Contested Belonging: Spaces, Practices, Biographies

In Contested Belonging: Spaces, Practices, Biographies contributions by well-known international scholars from different disciplines address the sites, practices, and narratives in which belonging is imagined, enacted and constrained, negotiated and contested. Belonging is viewed from the perspectives of both migrants and refugees in their host countries as well as from people who are ostensibly ‘at home’ and yet may experience various degrees of alienation in their countries of origin. The book focuses on three particular dimensions of belonging: belonging as space (neighbourhood, workplace, home), as practice (virtual, physical, cultural), and as biography (life stories, group narratives). What role do physical, digital, transnational and in-between spaces play and how are they used in order to create/contest belonging? Which practices do people engage in in order to gain/foster/invent a certain/new sense of belonging? What can the biographies and narratives of people reveal about their complicated and contested experiences of belonging? Contested Belonging: Spaces, Practices, Biographies convincingly shows how individual and collective struggles for belonging are not only associated with exclusion and ‘othering’, but also lead to surprising and inspiring forms of social action and transformation, suggesting that there may be more reason for hope than for despair.

Table of Contents:
Introduction; Kathy Davis, Halleh Ghorashi, Peer Smets & Melanie Eijberts Part 1: Spaces  1. Entangled Belongings: Reimagining Transnational Biographies of Black and Global African Diasporic Kinship; Jayne Ifekwunigwe  2. People Like Me: Multiple Belongings Among Senior Mobile Home Residents in Florida; Margarethe Kusenbach 3. Finding Their Place: The Multi-Scalar Belonging of African Academics on a South African University Campus; Melissa Kelly  4. Senses of Non-Belonging and Belonging Within Citizens’ Summits in Amsterdam; Marloes Vlind and Peer Smets  5. Between Ambiguity and Ambition: Experiences of Belonging and Spatial Mobility Among Business Professionals Whose Parents Migrated from Turkey; Ali Konyali and Elif Keskiner  Part 2: Practices  6. Identity and Belonging: Conceptualisations And Reframings Through a Translocational Lens; Floya Anthias 7. Becoming Unaccustomed to Home: Young Eritreans’ Narratives About Estrangement, Belonging, and the Desire to Leave Home; Milena Belloni  8. Bartering for Belongings: Ethnic Trade in Belleville, Paris; Alice Hertzog  9. Meaningful Culturalization in an Academic Hospital: Belonging and Difference in The Interference Zone Between System and Lifeworld; Hannah Leyerzapf, Tineke Abma, Petra Verdonk and Halleh Ghorashi  10. Young Finnish Somalis Exploring Their Belonging Within Participatory Performative Research; Helena Oikarinen-Jabai  Part 3: Biographies  11. Murder in Chapel Hill: Muslims, The Media, and the Ambivalence of Belonging; Katherine Pratt Ewing  12. Longing to Belong: Moroccan-Dutch Young People’s Narrations of National Belonging; Jacomijne Prins  13. At the Roots of Home, Away from it: Meanings, Places and Values of Home Through the Biographic Narratives of Immigrant Care Workers in Italy; Paolo Boccagni  14. “Sometimes I Feel More Moroccan Than Dutch” Identity and Belonging in Second Generation Iranian-Dutch Women; Leila Kian and Halleh Ghorashi  15. Gendered Narrations of National Belonging Through Biographical Narratives of Motherhood in Mexico and Sudan; Tine Davids and Karin Willemse  16. Some Reflections On Belonging, Otherness and The Possibilities of Friendship; Halleh Ghorashi, Kathy Davis and Peer Smets

About the Author :
Kathy Davis is a senior research fellow in the Sociology Department at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Her most recent book is Dancing Tango: Passionate Encounters in a Globalizing World (2015). Halleh Ghorashi is Full Professor of Diversity and Integration in the Department of Sociology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She is co-editor of Paradoxes of Cultural Recognition: Perspectives from Northern Europe (2009) and Muslim diaspora in the West: Negotiating Gender, Home and Belonging (2010).  Peer Smets is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands. His recent co-edited volumes include Affordable Housing in the Urban Global South: Seeking Sustainable Solutions; Earthscan (2014), and Social Housing and Urban Renewal: A Cross-National Perspective (2017).

Review :
This book’s international contributors include established and emerging scholars in migration and intercultural studies, sociology, and anthropology. They investigate the feeling of belonging in migrants and refugees living in host countries, and in those who experience alienation while still living in their country of origin. Some subjects explored are African academics on a South African university campus, the sense of belonging among senior mobile home residents in Florida, and biographic narratives of immigrant care workers in Italy. Other subjects include young Eritreans’ narratives about estrangement and belonging, young Finnish Somalis, and Muslims and the media in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.