Belonging

<p dir="ltr">What does it mean to belong? Belonging is a term that often has positive connotations. Belonging, however, is contested, always political, and bound up with colonizing, racist, and capitalist processes. Belonging makes and is made by exclusions as well as inclusions in ways intimately bound up with geography. Belonging generates a myriad of possibilities and enclosures. It is often felt and understood through emotional affiliation, but can also be constituted through practices and performances of belonging at different scales, or as a more-than-human process. To say belonging is more-than-human means that belonging is neither felt only by humans nor created by and between humans alone. Belonging-as-difference may nourish more inclusive worldings, worldings in which belonging both makes and is made by place. While belongings may exclude, belongings are also made in diverse ways through lived, emotional, and affective experiences that refuse, resist, and undermine exclusion. Indeed, people and more-than-human beings negotiate, contest, and remake belongings on multiple scales, in multiple sites, and through multiple domains. Supporting inclusive belongings may entail understanding belonging as emergent, as brought about when diverse more-than-human beings encounter each other and emerge together anew, and come into being together in and with place</p>