Despite widening participation policies across Europe, students from marginalised backgrounds continue to face persistent barriers to participation, recognition, and belonging in higher education (Brown & Leigh 2018; Weiss 2021). Even where formal access has been achieved, higher education often remains an ambivalent space in which students are present without fully feeling entitled, recognised, or secure in their membership. Transitions into university thus constitute a critical fault line within education systems, where social, cultural, and symbolic boundaries are drawn, processes of social closure become visible, and belonging is actively negotiated (Cree et al. 2017; Gravett & Ajjawi 2022). Within these dynamics, institutional inequalities are not only reproduced but may also be reworked and unsettled (Petrik 2025).

This paper focuses on practices of belonging, and in particular on collective practices of engagement through which belonging is negotiated, produced, and sustained in everyday interactions in various higher education contexts. Rather than approaching belonging as an individual state that one either has or lacks, we conceptualise it as a situated and relational process that encompasses both the broader politics of belonging (Yuval-Davis 2011) and its experiential, lived, and affective dimensions (May 2011; Niemi 2025). The paper draws on empirical material from three European contexts: Finland, Germany, and Austria. By bringing together data from different education systems, the paper contributes to European debates on inequality and participation in higher education from a cross-national perspective. Together, we examine how students engage in collective practices through which spaces of belonging are created. Our empirical material therefore shifts attention from individual feelings of inclusion or exclusion to the collective work through which belonging is accomplished or challenged. Against this backdrop, the paper asks: How is belonging collectively negotiated, produced, and sustained in transitions into and through higher education, and through which practices do students create spaces of belonging? Through the analytical examples, we show how belonging is actively done through collective engagements that both navigate and reshape institutional contexts of higher education.

Theoretically, the paper adopts a relational perspective on belonging, understanding belonging as a process that emerges through social practices rather than as an individual attribute. We build on Cuervo and Wyn’s (2014) three-dimensional model of belonging, which conceptualises belonging through meaningful relationships, a sense of rootedness and place attachment, and belonging in one’s time. This framework allows us to analyse how belonging is negotiated across social relations, institutional spaces, and biographical horizons. In addition, the analysis is informed by a social-materialist perspective (Paananen & Grieshaber 2023; Gravet & Ajjavi 2021) that attends to the involvement of non-human actors, material arrangements, and institutional infrastructures (Star 1999) in the production of belonging. This perspective enables us to explore how atmospheres, artefacts, technologies, and organisational settings become integral to collective practices of belonging.

The paper draws on empirical material from two qualitative research projects that share a common reconstructive and process-oriented methodological approach. Across both projects, the empirical base consists of a diverse sample of narratives from under-represented students, including first-generation students, non-white students, and students regarded as having special educational needs (OECD 2024). All participants are located at different moments of transition into and through higher education, including entry phases, early study experiences, ongoing programmes, and subject or pathway changes. This allows us to examine how experiences of belonging and non-belonging unfold across educational trajectories rather than at a single moment in time. The first project, Diverse Paths to Adulthood (DILE, 2019–ongoing), is a Finnish ethnographically oriented longitudinal study investigating the everyday lives and life courses of a small group of young men. It explores the formation of agency, wellbeing, and belonging across different life contexts, educational transitions, and social relationships, as well as the meanings of special needs education in participants’ educational pathways. The second project, Doing Class Transitions (2019–2025), examines transitions into higher education from the subjective perspective of first-generation students. It is based on 24 biographical case studies developed across universities in Austria and Germany. Employing biographical-narrative interviews alongside autobiographical written accounts, the study focused on pathways to university, everyday practices of studying, and affective experiences of transitioning to higher education. Methodologically, the paper adopts a life-history perspective to explore how experiences of belonging and non-belonging are embedded in longer biographical trajectories (Riessmann 2008). ‘Through discussion’ (Gordon et al. 2000), we engaged collaboratively with each other’s data sets, jointly analysing selected empirical materials and interpreting them together through the conceptual lens of belonging. This cross-project dialogue enabled us to identify and refine analytical insights into collective practices of belonging that cut across national contexts and institutional settings. The analysis foregrounds the collective dimension of belonging and the situated contexts in which belonging is made possible, negotiated, or constrained. Finally, the study is informed by ongoing methodological and ethical reflection on categorisation and representation. Rather than treating “under-represented students” as a fixed or homogeneous group, we attend to the heterogeneity of contemporary student populations and to intersecting and overlapping forms of marginalisation. This includes critical reflection on the researchers’ positionalities and on how participants are named, grouped, and represented, in order to avoid reproducing deficit-oriented or pathologising framings within higher education research.

The paper shows that belonging in higher education is not primarily an individual feeling or single achievement, but is accomplished through collective, situated practices. The analysis demonstrates how students engage in shared forms of work—such as building care relations, appropriating institutional spaces, and negotiating academic norms—through which spaces of belonging are actively produced, stabilised, and at times contested. By foregrounding these collective practices, we argue that belonging emerges at the intersection of social relations, biographical trajectories, and material-institutional arrangements. Empirically, the paper reveals how collective engagements enable students to navigate, endure, and at times rework marginalising experiences during educational transitions, while also showing the fragility and fluidity of these accomplishments. Theoretically, the paper advances a practice-based and socio-material conceptualisation of belonging that brings life-history perspectives into dialogue with social-materialist approaches. We argue that understanding belonging as collective work offers a productive lens for rethinking educational inequality beyond individualised accounts of participation and integration. We conclude by discussing how a collective and socio-material perspective on belonging can deepen our understanding of educational inequality and inform future research on transitions into and through higher education.

Brown, N., & Leigh, J. (2018). Ableism in academia: Where are the disabled and ill academics? Disability & Society, 33(6), 985–989. Cree, V., Tett, E., & Christie, H. (2017). From further to higher education: Transition as an ongoing process. Higher Education, 73(3), 389–406. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-016-0101-1 Cuervo, H., & Wyn, J. (2014). Reflections on the use of spatial and relational metaphors in youth studies. Journal of Youth Studies, 17(7), 901–915. Gordon, T., Holland, J., & Lahelma, E. (2000). Making spaces: Citizenship and difference in schools. Houndmills: MacMillan Press. Gravett, K., & Ajjawi, R. (2022). Belonging as situated practice. Studies in Higher Education, 47(7), 1386–1396. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2021.1894118 May, V. (2011). Self, belonging and social change. Sociology, 45(3), 363–378. Niemi, A. M. (2025). Assemblages of well-being and belonging in young adults’ life-historical narrations: Experiences from education and the labour market. Journal of Youth Studies, 28(8), 1283–1298. OECD. (2024). Education at a glance 2024: OECD indicators. Paris: OECD Publishing. Paananen, M., & Grieshaber, S. (2023). Policies of interlude and interruption: Stories of governance as an assemblage. Journal of Education Policy, 38(3), 367–385. Petrik, F. (2025). Practices of becoming: What and how do first-generation students learn when transitioning to university? Studies in Adult Education and Learning, 31(2), 135–153. Riessman, C. K. (2008). Narrative methods for the human sciences. London: Sage. Star, S. L. (1999). The ethnography of infrastructure. American Behavioral Scientist, 43(3), 377–391. Yuval-Davis, N. (2011). The politics of belonging: Intersectional contestations. London: Sage. Weiss, S. (2021). Fostering sense of belonging at universities. European Journal of Education, 56, 93–97.