Browsing by Subject "Belonging"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    College Students' Use of Facebook During Their Transition to College: Mediated Belonging at a Small, Private, Liberal Arts College
    (2015-05) Hart Ruthenbeck, Robin
    This study explored the effects of participation in a targeted Facebook group on students' sense of belonging as they transitioned to a small, private liberal arts college. Data collected through a mixed-method design illuminated the impact of participation in a targeted Facebook group on participants' sense of belonging as they made the transition to college. Evidence from this study indicates that students' participation in a targeted Facebook group may impact students' sense of belonging in various ways. Additional data indicate that the ways students engage with Facebook, their motivation to engage, the frequency of engagement and value attributed to such interactions are fluid. The intersection between perceived value, frequency and type of Facebook suggest taxonomy of Facebook usage. Understanding different types of usage will aid institutions in managing social media presence and determining best ways to introduce and engage new members within their communities.
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    Everyday landscapes of immgrant integration in post-socialist Berlin: integration projects, othering and meanings of work.
    (2011-02) Matejskova, Tatiana
    This research examined everyday landscapes of belonging and responses of local population to recent immigrants in one of the new urban areas of immigrant settlement in Germany, namely neighborhoods of eastern Berlin, Marzahn. Once the largest socialist-era housing estate in the former East Germany, now severely socio-economically marginalized, central and northern Marzahn has over the past 15 years become home of the largest concentration of post-Soviet immigrants of German ancestry (so-called Aussiedler) in the former East Germany, the second largest migrant group by now in Germany. The project focused first, on what I call integration practices, that is practices through which local integration projects and policies seek to enable greater social inclusion of recent immigrants as well as acceptance of immigrants by the local society. And second, I sought to understand how such projects as well as immigrants and local residents themselves understand what "integration" - a vague but increasingly ubiquitous and contested term - entails and how they construct belonging in everyday urban contexts. The study is more broadly situated within the context of Germany's new regime of immigrant integration, which promotes neoliberalized, work-based understanding of belonging. These research questions were approached through a mixed-method qualitative case study, which entailed ethnographic work focused on northern and central Marzahn, including volunteering in two integration projects, focus groups conducted with local residents and Aussiedler immigrants, semi-structured expert interviews with local integration practitioners and experts, as well as document analysis. Findings point out in the first place to the myth of an integrated national society that immigrants encounter and in which they strive for belonging. Namely, I show that local practices through which Marzahner Other Aussiedler immigrants in everyday spaces as Russians hailing from backwards East and thus non-belonging in Marzahn and in Germany, are strongly entangled with and embedded in the national landscape of citizenship, in which Marzahn and Marzahner themselves occupy a very precarious position. Second, this project finds that while local integration projects in Marzahn play an important role in supporting immigrants' process of settlement through creating linguistically and socially familiar social spaces, crucial for regaining social confidence in a new environment, they often fail in achieving their goal of providing spaces of increased contact between immigrants and local residents. Rather, such sustained encounters are enabled within the spaces of larger community centers housing integration projects, mostly because they employ often significant numbers of otherwise unemployed residents through workfare programs. While such engagements do tend to increase empathy and more positive attitudes of local residents towards individual Aussiedler, I have cautioned against overoptimistic expectations for increased contact to also bring about reduced stereotyping and prejudice against the Aussiedler as a whole group and category. And finally, this dissertation shows that, quite in line with Germany's neoliberalized norms of belonging as based on employment and work contributions, especially middle-aged and older Aussiedler perceive their long-term exclusion from labor market as an obstacle to their feeling integrated in Germany. As I show, their insistence on the centrality of work for their feelings of belonging in a society is less a result of an influence of local integration practitioners or community leaders - for whom the importance of work for Aussiedler integration is instrumental rather than ideological - or from Marzahn's residents, many of whom do not see steady employment as a precondition for immigrant integration, in part also because of their own strong experiences with long-term unemployment. Rather, as I argue, this centrality of work draws primarily on the persistence of dividual conceptions of personhood and self as deeply socially embedded and emerging through a practice and experience of work, that these subjects internalized during their Soviet-era socialization.
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    Legitimacy and Belonging: Community Engagement in Higher Education
    (2019-04) Grewell, Rachel
    This dissertation is concerned with a move toward community engagement within academia generally, and more specifically the concepts of legitimacy and belonging in engagement practices. My work contributes to a relatively recent shift toward community engagement classifications and designations for institutions of higher education (Saltmarsh and Driscoll 2015). These designations are important for understanding the growing significance of engagement within academia, as an opportunity for expanding interpretations of how knowledge is understood and produced. I find in this dissertation that the growing field of community engagement is an opportunity to challenge ideas of dominance and power in knowledge systems, as well as offer a space for growing collaborations and building relationships beyond traditional academic research practices. My work contributes to the idea that participatory and collaborative work is a place where practitioners of these methods grapple with questions of legitimacy and a sense of belonging, both in the work and with one another.
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    Tracking Wildlife Conservation in Southern Africa: Histories of Protected Areas in Gorongosa and Maputaland
    (2015-10) McKeown, Kathleen
    In this dissertation, I argue that the development and demarcation of protected areas in southern Africa has not only been a process of defining boundaries but also of defining belonging. I focus specifically on how wildlife has been determined to belong in particular areas and how these animals have been claimed as belonging to individuals, communities, provinces, nations, and regions. I focus on the histories of wildlife conservation in Mozambique and the northern part of KwaZulu Natal, with particular emphasis on Gorongosa and Maputaland during the period from the early 1960s to the late 1990s, a time of great social and political change in both South Africa and Mozambique. I have selected these areas not to propose points of comparison between conservation practices in these neighboring countries, but rather to demonstrate complex continuities, exchanges, and cross-fertilizations. Ideas about wildlife conservation crossed national borders, as did animals, their advocates, and, eventually, protected area boundaries. By employing a transnational perspective on protected area histories, I illustrate and analyze this movement of personnel, non-human animals, and conservation practices between nation-states. By interrogating the scientific knowledge production and policy-making of protected area development, my narrative foregrounds the ways that wildlife has been implicated in and impacted by ideas about where these animals belong and to whom. Conceptions of indigeneity and nativeness, which tie belonging to place, have impacted the territories and scales of protected areas, as well as what (or who) has the right to dwell within their borders. However, these categories of belonging are not inherent to the wildlife species they have been attributed to. Instead, “belonging” is a condition that is made through a complex network of biocultural interactions. It is produced through dynamic constellations of political conditions, cultural values, economic interests, scientific ways of knowing, and animal behavior.