Fostering a sense of belonging has become a core part of institutions’ teaching and learning endeavours. And yet, belonging is a complex relational concept. It has been shown to be processual, emergent, and dynamic. This complexity sits in tension with increasingly voluble calls to measure, manage and maintain students’ sense of belonging in universities. In this presentation we unpack belonging through research that invited students to not only narrate how they experience belonging, but also to show how belonging is embodied through actions, behaviours and artefacts. Our data depict the shades and modulations of how belonging is understood, which disrupts dominant discourses of simplicity, stability and uniformity.

Our research draws upon data from 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 contemporary universities. 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. 

In particular, we engage the theoretical concept of topologies in order to think about both space and belonging as evolving and multiple. We explore how Mol and Law’s notions of topological multiplicity and fluid spatiality (Mol & Law, 1994; Law & Mol, 2001) offer ideas that help us to consider the implications of a more nuanced conception of belonging, inclusion and community for educators and their institutions.

The project sought to answer the following research questions:

•           What assemblages of belonging do students create?

•           In what ways did the boundaries of belonging shift as a result of the shift to online learning during Covid-19?

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

•           How do students actively create belonging when learning in hybrid mode?

We will share how our data surface belonging as emotional, messy, emergent, textured, material, complex, and shifting.  These findings move us beyond a critical interrogation of the nature of student belonging to consider more nuanced perspectives about how belonging is both understood and also enacted at an individual lived level. Given the diversity of both learners and the spaces in which they learn, we suggest that interrogating the nature of belonging is urgently needed if we are to understand diversity and inclusivity in education in more meaningful ways.

In this presentation we draw upon empirical data with thirty students in two institutions in the UK and Australia to contend that a sense of belonging is not quantifiable in simple ways. Questions relating to community and belonging have formed a key element of the Student Experience Survey in Australia and the National Student Survey questionnaire in England. Such measures and the work in institutions to respond to these metrics, form strategies in which belonging is increasingly monitored and measured by institutions. Our research seeks to explore the complexities of how students define belonging. By exploring the situated, sociomaterial nature of belonging and the multiplicity of meanings it can engender, we examine a counterview to the notion that belonging can be easily measured, managed and maintained. As a result, we contribute to more granular perspectives on students’ experiences as well as to a deeper theorisation of the notion of belonging and its associated concepts: inclusion and community. We suggest that such insights are particularly important as educators seek to find ways to support a diversity of students in more meaningful and ethical ways. A richer understanding of how students orient towards and enact belonging at university is fundamental to creating a clearer alignment between the goals of the institution and those of the individual, avoiding superficial approaches to measuring the student experience. This research built upon 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, and this study is also inspired by the sociomaterial ethnographic work of Gourlay and Oliver (2016; 2018), and sociomaterial work of Fenwick, Edwards and Sawchuk (2011), seeking to expose ‘the complexities of what is actually going on ‘behind the screen’ and how these evolve over time’ (387). We adopted a video blogging method (or vlogging) at two institutions, the University of Surrey located in the UK and Deakin University 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.

This presentation contributes to richer understandings of the concept of belonging in higher education. The research presented will consider the situatedness of learners who were asked to narrate their conceptions of belonging in their own lives and contexts. The results are valuable, pointing to new and more nuanced understandings, including a recognition of the micro and the macro signifiers of belonging as well as its multiplicity. Our research also highlights the dangers of discourses of belonging leading to pressures to belong being experienced by students. Importantly, these student accounts point to the validity of non-belonging in certain times and spaces. We will invite the higher education sector to reframe conceptions of belonging in universities, to resist the lure of the metricisation of the complexity of human experience, and to be cognisant of the dangers of such oversimplification in terms of fostering further exclusions. Instead, we explore the value of thinking about the fluid and multiple topologies of belonging, and drawing upon theoretical ideas of topological space for thinking in more granular ways about students’ experiences in contemporary higher education. We suggest that these are ideas that are urgently needed if we are to understand diversity and connection in education in more meaningful and more ethical ways.

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