Imagine Belonging

This book will touch the soul of the young child inside of every adult. I grew up with the innocence of chewing bubble gum while jumping doubledutch to experiencing love, death, gangs, and betrayal captured from my eyes which seem bigger than myself in the Borough of Brooklyn. Facing obstacles in my life from one stage to another. I can hear my mother say “If a door closes in your face then go open the damn window.” With that I never let anything or anyone stop my light from shining. Being the baby of the family my journey of life was met with adult decisions while facing the fact of being a fatherless girl in school. Her musical background is from her mother playing jazz and R&B music through the early dawn. Shaheeda learned how to load and shoot a gun at 8 years old while selling girl scout cookies to dope fiends.

Belonging. You need to feel it in all aspects of your life, including the workplace. Many business leaders recognize this truth and embrace the significant benefits that result from workplace belonging. These benefits include increased psychological safety, trust, and innovation. Yet, most of these leaders struggle with how to build belonging at work. Some even believe the idea of belonging at work - let alone feeling it - is too elusive to achieve. In Imagine Belonging, Rhodes Perry equips inclusive leaders with a powerful framework to overcome these challenges. The book invites you to participate in this critical conversation, and motivates you to eradicate the pain of exclusion that far too many of us experience on the job. Perry draws upon his distinguished career as a nationally recognized DEI thought leader to help you understand complex issues like power, privilege, targeted universalism, and belonging at a deeper level. He offers practical case studies, proven strategies, and rich stories empowering you to overcome the common barriers that often stymie your organization's DEI goals. His writing encourages you to positively influence your workplace culture by embracing inclusive leadership practices, cooperative team building methods, and fresh approaches on how to equitably structure your organization. Imagine Belonging helps you recognize the relative power and privilege you hold to transform yourself, your team, and your workplace. Whether your organization is just beginning its diversity, equity and inclusion journey, or is further along in the process, Imagine Belonging will inspire you to transform your vision of belonging at work into a reality....and reap the rewards that result from establishing an equitable organization.

This book uses belonging as a lens through which to understand women students’ experiences of studying for a doctorate, exploring the impact of academic cultures on career aspirations. Drawing on discourses of neoliberalism and academic identities, it makes a valuable contribution to ongoing discussions of gender inequality in the academy. Based on data gathered from women doctoral students in the UK, this book offers a contemporary, research-informed understanding of the doctorate as an inherently gendered experience, which has implications for individuals, academic institutions, and for the future of the academic sector. The book will be of interest to academics working in the area of doctoral education, doctoral supervisors and those involved in doctoral student support, including researcher developers and individuals working in graduate schools, as well as doctoral students themselves.

This book explores how human population genetics has emerged as a means of imagining and enacting belonging in contemporary society. Venla Oikkonen approaches population genetics as an evolving set of technological, material, narrative and affective practices, arguing that these practices are engaged in multiple forms of belonging that are often mutually contradictory. Considering scientific, popular and fictional texts, with several carefully selected case studies spanning three decades, the author traces shifts in the affective, material and gendered preconditions of population genetic visions of belonging. Topics encompass the debate about Mitochondrial Eve, ancient human DNA, temporality and nostalgia, commercial genetic ancestry tests, and tensions between continental and national genetic inheritance. The book will be of particular interest to scholars and students of science and technology studies, cultural studies, sociology, and gender studies.

Precarity and Belonging examines how the movement of people and their incorporation, marginalization, and exclusion, under epochal conditions of labor and social precarity affecting both citizens and noncitizens, have challenged older notions of citizenship and alienage. This collection brings mobility, precarity, and citizenship together in order to explore the points of contact and friction, and, thus, the spaces for a possible politics of commonality between citizens and noncitizens.The editors ask: What does modern citizenship mean in a world of citizens, denizens, and noncitizens, such as undocumented migrants, guest workers, permanent residents, refugees, detainees, and stateless people? How is the concept of citizenship, based on assumptions of deservingness, legality, and productivity, challenged when people of various and competing statuses and differential citizenship practices interact with each other, revealing their co-constitutive connections? How is citizenship valued or revalued when labor and social precarity impact those who seemingly have formal rights and those who seemingly or effectively do not? This book interrogates such binaries as citizen/noncitizen, insider/outsider, entitled/unentitled, “legal”/“illegal,” and deserving/undeserving in order to explore the fluidity--that is, the dynamism and malleability--of the spectra of belonging.

This book explores how questions about home and belonging have been framed in the discourses on race, migration, and social relationships. It does this with the aim of envisioning alternative modes of living and reimagining our political communities in ways that question the legacy of colonization and constructed identities which detract from our sense of obligation to each other and the planet. The book questions problematic categories of difference to transform human relations beyond the materialism of our global political economy. Questions addressed in the volume include: In what ways are combative colonial identities of difference manufactured within our national and global spaces of encounter? How can we expel the racialized and tribalized political identities that seek to purify and deny the complexities and sacredness of being human? How do we embrace the notion that everyone we encounter is a mirror reflecting our fears of suffering and our desires for happiness? The book is set in the context of re-emerging ultra-nationalists and anti-migrant politicians on the national and international stage, advancing various strands of extreme-right and protectionist ideology couched as redemptive-welfarist strategies. The adverse impacts of these strategies seem to be reifying a possessive idea of citizenship and identity, engendering a national fantasy that portrays communities as homogenous entities inhabiting enclosed borders. This is essentially a compendium of conversations across the intersection of the racial, national, ethnic, spiritual, and sexual boundaries in which we live.

Unsettled Belonging tells the stories of young Palestinian Americans as they navigate and construct lives as American citizens. Following these youth throughout their school days, Thea Abu El-Haj examines citizenship as lived experience, dependent on various social, cultural, and political memberships. For them, she shows, life is characterized by a fundamental schism between their sense of transnational belonging and the exclusionary politics of routine American nationalism that ultimately cast them as impossible subjects. Abu El-Haj explores the school as the primary site where young people from immigrant communities encounter the central discourses about what it means to be American. She illustrates the complex ways social identities are bound up with questions of belonging and citizenship, and she details the processes through which immigrant youth are racialized via everyday nationalistic practices. Finally, she raises a series of crucial questions about how we educate for active citizenship in contemporary times, when more and more people’s lives are shaped within transnational contexts. A compelling account of post-9/11 immigrant life, Unsettled Belonging is a steadfast look at the disjunctures of modern citizenship.

Everyday Belonging in the Post-Soviet Borderlands examines the Russophone communities in peripheral cities adjacent to the Russian borders in Estonia and Kazakhstan. The research adopts a cross-disciplinary, space-sensitive approach that focuses comparatively on individual memories, narratives, and performances. Based on ethnographic examples, this book reconstructs belonging as a complex dialectical relationship between “inclusion” and “exclusion.” This relationship, it is argued, manifests itself through a continuous spiral of boundary construction, appropriation, and transgression among different versions of Estonianness and Kazakhness, Europeanness and Cosmopolitanness, as well as Russianness.