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Our ambition is to extend, stretch and question interdisciplinary understandings of belonging and unbelonging, always with a view to the consequences of these conceptualisations in the material world; to engage with those inside and outside the university using ideas about belonging in their everyday work; to understand what this allows and what it restricts; and to challenge and build on existing uses of belonging in ways that enable alternative perspectives on social life and power.

We seek to advance scholarship that problematises practices of exclusion, separation, hostility, and rupture – including those that promote limited and abstract forms of inclusion – and that contemplates concrete possibilities for solidarity and connection. At the heart of our research and practice are emergent forms of un/belonging. We imagine belonging as sometimes restrictive but also as holding possibility and we consider its many inflections: as in process, as transitional, as hopeful, as oppressive, as exclusive, as collective, as individual, as relational, as unfixed, as both measurable and immeasurable, as emotional, and as materially consequential.

Timely challenges for un/belonging which our work engages include the following interdependent dynamics:

• the hardening of categories of belonging espoused by governments in citizenship, rights, border controls and national identity categories
• the resurgence of requirements for gender conformity and gender binaries and restrictions on the rights of women, gender-nonconforming people and sexual minorities, in different guises around the world
• the role of social media and online interaction as a space of possibility for new communities of belonging, which can be both expansive in enabling connection and restrictive in ways that can increase hostility and disconnection
• questions about how practices and categories of belonging can change, or may be restricted, with the increasing influence of Generative AI and its dependence on specific materials for the reproduction/enforcement of knowledge, ideas and practices
• climate and ecological crises and their effects on people鈥檚 ability to relate to or stay in place, connect with others or understand global interconnectedness
• More broadly, the relationship between belonging and forms, processes and ideas of justice.

While varied and sociologically widespread, our research shares a commitment to the following conceptual and methodological efforts:

 

A critical theory of belonging today. We explore theoretical perspectives on belonging, including the sociological means of locating it in contemporary societies and understanding it as an active process. We theorise by considering a range of intersectional and interdisciplinary ideas that seek to offer a context-specific, bottom-up, politically attuned approach to belonging. For example, we examine belonging in official vs. affective forms (Lambert) and contrast abstract and normative belonging to concrete, lived belonging (Chamberlen). Our research also examines how belonging relates and contributes to other theoretically loaded concepts such as identity and biography (incorporating questions of race, gender, class), emotions and affective practice (Jones; Lambert; Chamberlen), social attitudes (Liebe, Gray), citizenship (Jones), conflict (Todorova), hospitality (Solomos), stigma (Chatzitheochari, Gray), victimhood (Marshall), spirituality, faith and religion (Blencowe; Robinson-Edwards), solidarity (Blencowe; Chamberlen) and home (Thiara; Jones). We consider questions of temporality, space and place and seek theoretically critical means to share stories that unsettle established narratives on questions of who belongs, how and where. Our theoretical approaches are committed to affective and material accounts that consider pursuits of empathy, longing, and attachment (Lambert) and are politically open to possibilities for solidarity and civic participation today (Wadia, Thiara, Todorova, Jones, Ozkul).

 

Methodological innovation to the study of belonging. Our scholarship is attentive to the tools and approaches we use to examine practices and meanings of un/belonging. We promote creative methods, suitable for communicating difficult stories of belonging and exclusion that are accessible, activist and publicly available. These include live methods, embodied participatory methods, collaborative and arts-based methods, ethnographic methods, qualitative and quantitative longitudinal methods and multifactorial experimental surveys, among others. We contemplate which methods are best placed to articulate belonging, how certain methods promote critical accounts of belonging while others restrict wider dialogue and explore how methods may help us think how to 鈥榙o鈥� and 鈥榝eel鈥� connection differently via our research practices.

 

We are interested in intersectional, sociologically aware accounts which highlight the roles of identity negotiations, emotions, and social attitudes in understanding experiences of belonging and unbelonging in contemporary societies. We take a critical stance on the contested notions of citizenship, community, home, family and justice, and engage with creative methods and affective politics that enable us to read and do connection differently. We are promoting a research agenda that conceptually and methodologically examines practices and lived experiences of un/belonging and is participative and engaged with invisibilised individuals and groups, non-academic partners, and official/policy discourses.

 

The following themes are shared in the research projects of several colleagues:

 Exclusion, Hostility, Rupture, Separation

Colleagues in the Department are engaged with questions which challenge unbelonging, marginalisation and social exclusion in their varied manifestations. Work in this strand also looks at instances of negative belonging experienced through (dis)possession and rights to own/inhabit (Jones) which materialise in histories of empire, colonialism and oppression. This focus on exclusionary belonging runs through research on unaccommodating urban spaces (Solomos), racialised ethno-nationalism and conflict (Todorova; Jones), intimate partner, ethnic and state violence (Liebe; Thiara; Blencowe), punitive logics, carcerality and criminalisation (Robinson-Edwards; Todorova; Chamberlen; Gray; Marshall; Lewis), hostile or inhospitable policies and discrimination practices (Jones; Solomos; Liebe; Ozkul); and disability stigma and discrimination across the lifecourse (Chatzitheochari). We also look at the othering of gendered and racialised communities (Wadia; Thiara; Robinson-Edwards; Chamberlen) and the erosion of belonging, relationships and 鈥榯he home鈥� (Thiara; Solomos; Lampard). More broadly, we reflect on colonialism, dispossession, and racism (Blencowe) and we consider long-term effects of neoliberalism, state violence and stigma on un/belonging of marginalised groups (Chatzitheochari; Gray). Research here is seeking to tell the stories of what it feels like to not belong, or of assuming violent belonging, and in so doing considers aspects of nostalgia, memory and legacy.

 

Shifting structures of Un/Belonging: Family, Relationships, Community, Nation, State

This strand of research looks at the interconnected structures and processes through which belonging and unbelonging are configured. In it we examine institutions including family, race, nation and state conceptually and historically, and attend to their implications for lived experience, inequality and social connections in settings including criminal justice, migration, disability and childhood. Work in this strand considers how structures and practices of family- and community-based belonging are linked to ongoing histories of coloniality, state-building and neoliberalism (Werner Boada, Lambert, Gray, Jones). Research in this area considers formation and dissolution of couple and parental relationships, behaviour and attitudes towards relationships and their place in one鈥檚 biography and sense of self, and considers 鈥渇amily鈥� beyond normative models (Lampard; Lambert). Experiences of un/belonging through enforced binaries of gender and sexuality are explored in this strand (Moon) as are attempts to create spaces for political participation for excluded groups (Wadia). Linked questions of how race, colonialism, nationalism and migration inflect belonging are central to this strand of work, examined in relation to bordering practices (Jones; Ozkul), policing (Lewis), punishment (Chamberlen) and discrimination (Solomos, Werner Boada). This strand of research also considers 鈥榦n road鈥� and 鈥榬oad life鈥� approaches to understanding street cultural formations and labels of criminalisation (Robinson-Edwards), explores cultural life in shifting urban spaces as well as spaces of confinement (Solomos; Robinson-Edwards; Chamberlen) and examines the urban dynamics of hospitality, dwelling and co-existence amongst diverse communities (Solomos). This strand engages more-than-human relationships: belonging not just to families or relational groups and places, but also to spaces, rocks, ecologies, waters (Blencowe). This work includes research on religion and spirituality/spiritual-activism (Robinson-Edwards) and is interested in the spiritual as a means of expression of our more-than-human kinships and connections and of new, shifting or negotiated identities (Blencowe; Robinson-Edwards). The relationship between community and state is central in this strand where the negotiation of cohesion and categorisation dynamics are unpacked.

 

Resistance, Solidarity, and the Politics of Belonging

The third strand of our Belonging research considers how individuals and groups survive, resist and organise against and with belonging narratives. It looks at grassroots responses and political mobilisations that create forms of belonging and connection different from those of state laws and practices (Jones). It also looks critically at human rights as everyday practices and seeks to elevate the status and lived experiences of asylum seekers and refugees (Ozkul), as well as stateless, imprisoned, colonized and minoritized populations (Todorova; Robinson-Edwards; Liebe; Chamberlen). Scholars in this research strand look, for example, at women鈥檚 civic and political participation and the impacts of public policy on women (Wadia) and explore questions of gender, reproductive justice and parenting as instances of resistance and radical praxis (Werner Boada; Lambert).Research within this theme looks at how racialised minority women 鈥榙o politics鈥� and considers the politics of belonging as a means of claiming one鈥檚 place in the western polity (Wadia). It also contemplates ways of disrupting one鈥檚 exclusion by creating a different sense of 鈥榟ome鈥� and belonging (Thiara) or challenging binary distinctions between 鈥榲ictims鈥� and 鈥榩erpetrators鈥� (Marshall; Jones) and analyses 鈥榦utsider鈥� and art-based forms of resistance performed by those punished, imprisoned or victimised (Thiara; Liebe; Chamberlen). This strand of research takes the possibilities for solidarity and reparation seriously, considering the obstacles as well as opportunities to move beyond hostile and punitive forms of political connection and justice (Blencowe; Chamberlen; Marshall; Lewis) that are local, embodied and affective. This theme is also interested in thinking about abolition (of various hegemonic ideas and institutions) and the affective economies around pursuing abolition today. This includes imagining all the things that might/should be abolished, including belonging itself (Jones).

 

Principles

• We seek to understand inflections of belonging and unbelonging in social life.
• We are always interested in how power relates to conceptions, practices and experiences of belonging and unbelonging.
• Unbelonging is as important to us as belonging.
• Ideas and practices of justice are central to our approach to belonging and unbelonging.
• We are interested in possibility and process, not fixed definitions.
• We understand that belonging and unbelonging always have a history and context.
• Belonging and unbelonging are relational – relations might be with people, groups, places or things.
• Belongings and unbelongings are multiple and they change over time, place and circumstance.
• Understanding belonging and unbelonging requires attention to the social, cultural, emotional/affective, political, material, geographical and temporal.