Belonging Today Working Group is a forum for recurring conversations, inspiration and collaboration between scholars on the topic of belonging and its transformations in the contemporary world.

By belonging we mean three interconnected dynamics:

1. person’s feelings or identification with a collectivity
2. that collectivity’s recognition of her or his belonging, and
3. the practices and material conditions which constitute belonging and exclusion or isolation.

Our focus on belonging directs the gaze to several classical problems of social sciences, including solidarity, social bonds, social integration, differentiation, domination, change and distinction. In examining contemporary forms of belonging, the Working Group sees itself as a descendent of this long intellectual lineage but it does so without reproducing the conventional and theoretically fixed ways to understand the question, originally posed as “what holds society together?”

In asking “how do people belong in the contemporary world”, and doing so from a multidisciplinary perspective, we re-address the original framing of the question by: (1) beginning with an understanding that there are multiple and coexistent forms and locations of belonging, as well as of exclusion, from those rooted in economic exchanges to those rooted in national beliefs, and from those located in the “private sphere” of intimacy, household and kinship to those located in the setting of community; (2) seeing belonging as both a political and personal question, a place of ambivalence and conflict, in which the capacity to belong, and the sense of belonging, is connected to an unequal access to both symbolic and material resources; (3) asking how contemporary belongings are formed and transformed in relation to collectivities, but also the life-projects of “individuals”, who sometimes seek forms of belonging, but other times seek to escape or disclaim them.

Understanding contemporary belonging means accounting for changes in intimacy, family structure and gender roles, the growing importance of transnational ties and communities, the decline in long term wage based employment and unionized labor, extensive migration and redefined immigration policies to mention a few.

Four foci of the Working Group include:

1. Political belonging (membership; inclusion/exclusion)
2. Economic belonging (work and organizational life)
3. Localities of belonging (from the local community and neighbourhood to the non-local or transnational)
4. Personal belonging (personally significant bonds and personal attachments).

These sub-themes are not mutually exclusive, but overlapping, coexistent and mutually informative both empirically and theoretically. Moreover, in each case we seek to examine belonging in multiple ways: as a political question; in terms of the material infrastructures (from passports to policies to technologies) that make belonging possible or restrict it; as something rooted in practices and social categories, but also agency; in terms of how it is organized; in temporal terms (including biographical but also larger historical transformations); and finally, in terms of those who do not belong or whose belonging is restricted (as for example the undocumented immigrant).