Cartographies of belonging: mapping nomadic narratives of first-year students

ABSTRACT

In this work, we explore first-year students’ experiences of belonging through the theoretical and methodological lens of nomadism. Specifically, we problematize conceptions of belonging subjects and spaces as bounded and static, instead taking up belongingness as a dynamic process that enfolds complex experiences and spaces. Using feminist poststructuralism, we move toward an understanding of belonging that disrupts stasis and fixity, conceptualizing belonging as requiring continual negotiation. Our analysis produces a cartography across participants, a narrative mapping of the connections, relations, and flows of belonging that parallel and disrupt static understandings of what it means to belong in higher education. This work suggests new methodological and theoretical possibilities for considering and understanding narratives of belonging in the nebulous, multiplicitous, and shifting places and spaces of higher education institutions.

KEYWORDS:

• Belonging
• philosophical nomadism
• higher education
• narratives
• space
• feminism
• poststructuralism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Consistent with Braidotti (2011), we use ‘zigzag’ to describe cartographic movements that resist linearity and disrupt chronological notions of time. These movements attend to both local and global, spatial and temporal.

2. All names are pseudonyms.

3. Racial identities derived from a first-year student survey. Through nomadic theory, the complex nature of identity cannot be flattened into these categories; however, we include such designations because they nod to the challenges in practicing a nomadic philosophy. As articulated by the editor who reviewed this manuscript, we are always caught amidst contradictory nomadic flows. Resolving these contradictions exceeds the aim of this manuscript (and the aims of nomadism), thus we simply note these challenges rather than resolve them.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Paul P. Fidler Research Grant from the National Resource Center for The First-Year Experience and Students in Transition.

Notes on contributors

Kelly W. Guyotte

Kelly W. Guyotte is Assistant Professor of Qualitative Research and co-coordinator of the qualitative research certificate at the University of Alabama. Her research interests include qualitative methodology, artful inquiry, and pedagogy/mentorship.

Maureen A. Flint

Maureen A. Flint is Assistant Professor of Qualitative Research at the University of Georgia. She has worked in student affairs in a variety of capacities including residential life and student programming, and her research interests include higher education, qualitative methodology, and artful inquiry.

Keely S. Latopolski

Keely S. Latopolski is Director of Diversity and Inclusion Initiatives and an Academic Advisor in the Culverhouse College of Business at The University of Alabama. She has experience in student involvement and residence life, and her research interests include mattering, sense of belonging, and diversity and inclusion initiatives within higher education.