ABSTRACT

This article offers a rethinking of a fundamental area of higher education research and practice: the concept of belonging. Extending the considerable international research attending to belonging, we suggest that normative narratives often contain a number of omissions. Such omissions include a consideration of the experiences of those students who may not wish to, or who cannot, belong, as well as a questioning of the very boundaries of belonging. Crucially, our reconceptualisation occurs within the context of the post-Covid-19 times in which we now live. Such times have seen a rapid move to emergency remote teaching, and, we suggest, offer an opening in which belonging can no longer be taken-for-granted as uniform and, as located within fixed times and spaces. Engaging generative concepts from the work of Massey, and Braidotti, and drawing upon Adam’s notion of timescapes, we propose a reframing of belonging as situated, relational and processual. Within this lens, belonging can be understood as a sociomaterial practice that shifts within, across and beyond online and face to face timespaces. At the end of this article, we examine the implications of such a reframing for educators seeking to develop belonging, and we also offer suggestions for further research.

摘要

本文重新思考了高等教育研究和实践的一个基本领域：归属概念。扩展关于归属的大量国际研究，我们认为规范性叙述通常包含一些遗漏。这些遗漏包括考虑那些可能不希望或不能归属的学生的经历，以及对归属界限的质疑。至关重要的是，我们的重新概念化发生在我们现在生活的后 Covid-19 时代的背景下。这样的时代已经看到了紧急远程教学的迅速转变，我们建议，提供一个开口，在这个开口中，归属感不再被认为是统一的，并且位于固定的时间和空间内。从 Massey 和 Braidotti 的工作中引入生成概念，并借鉴亚当的时间景观概念，我们提出了将归属重新定义为情境、关系和过程。在这个镜头中，归属感可以被理解为一种社会物质实践，它在网络内部、跨越和超越在线和面对面的时空。在本文的最后，我们探讨了这种重构对寻求发展归属感的教育者的影响，并为进一步的研究提供了建议。