Topologies of belonging in the digital university

ABSTRACT

Belonging is a complex relational concept. It has been shown to be processual, emergent, and dynamic. And yet this relationality, and complexity, sits in tension with increasingly voluble calls to measure, manage and maintain students’ sense of belonging to an ostensibly fixed space of higher education. This article reports on research that invited students to not only define how they experience belonging, but also to surface belonging’s relationality: how it is entangled with material spaces and artefacts and enacted through evolving behaviours and communities. Our data depict modulations of belonging which disrupt dominant discourses of simplicity, stability and uniformity. Engaging the generative concept of social topologies, we offer a rethinking of both space and belonging as material and relational. These findings enable us to consider more nuanced perspectives about how belonging is both understood and also enacted, surfacing the complex tapestries of belonging and non-belonging experiences within education, as well as the increasing departure from a coherent delineated conception of ‘the university’. Given the diversity of both learners and the spaces in which they learn, interrogating the nature of belonging is urgently needed if we are to understand students’ diverse experiences of education in more meaningful ways.

KEYWORDS:

• Topology
• belonging
• digital education
• space
• higher education

Introduction

The assumption that students can and need to belong to university spaces and places has become a grand narrative within institutional policy and practice, with students’ sense of belonging strongly associated with a successful experience of higher education (Ahn and Davis 2020; Meehan and Howells 2019), and with student wellbeing, academic attainment and retention (Winstone et al. 2020). Students’ sense of belonging has been associated with ‘an upward spiral of positive relationships’ (West 2022). How to ensure institutions remove ‘barriers to belonging’, and are able to create welcoming ‘belonging spaces’, are presently primary preoccupations within higher education research, policy and practice (Bowles and Brindle 2017; Meehan and Howells 2019). However, the literature is often silent about what students are actually belonging to. There is an assumption that we all understand and use the concept of belonging in similar ways (including students), and that both the notion of belonging, and of the university, can be understood coherently. This problem is compounded by the rise in remote and hybrid learning following Covid-19, meaning that the spaces in which students learn are evolving rapidly, and that ideas of traditional university settings and delineated campuses are increasingly losing their meaning. It is apparent that any straightforward notion of belonging to ‘the university’ is no longer valid or coherent − if it ever was.

In order to elaborate a new conception of belonging, in this article we think with the concept of social topologies. Topology is a concept originating from mathematics. However, in the social sciences, it is being increasingly used in interesting and challenging ways. For example, researchers have engaged the concept of social topologies to understand the experiences of ‘distance’ students (Bayne, Gallagher, and Lamb 2014), to think in new ways about lecture capture systems (Lamb and Ross 2022); to think relationally about educational practices (Decuypere and Simons 2016), and to theorise different kinds of social spaces (Law and Mol 2001; Mol and Law 1994). Contributing to these conversations that explore the value of topological thinking for understanding education, we engage Mol and Law’s notions of topological space (Law and Mol 2001; Mol and Law 1994) to think about space as relational, as opposed to an a priori given (Decuypere and Simons 2016), and to tease out the potential of thinking topologically for conceptualising students’ experiences of belonging.

We draw on empirical data with 30 students in two institutions in the UK and Australia to show how space is entangled with belonging and non-belonging practices in multiple and relational ways. This resists the generalist framing of belonging to the university as a single entity that can be quantified. We explore the implications of topological understandings of both belonging and space for educators and their institutions, including how a topological gaze allows for understanding how spaces are relationally enacted. Crucially, our paper moves beyond critique, to propose new directions for conceptualising experiences of belonging that we suggest can help educators to think in alternative ways about their work supporting diverse students.

Belonging in contemporary higher education

Both the concept and practice of belonging in higher education have become increasingly prevalent within the literature over the last few decades (Carruthers Thomas 2019; Leach 2002; May 2011; Raaper 2021; Strayhorn 2012; Tinto 2012; Yuval-Davis 2006). Belonging has been defined as a fundamental human need (Kim and Irwin 2013; Strayhorn 2012), as an emotional attachment, and as a feeling of safety (Yuval-Davis 2006). Belonging represents perceptions of acceptance and connection. Belonging is understood as a significant force, with the need to belong ‘a powerful, fundamental, and extremely pervasive motivation’ (Baumeister and Leary 1995, 497), even a fundamental aspect of being a person (May 2011; Miller 2003).

Fostering a sense of belonging has become a core part of institutions’ teaching and learning endeavours driven, in part, by data on belonging from national course experience questionnaires. In the National Student Survey in England, past questions have included evaluating students’ experience of a learning community: ‘I feel part of a community of staff and students’, and ‘I have had the right opportunities to work with other students as part of my course’. Similarly, in the Australian Student Experience Survey questions include: ‘how frequently have you worked with other students as part of your study?’ and ‘to what extent have you had a sense of belonging to your institution?’ These surveys have embedded notions of community and belonging within institutional discourses. In the United Kingdom, the Higher Education Policy Institute, an independent higher education think tank, foregrounds the importance of belonging as we move out of the ‘isolating experience of studying through COVID-19’ (Jackson 2022, n/p). Similarly, the UK’s Advance Higher Education, and Australia’s National Centre for the Study of Equity in Higher Education, among others, have prioritised student wellbeing, belonging and retention in recent decades. Likewise, an extensive survey of over 5000 students, from Wonkhe and Pearson (2022), offers a number of recommendations in terms of the ways in which institutions might work towards an inclusive environment that fosters a sense of belonging.

However, the speed with which belonging ‘practices’ have taken hold on the sector has not been followed by parallel developments in understandings about these nuanced and complex concepts, or by critical engagement with extant theorisations of space, community and connection within the social sciences. Often, how the institution is being defined is not explicitly articulated or theorised, nor is the complexity and fluidity of relational connections of individuals and their environments acknowledged. As Guyotte, Flint, and Latopolski (2021) question, drawing inspiration from critical spatial theory can enable us to consider ‘what are we wanting students to belong to? Why?’ Such questions enable:

an exploration of higher education as a complex site of nomadic belonging-as-relations, where students both create and are created by embodied encounters with spatialized social practices and power geometries with human, nonhuman, and ideological others. Complex sites of research require research lenses and methodological approaches that attend to such complexity. (Guyotte, Flint, and Latopolski 2021, 556)

Space and the university

This current preoccupation with belonging may, in part, relate to the recent health crisis that has impacted the global higher education sector. The COVID-19 pandemic and associated move to remote learning destabilised further the spaces and ways in which students’ experience higher education, disturbing simplistic conceptions of community or even where the university is located. Today’s students learn and experience the university in mobile ways, engaging in multiple communities and learning in ways which trouble the very boundaries of belonging and the delineations of what, and where, a university is. Remote and hybrid learning means that the spaces in which students learn are multiple and evolving, and digital learning is now a taken-for-granted component of students’ experiences. Previously, distance, change, and placelessness were often treated as exceptional, with ‘sedentarist’ conceptions of learning that foreground stability and place − for example a university campus − treated as the norm (Bayne, Gallagher, and Lamb 2014; Sheller and Urry 2006). Today, this sedentarism has been upended as a result of Covid. But the long-lasting impacts of such shifts have not been fully explored, particularly the ways in which students consider the materialities of learning.

Our study is situated in a period of increasing interest in researching learning spaces in higher education (Bayne, Gallagher, and Lamb 2014; Boys 2011, 2021; Decuypere and Simons 2016; Flynn, Thompson, and Goodyear 2018; Lamb et al. 2022; Lamb and Ross 2022), and alongside the rise in digital learning with significant investment in new built environments to enable flexibility, for example moveable furniture for more active learning approaches. This heralds a shift away from viewing space as irrelevant due to hyped affordances of technology ‘anywhere, anytime’, towards a recognition that education is spatially configured and entangled with the material world and where ‘place and the material qualities of things matter’ (Flynn, Thompson, and Goodyear 2018, i). And yet, the relationship between learning and a learning space is complex (Ellis and Goodyear 2016). Learning spaces are enacted processes that are co-constructed in activity, used and maintained by learners (Damşa, Nerland, and Andreadakis 2019). Sociomaterial and spatial turns in educational research have highlighted that understanding the role of materials in learning is crucial; that is, how objects and artefacts transform and modify people’s learning trajectories (Fenwick, Edwards, and Sawchuk 2011).

Research into learning spaces has highlighted how space participates in, rather than serves as a setting for, or backdrop to, learning (Mulcahy 2018). Space, far from being a neutral container, can constitute discomfort and exclusion or can welcome and enable. Think for example of a student in a wheelchair excluded due to the spatial and material arrangements present (Mayes 2019), or the different affective responses created from ‘hot desking’ in an open plan office and being secluded within a comfortable office. Spaces are multiple and fluid, students connect sites, people, tools and resources in networks to support their personal learning (Carvalho et al. 2018). Further, non-typical spaces can constitute productive learning (e.g., a cupboard; Burford and Hook 2019), while sanctioned spaces of learning might foster feelings of vulnerability (Marshalsey and Sclater 2018). Being excluded can thus negatively affect students and impact on their epistemic understandings of the practices of communities. Similarly, taken for granted spaces of belonging might exclude some students (e.g., social clubs) due to physical location and/or the activities they constitute (e.g., drinking or loud music). While problematic for some, such discontinuities might be unproblematic for others – recognising the validity and choice of non-belonging. Students may be knowingly or unknowingly excluded from participation in learning due to sociomaterial arrangements of space and place. Space is inherently political and yet there is a taken-for-granted understanding regarding learning spaces that belies the ‘psychic investments, attachments, projections and resistances’ that are involved in such spatial choices and decisions (Kenway and Youdell 2011, 132).

Social topologies

To continue and advance the conversation regarding the materiality and relationality of space, and to connect it to the concept of belonging in new ways, we engage the concept of social topologies (Mol and Law 1994). A topological gaze seeks to explain how the spaces of social life (material, digital, temporal) are constructed relationally, between the actors that produce it (Decuypere and Simons 2016; Lamb and Ross 2021). Social topology studies help to analyse space in ways that does not assume space to be fixed, stable or unchanging. Rather, social topology offers an approach to understanding these relationships as a shifting continuum (Lamb and Ross 2021), where spatial securities are disrupted and social spaces are considered fluid: ‘relations, repulsions and attractions which form a flow’ (Law and Mol 2001, 614). Law and Mol explain that a ‘topology of fluidity resonates with a world in which shape continuity precisely demands gradual change: a world in which invariance is likely to lead to rupture, difference and to distance’ (Law and Mol 2001, 614). Crucially, Decuypere and Simons explain that sociotopological studies can enable researchers to find ways of observing a setting that allows analysis of the distribution of actors in this setting, as well as ways of describing the emerging relations between actors in the setting (Decuypere and Simons 2016).

Within this relational framework, Mol and Law (1994) also offer specific topological possibilities for thinking about space. These include the spatial types of region, network, fluid and fire. We might think about how belonging can be thought to flow within and between ‘regions’ constantly transforming itself from one arrangement into another. Further generative for understanding education, and particularly digital education, is Mol and Law’s concept of fire space (Law and Mol 2001), which enables us to think about ‘a flickering relation between presence and absence’ (Law and Mol 2001, 615). For Mol and Law, fire space can be conceptualised as alterity and otherness, a flicker, an oscillation, a discontinuity. This is helpful for thinking about the impermanence of digital connections and relations, as has been suggested by Gourlay (2022), and Gravett (2022). In this study, we also explore how it may be generative for thinking about the presence, absence and flickering experiences of belonging. Taken together, these ideas enable us to consider the fluidity of institutions, where ‘ … formation and personal identity, location and diaspora, mobility and stasis are continually and creatively re-thought, re-formed and re-shaped’ (Bayne, Gallagher, and Lamb 2014, 571). Thinking topologically then provides insights into how the university is being reconstituted in new ‘enactments’. And yet, our understanding of how these re-worked institutional social topologies are experienced and articulated by students remain relatively limited (Bayne, Gallagher, and Lamb 2014).

In this study then, we examine how thinking topologically, and observing students’ fluid and relational experiences of belonging, within specific settings, serves to disrupt simplistic conceptions of students’ experiences within higher education. We suggest that rethinking belonging in this way provides the foundations for more nuanced depictions of what it is to be a contemporary university student, whether studying on- or offline.

Method

This paper draws upon data collected during a Society for Research in Higher Education (SRHE) funded research study: ‘Belonging to and beyond higher education in hybrid spaces’. The research project commenced in May 2022. The overarching aim of the research was to unpack the ways in which students experience and create belonging within the digital university. The study focused on students’ experiences of belonging and non-belonging, exploring the ways these are negotiated through hybrid or blended approaches to learning, which have become prevalent within institutions internationally.

As we have suggested, the disruption to higher education (HE) caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has meant that belonging needs to be considered in different ways. Without regular face to face contact or the social networking associated with on-campus study, creating a ‘belonging environment’ can no longer be taken-for-granted as uniform and, as located within fixed times and spaces. This study examined the diverse experiences of students’ engagement and belonging to the digital pandemic university, by considering the ways in which students were engaging with university ‘spaces’ (in the broadest sense).

Specifically, the project sought to answer the following research questions:

• What assemblages of belonging do students create?

• What do students’ day-to-day material interactions with the digital university look like?

This research project extends preliminary conceptual work that has already been carried out by members of the research team (Gravett and Ajjawi 2022). Specifically, this detailed approach enabled us to attend to the day-to-day fine-grained practices of students’ learning. We adopted a video blogging (or vlogging) method at two institutions, one located in England, the other in Australia. Participants were asked to produce a short vlog under the broad theme of belonging and invited to participate in a semi-structured interview. The two institutions were chosen to capture a rich international focus; one is a research-intensive university while the other is part of the Australian Technology University Network and a leader in innovative digital engagement.

Ethical approval was obtained from the institutional ethics committees of both universities. Ethical approval involved the design of the instruments to be used (interview schedules and vlog prompts), consent and participant information sheets, as well as discussions regarding how and where to recruit participants and how and where to store data. Participants were advised that they could withdraw from the study and that their personal details and any associated data will be deleted. Legal agreements were also created and signed between the partner institutions. A data management plan was also completed.

Following this ethical approval and contractual phase, undergraduate students were recruited via email and Learning Management System noticeboard announcements. Participants were invited to share experiences that they felt captured practices of belonging or non-belonging within different university spaces via visual representations and narration. The recruitment phase was successful meaning that we were able to slightly over recruit. In the UK sample, 15 participants were recruited from across different faculties. This included 13 interviews and 9 vlogs. For the Australian sample, 13 vlogs and 6 interviews were obtained from 15 participants.

Vlogs were chosen as an effective way of capturing the lived experience of a context or situation. These short video narratives were made with the video function on a mobile device and accompanied by brief self-narration on the theme. To assist in this narration, participants were provided with a series of questions or conversation starters to ‘frame’ the focus of the vlog. The combination of both audio and visual provides a more holistic overview of experience allowing the very personal and spatial implications of the shift (or potential shift) from face-to-face learning to online modalities to be conveyed. Participant-generated visual materials are particularly helpful in exploring the taken-for-granted things in research participants’ lives (Rose 2014) and are considered to lead to deep and personalised forms of engagement and self-representation (Gourlay 2010).

Each vlog was 4–5 minutes in length and told in the first person, inviting the listener into areas of life that are personally significant to the story’s creator. The questions/conversation starters provided were as follows:

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.?

This participative, creative, method surfaced how (and where) students studied and the role of belonging and technologies within these practices.

Interviews were conducted by two of the authors at their respective institutions. The interview guides were piloted and consisted of open-ended narrative style questions including: ‘Is belonging important to your learning at university? Can you explain why and how?’ ‘What does belonging look and feel like in these spaces?’ And: ‘how has the pandemic and move to hybrid learning impacted on how you feel about belonging and learning at university?’

All vlogs and interviews were transcribed by the project’s two research assistants (see acknowledgements). The data analysis stage involved the three co-researchers reading the transcripts carefully and meeting on two occasions to discuss and compare initial insights. The next stage included data analysis using detailed coding. Data were imported into NVivo12 where inductive line by line coding was conducted. A process of reflexive thematic analysis was adopted (Braun and Clarke 2019). In addition, the visual data was analysed using a close sociomaterial reading to enable insight into the ‘ordinary’ of our students’ lives. We were attentive to the material content of the video data: what is literally on show and how it is shown (Rose 2014). We holistically interpreted this alongside the text of the vlogs seeking to identify the different spaces, objects and technologies that students occupied and how they described these in relation to their belonging. We paid attention to tone of voice, affect, and materials, as students walked through their spaces and narrated their experiences of belonging or non-belonging.

Findings and discussion: social topologies of belonging

In both our interviews and vlogs, our data show how participants experienced and enacted belonging and non-belonging in multiple, shifting and relational ways. In the following section we explore these themes and their implications. All names used are pseudonyms.

The materiality of belonging

The materiality of belonging permeated our data. Students told and showed us the significance of space, objects, and the senses, specifically sound and smell, to their conception and enactment of belonging. Some objects were unsurprising such as a laptop, earphones, notebook, water bottle, keyboard, mouse, or screen − while others were more idiosyncratic and variable, for example, a specific outfit, earmuffs, a pet, music, a particular type of pen, a candle, a special perfume, and sweets. Belonging spaces were produced and curated through these objects, which also acted to connect students to geographically distant spaces such as the university campus. Molly, who preferred to study at home, showed us her space, in detail, and described how it made her feel:

You have got to have your Tim Tams and your Twisties and your chocolate and your Pepsi to keep you going, and lots of pens and pencils and staplers. This is my secret weapon drawer! This has got my notes … you have got to have all your tips and tricks in your drawers.

Here, Molly describes the importance of her Tim Tams and Twisties (snacks), and her stationery. Molly also showed us her ‘study buddy’ (her pet cat), and her garden: ‘my plants help me study. They make me feel nice’. Molly told us ‘I have my own space that belongs to me … it’s warm. Not being cold is amazing’. The notion of owning space, and curating that space, was alluded to throughout the vlogs and interviews. For example, Louis explained 'I enjoy studying in my room because I own it. This is my place. It’s my area. I can do as I feel with it. Take a rest. I can go to sleep, and I can move to my bed if I ever get tired or my back hurts'.

Hannah told us about the pleasure of spatial ownership as well as the different spatial settings she liked to use:

I do enjoy going to the library, but you’re obviously always going to be more comfortable in your own home. I feel I can relax a lot better. So I feel like I belong more in my room because it is mine.

Sociomaterial arrangements produced belonging across different topologies, for example Sarah who described how on campus spaces enabled her to define her identity more clearly: ‘It comes to having my workspace in a shared space, having a child and being a mother … . I can connect more with that student aspect of myself than when I’m on campus’. Whereas Sam described how certain on campus spaces engendered a sense of belonging and comfort:

I had loads of lectures and seminars in the __ building, as well as LGBTQ+ society sessions are held there. I just tend to feel more comfortable in that space and more belonging in that space because I’ve gone there that often. Whereas with different places that I don’t really know that well I struggle to feel belonging there.

Other students described the benefits of routine and regularity in purposefully enacting belonging in specific spaces and times: 'I like regularity, doing the same thing, so I like when I go to campus, sit in the same seats, go to the same places, use the same computer as it, kind of like makes me almost feel like I own it in a sense, or belong to it' (Alex). Belonging is shown to be something that is enacted, made, in relation to specific practices, and relations between actors in these particular practices.

Fluid spaces and topological multiplicity

Our data resonated with Mol and Law’s ideas of fluid space and topological multiplicity (Mol and Law 1994, 2001). We can see from the quotes above how students described different experiences of belonging in different times and spaces. Similarly, students also walked through their spaces within the vlogs to show the mobility of their belonging experiences. In the following extracts, students reflected specifically on the notions of flexibility and multiplicity, including exploring their multiple conceptions and enactments of belonging. Spaces can span curricular, extracurricular, campus, home, personal spaces.

The library is beneficial because there are different spaces and levels for whatever vibe you’re feeling that day. (Sam)

I’m in the house with my friends… So that’s social space. Social aspect is very important, and I think to feeling of belonging. So therefore, I think it can change depending on where you are, but then also who you’re with. (Lorena)

How I feel when I would be in my Uni House would be different to how I feel like I belong when I’m in like a lecture theatre. And so, it’s like a different dynamics and different people. (Lorena)

For many students, belonging was defined in expected ways that have already been documented in the literature. These included: as connections with peers, via societies, sports and clubs, via relationships with lecturers and personal tutors, or within a specific course. For others, belonging was defined differently. For Lorena, belonging was conceptualised on multiple levels:

So even when I came to ___ it was important to me to find a group of people … I didn’t feel like I needed to belong within the whole university. I didn’t think that there was this need to kind of be a University of ___student, but more I felt the need to belong within my course, and within a smaller group of friends, so I think I value belonging. Belonging on a meta level to be part of something greater, but then as an individual on like a personal level. (Lorena)

For Jack, belonging was also spatially located in the local area: ‘It goes beyond the university as well, I guess just knowing the town’. For Max, belonging was future orientated and connected to his professional identity: ‘I’m here because I’ve pretty much always wanted to be part of this profession, so to feel like I’m getting closer to that. It’s very important’.

For Maya, belonging represented both a change in oneself and stability:

I feel like I’ve grown as a person as well over these four years … and therefore feel like I belonged more so … I think you retain part of yourself from before the university. You can both maintain your anchor as well as develop around it.

Belonging was often integrally connected to the embodied nature of enacting a student identity. For example, Alice explained that for her, belonging was conceptualised as part of her internal qualities and identity: ‘I think [belonging is] myself, my willpower, my motivation to actually continue the course’. For other students, belonging was imagined multiply − as both an internal and an external experience ‘Probably the biggest thing is like a passion for the course. If you enjoy what you’re doing, it kind of becomes a part of you, becomes ingrained in your life and in a sense, you belong to it. It belongs to you’ (Alex).

Fire spaces: discontinuities of belonging

Typical assumptions of topological spaces of belonging were uncomfortable for some students, and many students spoke of the deliberate choice to not belong, or of experiencing belonging in some spaces and not others. Lorena explained how she made decisions on which societies or groups to disconnect from, and to discontinue engaging with: ‘Maybe this (society) isn’t my group. This isn’t my type of people. And so, I felt almost like a misalignment with them’. This refusal of belonging resonates with Mol and Law’s concept of fire space (2001), which enables us to think about belonging and non-belonging as flickering, an oscillation.

For some students, focusing upon belonging was a source of discomfort. Bart explained how his need to work meant he found himself excluded from some of the typical activities of belonging such as extracurricular clubs: ‘I’m a waiter at one of the restaurants in town. So, it’s hard to fit in those activities around that as well’. Whereas Qilan described how reflecting on a sense of belonging provoked sensations of guilt:

[How I think about belonging] has changed over time. Like in first year I remember I felt kind of guilty for studying here because like with the whole Covid stuff, we got our predicted grades and I was kind of like I didn’t really work for this … (now) I don’t really think of the concept of belonging. Like I’m here for a reason, right? So there’s no point in me thinking like I don’t belong here when I’m already here. Since I didn’t pay much attention to it, I wouldn’t say that it was important for me to feel like I belong to the university. (Qilan)

Here, Qilan described how reflecting on a sense of belonging prompted discomfort, as she experienced a feeling that she shouldn’t be at the University due to her not having earned her grades in the conventional way.

For other students, belonging was very much temporal and in flux, again echoing the topological concept of fire space: ‘It’s mostly events for me kind of like freshers’ week’ (Sam). Or as described by Ana: ‘it has so much to do with campus because I feel like when I’m there I’m living the student life, and as soon as I leave it’s different’. These complex conceptions of belonging and non-belonging resonated through the data and aligned with literature that surfaces both the situatedness of belonging and the need to legitimise student disconnection (e.g Gravett and Ajjawi 2022; Guyotte, Flint, and Latopolski 2021). These nuanced experiences not only alert us to the flickering nature of belonging but raise the question of when an experience of non-belonging is a legitimate choice, and when non-belonging is a sign of exclusion that warrants concern.

New possible belongings

We can see that the students conceptualised belonging in multiple and divergent ways. Our data show how belonging flows across spaces and discontinuities. A sense of belonging was depicted, not as a constant or enduring aspect of students’ experiences, but as a shifting continuum: complex, fluid, messy and multiple. Participants reflected on the fleeting nature of belonging, this was a state that could come and go, a flickering state of being. This description resonates with Mol and Law’s concept of fire space (2001) which enabled us to think about the flickering relations between presence and absence (615). This opened up discussions and reflections on the notion of discontinuities of belonging. These include questions regarding when educators should seek to interfere with spaces of non-belonging? When does non-belonging constitute exclusion? Our participants showed how they made active choices to enact belonging within some spaces and communities and not others. Indeed, one student described the focus on belonging as unhelpful and as something that led her to experience guilt and a sense of exclusion. These complexities resonate with other research for example, Nieminen and Pesonen’s (2022) which shows that for some students withdrawing from enforced inclusivity may be an entirely appropriate decision, particularly if specific spaces or learning environments are built on ableism. Similarly, research into students’ experiences of transition depicted positive choices made by students to withdraw from the perceived pressures of campus life through relationships beyond the place of university, actively choosing to situate themselves ‘outside the bubble’ (Gravett and Winstone 2021, 1584).

We suggest that theorising belonging topologically can be generative in expanding our understanding of this complex idea. We can understand the topologies of belonging as multiple, fluid, and flickering in both absence and presence. Belonging is both material and bound up with identity, it flickers and is in flux, it may stick, slip and slide in different times and spaces. Our findings challenge the stability of space for belonging, and the stability of belonging itself as a concept that can be measured in a single item at any one point in time. Belonging is not a fixed entity but instead needs to be considered in relation to the material, the temporal and the spatial. Troubling belonging as a passive depiction of processes of assimilation becomes important. Students may need their own certainties of bounded space. Our students told, and showed, us how they purposefully created remote spaces of belonging through the curation of their desks, rooms, and resources. Belonging was shown to be relational, with relations between different actors enabling students to enact belonging spaces, rather than those spaces pre-existing or being already ‘there’. However, this was also shown to be an equity issue, as many students may need support to create these spatial certainties. Belonging may also be more difficult to enact remotely, and so additional attention needs to be paid to support diverse students in new ways. Understanding how students create assemblages of belonging will become increasingly important.

In this article, we have proposed that common assumptions around belonging belie its complex and diverse nature. We have surfaced the possibilities of topological thinking for educational research, and the value of engaging spatial theory to enable a different approach to understanding space and belonging. By thinking topologically, we can consider the complex topologies of belonging that institutions not only need to recognise but also productively engage with. In order to better foster multiple belongings for diverse students, we suggest that the first step is for educators to understand the nuances of belonging and to approach this multilayered concept with an awareness of its multiplicity. Students conceptualised belonging (and not belonging) across extra-curricular and curricular spaces, physical and virtual, and including multiple spaces. The (more) common spaces for students are curricular. Pedagogical approaches need to be adopted that respond to the ways in which students conceptualise and experience belonging differently, to the affective, material and embodied ways in which students experience belonging, that are better understood as multiple senses of belonging. Pedagogical approaches also need to acknowledge the discontinuities that our data has indicated through raising dialogue with students. Increasing emphasis on belonging as a prosocial uniform process, can elevate students’ anxieties, when there are many discontinuities.

Thinking differently about belonging

This study contributes to situated, spatial and material understandings of belonging. The research presented in this article sought to consider deeply the situatedness of learners who were asked to narrate their conceptions of belonging in their own lives and contexts. We uphold the validity of engaging the concept of belonging. But we suggest that belonging needs to be handled with care if it is to be meaningful, and not to join the ‘encrustations of buzzwords’ (Maclure 2010, 278) that are endemic to the higher education sector. Indeed, as educators we might more helpfully approach belonging as a matter of concern (Latour 2004). This moves us away from defining belonging singularly – as a uniform sense of belonging – and beyond assuming belonging can be measured and determined in any fixed way. Our research also highlighted the dangers of discourses of belonging leading to pressures to belong being experienced by students including belonging through particular activities. Importantly, these student accounts point to the validity of non-belonging in certain times and spaces. In particular, the need to disentangle when non-belonging may be problematic – as a warning sign of an exclusionary practice – or when it may be a legitimate expression of choice by students who prefer to disconnect from specific communities or spaces and to curate their own university experience differently. Our research also highlights how some students may wish simply to connect at different times and in different spaces. This is a critical insight as the importance of non-belonging is overlooked in much of the present practice that seeks to support students’ experiences. Belonging is something we should be both concerned about and interested in. But we suggest that more nuanced approaches are to be welcomed if we are to understand belonging in education in more meaningful and ethical ways.

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 author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Society for Research in Higher Education .