What does it truly mean to belong? In this blog post, Dr Neil Speirs, Widening Participation manager, discusses what place-belongingness means, the underlying politics of belonging and how we can support and nurture belonging for student parents on campus. This post belongs to the Mar-April Hot Topic series: Being student parents/carers↗️.
The Phone Call
It was a miserable Tuesday afternoon in early February a few years ago. I remember how the rain was falling sideways from an angry grey sky when the phone rang. A student was calling me, looking for some advice. The student in question was in second year, and on this particular day she hadn’t been able to arrange child care for her daughter. This was the first time this had happened in her year and half as an undergraduate student. She had been turned away from the few University spaces she had tried to gain entry to with her daughter. She simply wanted to study for a few hours in a quiet space, while her daughter sat with her. However, it had been made very clear to her that this was not possible. She would be welcome any time, but not with her daughter. So, she had gathered her bag and taken her daughter’s hand and walked into town – frantically trying to find a public space that she would be able to use. Not knowing the city centre of Edinburgh so well, very quickly she and her daughter were defeated by the weather and had no idea of where to go or what to do.
What we do, what we say and how we treat each other really matters.
The geographer Marco Antonsich (2010)↗️ writes that belonging should be thought of in two dimensions. Firstly, it should be analysed as a ‘personal, intimate, feeling of being ‘at home’ in a place (place-belongingness)’. The second dimension of analysis should be ‘as a discursive resource that constructs, claims, justifies, or resists forms of socio-spatial inclusion/exclusion (politics of belonging)’. Antonsich argues that ‘a first analytical level in the study of the notion of belonging is to understand how, as an emotional feeling, it comes to be attached by an individual to a particular place’. This generation of place-belonging is clearly absent for the student that had called me those few years ago. However, they are not alone in this lacking of place-belonging on campus. Many student parents over the years have spoken to me about this. I recall on one occasion a fourth-year student that had very quickly gone into one of the student union buildings with his son so as to buy a cup of coffee and a bottle of orange juice. He was very quickly told that the student union buildings were not for the general public and their families – but for students only. A brief interrogation of these occurrences – of which there are many more I could tell you about – through Antonsich’s first level of interrogation, reveals a lack of the personal and the intimate. There is no place- belongingness to be found. Even more worrying is the potential for the emotional feelings that are developed to be negative in connotation – leading to quite the opposite to place-belongingness. What we do, what we say and how we treat each other really matters.
The structures that frame our experience
In terms of the politics of belonging, we might reflect on the work of Yuval-Davis et al. (2005)↗️, when the authors assert that this is when the ‘sociology of emotions’ should come to terms with the ‘sociology of power’ – after all, ‘belonging cannot be an isolated and individual affair’ (Probyn, 1996, p13)↗️. As Antonsich reminds us ‘every politics of belonging involves two opposite sides: the side that claims belonging and the side that has the power of ‘granting’ belonging. This means, that a process of negotiation – as well as rejection, violation, and transgression – is always in place, either at the individual or at the collective scale or both’. So, we must ask ourselves why would any institution not want to ‘grant’ belonging to its student parents? Student parents, as Estes (2011)↗️ reminds us, ‘want to be successful as parents and as students’. However, they are attempting this ‘within institutional and cultural contexts that have not caught up to the realities of their lives’. It is vital for all institutions to catch up with these realities, because ‘if university administrators and educators want to meet the needs of a diverse student body to promote retention and completion, they need to understand the challenges facing students and develop strategies to serve them better’ (ibid). In doing so, using the language of Antonsich, we facilitate the right to ‘claim’ belonging for each and every one of our student parents through a pedagogy of love and hope – in turn, this begins to facilitate place-belonginess. However, this is not an on-off switch – this is a process that must be engaged with by higher education institutions side by side with their student parents – ‘belonging cannot be an isolated and individual affair’ (Probyn, 1996, p13)↗️. This is therefore both a cultural and policy project that may indeed take time – but why not start now? The structures that frame our experience on campus can have both positive and negative consequences – particularly if they are constructed with only a certain type of student in mind.
Colouring in – outside of the lines
The good news is that since December this academic year we have our first ever child and parent room on campus↗️. This is situated in the main library and involved collaborative work between widening participation, information services, the main library and the student parent representative. This is just the beginning of a process that could see a number of child and parent rooms across our various campuses. The room in the library is bright and colourful – its large windows welcome huge amounts of light from the meadows. We are currently in the final stages of arranging drop off points so that students and staff might be able to donate children’s books and toys that can be used in the room. As the child and parent room (along with other acts of support by staff across campus) generates place-belongingness, that in turn facilitates a proper rejection of any socio-spatial exclusion. The next steps involve looking at the timing of the release of timetables to enable student parents to plan for child care; looking at aligning reading week with Edinburgh school holidays; and considering Friday afternoons as a teaching free zone – matching with Edinburgh schools. Good educators place students in a position to flourish. Let’s make sure we do this for our student parents as well as other students – to do so we might need to colour-in outside of the lines of current policy and practice. But that might be no bad thing.
References
Antonsich, M. (2010). Searching for belonging–an analytical framework↗️. Geography compass, 4(6), 644-659.
Estes, D. K. (2011). Managing the student‐parent dilemma: Mothers and fathers in higher education↗️. Symbolic Interaction, 34(2), 198-219.
Probyn, E. (1996). Outside Belonging↗️. London: Routledge.
Speirs, N.M. (2021). Storm on the Island – The Lived Experience of Working Class Adult Learners in Higher Education↗️. Adult Learner: The Irish Journal of Adult and Community Education, 22, pp 107-131
Yuval-Davis, N., Anthias, F., et al. (2005). Secure borders and safe haven and the gendered politics of belonging: beyond social cohesion↗️. Ethnic and Racial Studies. 28 (3), pp. 513–535.
Neil Speirs
Dr Speirs’ role involves working as a manager, practitioner and researcher in a number of areas concerning widening participation & access and related policy. He has strategic oversight and management of a number of self-generated community projects. These projects along with his teaching and research are centred around a number of areas of interest that span from primary education through secondary, further and higher education. A few of these areas of interest and specialisms are; the transition from primary to secondary education, the academic achievement of working class young males, the sociology of sport, widening participation student transitions, the equity of student experience, social reproduction & critical pedagogy, the working class mature student, the hidden curriculum, peer-related pedagogies and autoethnography.
