Self, Home and Belonging

Through a journey of self-exploration, acclaimed inaugural poet Richard Blanco shares his quest of finding himself and a country to call home

Hierarchies, scale and privilege in the reproduction of national belonging

It is increasingly recognised both that belonging divides hierarchically and that people have different capacities to be seen as belonging. However, while the existence of hierarchies of belonging is well‐documented from the perspective of ethnically minoritised and migrant groups, what characterises, produces and underpins these hierarchies is largely unaddressed, as is a geographically‐informed analysis of their reproduction. This paper, based on interviews with white British people in the suburbs of London, takes a novel approach, examining the reproduction of national belonging among people for whom such belonging is relatively privileged. The paper identifies three constructions of national belonging within white British narratives – “belonging in Britain”, “belonging to Britain” and “being of Britain” – and argues that, although not always recognised as such, the three constructions are hierarchical in their differing temporalities and connections to whiteness. The elucidation of these different belongings and, crucially, the recognition of their hierarchisation and scalar‐reproduction, represent major contributions to research on belonging, and also help to explain the exclusion from a full sense of national belonging articulated by British people of colour

Affective Terrains: Art, War, and National Belonging

This paper examines how cultural representations affirm national belonging within the context of Canada’s involvement in the War on Terror. To do this, it takes as its central case study an exhibition of official war art, 11 Artists for 11/11 (2012), which was mounted on public display in celebration of Remembrance Day. This paper approaches the exhibition and the works included in it by addressing their representative and non-representative (or affective) qualities, in order to think through the ways in which visual narratives of military history participate in shaping sentimental attachments to Canadian identity and being Canadian

Struggling to 'fit in': On belonging and the ethics of sharing in project teams

This paper explores the links between belonging and ethics, which remain largely underdeveloped in project studies and are overlooked in everyday practice of managing projects. It focuses on belonging as the process articulating identity-construction of an inter-organisational project team from a global management consulting firm that was working in IS design. As the team?s experienced ?sense of place?, belonging becomes the space which highlights preferred affiliations and exposes how ? individually and collectively ? ethics are played out in the context of the management of projects. Four in situ belonging-narratives (of opposition, pragmatism, reflexivity, and the habitual narrative) represent ethics as part of lived action and of a life-world that emerge from deconstructing and reconstructing ?the team? and an ideal worker in projects. The team?s struggles to ?fit in? were experienced both when resisting and when collaborating with the dominant collective narrative of belonging. Modes of belonging are constituted in the relationship between self, others, and ?otherness?, creating a situated ethical imagination of how to ?be professional?. Implications concern the politics of belonging and call for a renewed practical ethics that engages with the social nature of ?being?, to change the current view of professional identities in projects

Shades of Belonging

Examines data from the 2000 Census and information from surveys and focus groups conducted by the center to look at how Hispanics view their racial identities

Migrant African women: tales of agency and belonging

This paper explores issues of belonging and agency among asylum seekers and refugee women of African origin in the UK. It discusses the ways these women engendered resistance in their everyday life to destitution, lack of cultural recognition, and gender inequality through the foundation of their own non-governmental organization, African Women’s Empowerment Forum, AWEF, a collective ‘home’ space. The focus of this account is on migrant women’s agency and self-determination for the exercise of choice to be active actors in society. It points to what might be an important phenomenon on how local grassroots movements are challenging the invisibility of asylum seekers’ and refugees’ lives and expanding the notion of politics to embrace a wider notion of community politics with solidarity. AWEF is the embodiment of a social space that resonates the ‘in-between’ experience of migrant life providing stability to the women members regarding political and community identification

Gravitation and Electromagnetism

The realms of gravitation, belonging to Classical Physics, and Electromagnetism, belonging to the Theory of the Electron and Quantum Mechanics have remained apart as two separate pillars, inspite of a century of effort by Physicists to reconcile them. In this paper it is argued that if we extend ideas of Classical spacetime to include in addition to non integrability non commutavity also, then such a reconcilation is possible.Comment: 5 pages, Te

Black Italianità: Citizenship and Belonging in the Black Mediterranean

This article discusses the fraught relationship between legal citizenship and Black belonging as depicted in the works of two Black Italian women writers. The protagonists in the short story “Salsicce” (“Sausages”) by Igiaba Scego and the novella Kkeywa: Storia di una bimba meticcia by Carla Macoggi resist multiple forms of dispossession and struggle to hold on to the autonomy of their self-identification and cultural attachments. Both Scego and Macoggi affirm the necessity to reclaim the power of self-definition, self-representation, and political agency when reckoning with the citizenship project and its inherent exclusions. Thus, these writings showcase the importance of studying the dynamic body of Black literature in Italian and offer us insight into some of the racialized, gendered, and religious negotiations of Italian sociopolitics for Black people navigating life throughout Italy and the Mediterranean.