The Politics of Student Belonging

In this research seminar, we will present research funded by the Society for Research in Higher Education (SRHE) on student belonging, which is broadly considered to be a positive foundation for students’ well-being and success at university.

We start by presenting a brief history of belonging research in higher education and invite you to think more critically about belonging. Drawing upon empirical data from interviews and video-blogs with 30 students in the UK and Australia, our research highlights how students experience and create multiple belongings. We identify how calls for integrated, uniform, approaches to building belonging in universities are unhelpful. Instead, we foreground the situated and political ways in which students make and curate meaningful and purposeful connections and safe spaces.

Our research points to the affective and dynamic nature of belonging, particularly how learners often enact belonging in ways that disrupt or challenge institutional assumptions and expectations. These insights are particularly important in the current HE context, with universities in many countries, such as Australia, setting ambitious targets to expand the access and participation of students from more diverse backgrounds.

We advocate for critical discussions between staff and students related to the affordances of embracing the multiple ways students and staff choose to belong, at different times and in different spaces. To facilitate such discussions, we will share visual resources designed to develop more generative conceptualisation of the notion of belonging.

Professor Sarah O’Shea has been awarded an Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) Fellowship at Surrey university and is visiting from Australia where she is currently Dean, Graduate Research. Sarah is also an internationally recognised researcher, who applies sociological perspectives to the study of higher education equity. Institutional and nationally funded projects advance understanding of how under-represented student cohorts enact success within university, navigate transition into and through this environment, manage competing identities and negotiate aspirations for self and others. Sarah has also held numerous university leadership positions, which have directly informed changes across the Australian higher education sector, particularly in the field of educational equity. She has published extensively and has been awarded nearly $AUD4 million in grant funding since 2009, also managing over $10 million in Federal Government funding. Sarah has also been recognised for her work via numerous awards and is currently an Australian Learning and Teaching Fellow (ALTF), a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (PFHEA), and a Churchill Fellow (CF).

Dr Karen Gravett is Associate Professor and Director of Research at the Surrey Institute of Education at the University of Surrey, UK, where her research focuses on the theory-practice of higher education, and explores the areas of student engagement, belonging, and relational pedagogies. She is Director of the Language, Literacies and Learning research group, a member of the SRHE Governing Council, and a member of the editorial board for Teaching in Higher Education, and Learning, Media and Technology. She is also a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (PFHEA). Karen’s work has been funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, the Society for Research in Higher Education, the Association for Learning Development in Higher Education, the British Association for Applied Linguistics, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Her latest books are: Gravett, K. (2023) Relational Pedagogies: Connections and Mattering in Higher Education, and Kinchin, I. M. and Gravett, K. (2022) Dominant Discourses in Higher Education.