Conversations on Belonging: Women of Indian Heritage Speak

Abstract

In this Special Section we highlight existing and emerging scholarship on Belonging in countries with white majority cultures. We argue that ‘belonging’ is a familiar and well researched concept that continues to be relevant today because it is central to the joy and vitality of life that enables us to inhabit multiple worlds. Drawing on intellectual and personal journeys in USA, Canada and Australia, the contributors of ‘Indian’ heritage raise questions that urge us to unsettle hierarchies of belonging in western societies. They build on interdisciplinary theoretical and empirical insights by thinking about the potentialities of bodies for interdependence in a place we call home.

Keywords:

• Belonging
• Ethnicity
• Whiteness
• Intersectionality

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge our connections to the Department of Geography, Loreto College, Kolkata, India, a place that stimulates innovative thinking and public debate. We, as well as the contributors in this Special Section benefitted immensely from such debate. Thanks also to the inspiring thoughts of participants at the Belonging Project Symposium, the University of Melbourne, December 2011, and the Roundtable, Ontologies of Postcolonial Belonging: the Material and the Sacred in Australia, Deakin University, Geelong, November 2012.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michele Lobo

Michele Lobo is an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research Fellow (ARC DECRA) at the Centre for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia. She is a social and cultural geographer whose research focuses on whiteness, ethnoreligious diversity, race, encounter and belonging in suburbia. She is exploring indigenous-ethnic minority relations in Darwin with the support of a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award and Islamic religiosity in public spaces with the support of an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant

Sumita Ghosh

Sumita Ghosh is an independent scholar in Kolkata, India. She is a geographer whose interest lies in exploring changing landscapes in rural West Bengal as well as other parts of India. She was the Chair of the Department of Geography, Loreto College, Kolkata, for several years where she inspired several students and colleagues, many of whom are research scholars in India as well as overseas