each other making up study groups so that we can go through content together. (Arlene interview)

Making connections and belonging was emotional, exposing students to a level of vulnerability when reaching out:

If you don’t get out of your comfort zone, you will end up being in your room, you will study you probably will do well, but then you’re not going to be connected to the university. University is not just your course but everything that comes along with it. (Josie interview)

One of the students did reflect on the lingering effects of COVID: I feel like nowadays, with students interacting online, especially during like with the whole COVID situation, I feel like everyone has become a bit less social and less open and not that talkative anymore. Everyone just closed up in their own little box and it’s hard for everyone to open up. (Imran Interview)

Curating safe spaces for belonging

Given the emotionality and vulnerabilities of making connections, it is not surprising that students described their need to create safe spaces for learning and belonging. Students described the role of specific sanctioned spaces on campus for belonging: a Pride room on campus, library, the ‘Centre’ (or student hub), alongside home spaces such as the kitchen table, the dining room table, the bedroom, or their study.

Library spaces loomed large as study places where students felt safe. For regional and remote students, outreach hubs in the local community were also appreciated:

I enjoy studying at the centre as it is a great study environment with high-speed internet, a quiet space with limited distractions, great heating and cooling systems and a breakout space, and importantly, ergonomic furniture, all which are requirements for my studies. (Tasha vlog)

Many students recorded their vlogs in their bedrooms and described these environments as carefully curated spaces that offered warmth, nourishment (snacks and water), and safety, alongside practical things like extra batteries and notes and technological things like computers and printers. Kate noted: I feel better in the study. I feel more connected at my desk … I like being able to shut myself in here, have quiet. I'm surrounded by all my books and my resources and my printer and everything I need is at my fingertips. (Kate interview)

This notion of ‘home’ is in stark contrast to a student who described being homeless: belonging is one of the things, you need to feel safe where you belong … [the campus] It was like a home that I didn't have because I was homeless at the time. (Niki interview)

Belonging wasn’t always about being with other people, particular spaces gave rise to a student identity that enabled students to feel like they belonged as a university student.

I feel more like I can connect more with that student aspect of myself and when I’m on campus, I generally like to sit, there’s a gazebo area near the parking lot with a beautiful walking trail. Even though I’m sitting by myself, I feel really connected. (Amanda interview)

Not all belonging was elaborate, some students simply wanted to see themselves in others. To have a key aspect of their identities validated by being valued, seen, and respected:

‘in the library, it feels kind of nice when I see other … coloured people around because then it feels like I’m not the only one.’ (Arlene interview)

When I brought my son, I even could give him some things to play because there were some things in the library that my kid could play with. We sit in the private room in the library, and then I gave him some stuff from the library, which were for play. (Houda vlog)

For students who shared their physical or mental health concerns with us, this notion of safety was more basic. It was less elaborate in some ways than the carefully curated spaces that students with more resources described. It was also less about the extra-curricular social spaces that universities invest in for belonging:

When I’m in my room, I just feel like it’s like a safe space for me somewhere where I feel safe and somewhere where I can just get away from the outside world and just focus on things … its easier for me with my health as well. (Imran interview)

I’ve got PTSD and Asperger’s, and I’ve got physical disabilities and medical conditions … if I can be alone in a room or study in an individual study pod [in the library] without anyone, noises distracting me, or people being able to see me, it makes me feel safer. (Niki interview)

Discussion

Our research shows that students define, curate, and experience multiple belongings in diverse and sophisticated ways; however, these approaches are often invisible or marginalised within common university discourses of what belonging requires and who gets to belong. In narrating their experiences of belonging, students identified themselves as actively contributing to and meaningfully participating in various communities and activities within and beyond the university. This required a leap of faith, or reaching out which made students feel, at times, vulnerable, and where possible, students curated safe spaces for belonging in highly personalised ways.

While these broad themes tell us something about the similarities of students’ experiences and conceptualisations of belonging, how this intersected for the individual student with their identities, shows the variability in experience. For example, while many students reported curating safe spaces – for some, this was quite luxurious with special outfits, tools, snacks, and private spaces, like Kate, while for others it was having a public space they could feel comfortable in, for example, Arlene. University spaces were the main ones available in the absence of an alternate home for one of our students (Niki). Universal notions of belonging as prosocial fracture against such diversity.

These diverse acts of belonging are invisible in our current discourses of belonging that bestow belonging on students through something that institutions ‘do to’ students. Where it was available to them, students expressed a desire to design their own belonging in an individualistic and personally meaningful way. This purposefulness resonates with recent work exploring the importance of mattering in education (Gravett, Taylor, and Fairchild 2021). For students experiencing a sense that they matter may be important, but the notion of mattering also draws our attention to the powerful role of materialities within learning and teaching environments. This did not mean that students were not also interested in belonging through community, curriculum, and connection with others. What it does show, however, is that for students without the means and resources to do so, curating belonging might be more challenging or not even possible. The rhetoric of belonging itself, and the push to foster it, might raise for students the spectre of their unbelonging. Institutional discourses must recognise the socio-political dimension of belonging if they are to become inclusive.

For many of our students, there was a social vision of meaningful contribution to the university and beyond – doing good in the world through for example volunteering or activism. This perspective shifts learners beyond the prevalent discourse of educational consumerism and a suggested passive nature to belonging. This aligns better with Ashwin’s (2022) call for broader educational purposes than typical neoliberal assumptions of the student as consumer within a university towards societal outcomes. Our students want to make a difference and want a different ‘immersive’ student experience. The tension around not wanting to be ‘all in the same boat’ (Gravett and Winstone 2021) but wanting to be part of something bigger was palpable in interviews and vlogs. Students described making belonging through purposeful ethical and political negotiations. There was an added tension about reaching beyond their comfort zone but doing so from a safe space. In this research, students were making judgements about the value of connections, social locations, and constructions of individual and collective identities.

Our data also shows the intersections of identity and belonging, identities raised by the students in their stories. Students spoke about being a mother, Queer, Black, disabled, older, etc., and explained how these identities influenced their experiences and acts of belonging. This data shows how personal feelings of belonging intersect with social structures that work to include or exclude – such as race for Arlene, or economic means for Niki. Probyn (1996) notes how belonging captures the desire for some sort of attachment, (e.g. to people, places, spaces, objects, or modes of being), ‘a process that is fueled by yearning rather than the positing of identity as a stable state.’ (p.19) Belonging can thus be seen as a process of self-identification (Yuval-Davis 2016). Healy (2020) speaks to sense of ‘belonging together’: each must have a commonly held sense of legitimately belonging together towards some form of common future. The desire to contribute to something bigger then drives student action to take a first step in making connections.

Taking the first step can be daunting, emotional, and involves risk. No wonder students wanted to feel safe when they reached out. Belonging itself is risky, tainted with deep insecurities about the possibility of truly fitting in (Probyn 1996). Where does this leave students from structurally marginalised groups who can feel like they belong nowhere? In her research with first in family students, O’Shea (2021) identified a deep sense of dislocation among these students at university as they considered themselves in a state of in between neither belonging to their old lives nor feeling like they belonged at university. Mature-aged regional and remote university students in previous research also noted the role of safety that contributed to their belonging (Crawford et al. 2022). They reported distancing from social connections due to their partial identities.

Given the boundaried work of belonging, and the pressure of fitting in, might these discourses of belonging create the need for additional invisible work for students from marginalised backgrounds? The effort of presenting the best version of oneself and the stigma of not fitting in has a visceral toll on individuals (Goffman 1959). The work of masking or fitting in does add further emotional and actual labour that remains largely invisible. Unfortunately, for students from a minority background, this unbelonging might actually be perceived as an individual deficit or failure rather than a result of institutional structures (Reay, Crozier, and Clayton 2013), often couched in the language of imposterism (Rickett and Morris 2021). The increasing rhetoric of belonging at university can add a burden on students to do this identity work of not-belonging and unbelonging which at once makes them feel like outsiders or imposters.

Insights and implications

How do we account for the politics of belonging in our institutional and higher educational discourses? If we are serious about equity and quality education, then what role does belonging play in this? Again we return to Probyn, where belonging is about complexity: ‘different modes of belonging fold and twist the social fabric of life, so that we find ourselves in unexpected ways using desires for belonging as threads that lead us into unforeseen places and connections’ (Probyn 1996, 20). The magic of belonging is to understand and respect its complexity. Belongings become multiple, sensual, affective experiences. Belonging, then, is at once emotional, political, personal, and societal – a co-constitution of beings and belongings (Wright 2015).

Hence, there is a need to avoid a singular ‘sense of belonging’ becoming an expectation of university experiences, as well as inferring an onus on already pressured educators to provide something that is essentially unachievable. This is not the same as the need for educators to work to support a diversity of students to engage and have an equitable learning experience, including foregrounding good curriculum design as a scaffold for belonging opportunities. However, it is important not to conflate equity and belonging. This relies on discussions surrounding the inevitable fluctuations and multiplicities of belongings. Universities cannot be expected to guarantee belonging – students need to also contribute and make sense of it, including situations and contexts where it is safer to not belong – to choose to study alone for example. We also cannot assume that home offers the safety of belonging, as for some students there might be trauma, violence, or high-stress responsibilities that come with being at home, or even a lack of a home. Ensuring safe inclusive spaces, both physical and virtual, are available for these students is key. But equally, we must better understand students’ experiences of what constitutes safety and inclusivity.

Crucially, students show purpose in actively making and curating belongings. Belonging is not something that educators must necessarily build or do for students. Students also show an understanding of the diversity and mobility of their experiences of belonging in different times and spaces. They must negotiate the power structures that determine who belongs and specifically for those on the margins, to claim a place of belonging (Covarrubias 2023). However, we do worry that the increasing rhetoric of belonging might add a burden to students from minority backgrounds in particular and foment pressure of not wanting to miss out. For students from minority backgrounds we must be careful that they do not internalise their unbelonging as a personal deficit but to create multiplicities of belonging and not-belonging within the sector.

Limitations and future research

Our research spanned two universities in two countries, Australia and the UK. The participants who volunteered to take part in the study were likely to value belonging and to have the courage and confidence to reach out to us as researchers. Our data were collected in post-pandemic times when the world was tentatively taking its own first steps out of lockdown. Perhaps the need for safety is particularly stark in our data as students craved their safety (after the turmoil and anxiety of COVID-19) through carefully curated spaces while also tentatively reaching out through technology. We also wondered in our discussions, whether given the instability of the broader socio-political landscape, whether this careful curation of home spaces was indeed about curating a sense of control however limited this might be. Or even because safety acts as a minimum need for students with mental illness (which is on the rise) and precarity (e.g. domestic violence and homelessness). We also note that our interview and vlog questions did explicitly ask about space therefore, orienting students to reflect on this.

Intersectionality then becomes a powerful lens through which future research might further unpack the politics of belonging. Intersectionality requires a focus on how intersecting sociohistorical systems of inequity influence interdependent identity-specific experiences (Harris and Patton 2019). This analytical approach might enable the identification of the multilayered and routinised forms of social power (Crenshaw 1991) that influence agency and access to resources and the dynamics of belonging in mutually constitutive ways (Yuval-Davis 2016).

Conclusions

We contend that belonging still holds significant value as a concept for informing contemporary theory-practice in higher education. However, we argue that the notion of belonging should be handled with criticality and care. Given its recent overuse in research, policy, and practice, we fear its reduction as a buzzword that functions as a shorthand for simplistic ideas that do not resonate with the granular lived experiences of contemporary students. Belonging is political – there is work in belonging to something bigger / a form of membership that interacts with internal and in between emotions, risk, safety, identity, purpose, and inclusion. Belonging is always in a liminal space between the individual’s feelings, experiences, and the social structures that co-produce it.

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank all of the students who agreed to participate in our study for their generous engagement with this research. This research is the outcome of a funded grant from the Society for Research in Higher Education (SRHE). We thank the SRHE for their support with this project. We would also particularly like to thank Syeda Alina Husein, and Kevin Dullaghan for their valuable research assistance during this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Society for Research into Higher Education under Grant RA2168.