Belonging Across Disciplines
Interdisciplinary Insights
How we think about and understand a subject, any subject, can be rather limited (forgive me for saying) unless we dare to step into other genres and disciplines. Quite honestly, it can be a bit intimidating to confront a whole other body of knowledge that lies outside our own frameworks and theories for understanding the world. My work has always sat firmly in sociology, education and social work (with rather large dollops of psychology). However, for my doctorate, I needed to wander into the mind-blowing world of philosophy and the vast world of geography, two areas that I have had little relationship with. However, the riches of this venture are vast, almost like travelling to another country. Alongside this, it has become increasingly impossible to consider belonging without thinking about mattering, a shift that can be attributed to the work of Flett (2025).In this post, I will briefly introduce belonging and mattering across different academic disciplines.
General: Belonging
Anyone who has an interest in belonging will know that it is widely understood to be an intrinsic human need (Baumeister & Leary, 1995). You are unlikely to read any work on belonging where Baumeister and Leary aren’t referenced. However, if we look at research across different disciplines, we can add more depth to this understanding. We will see how belonging is woven into the fabric of place, identity and power. To belong is not merely to be present; it is to be recognised, included and accepted. To matter is not simply to exist; it is to feel that one’s presence makes a difference and that we are significant. That our experience of these aspects of being human are fragile and transformative.
Education: Belonging in Schools and Universities
Studies in education highlight belonging as a critical factor in student engagement, well-being and retention. The extensive work of Kelly-Ann Allen in this area shows that belonging in schools is not automatic; it must be cultivated through pedagogy, staff support and inclusive cultures (2025). Yet belonging can be undermined by stereotyping, invisibility or systemic inequities.
Belonging in higher education has become a central theme in contemporary research, recognised as a powerful determinant of student engagement, wellbeing and retention. Critical reviews (Gilani & Thomas, 2025) show that belonging is shaped by multiple factors such as inclusive pedagogies, supportive staff relationships, peer networks and institutional culture. However, students often encounter stereotyping, invisibility, or exclusion, particularly those from marginalised or working-class backgrounds.
For newly qualified teachers, especially those from working-class backgrounds, the classroom becomes a threshold: between student and professional, insider and outsider (Smith, 2026). Here, belonging is a daily negotiation, where their contributions only begin to matter when their contributions are valued rather than overlooked.
Geography: Place-Belongingness and Migration
Drawing upon Antonsich (2010) in my research helped me shape an understanding that belonging must always be understood as both place-belongingness (a personal, emotional attachment to place). This contributed to my FACES PLACES SPACES conceptual model (Cherry, 2025) to ensure a broader perspective on the areas that we must visit to cultivate belonging.
The politics of belonging (the discursive and institutional boundaries that regulate inclusion) help us grasp who gets to belong and how! This lens has been taken up in newer geographical work, showing how belonging is constantly negotiated in contexts of migration, urban change and environmental displacement. In this way, geography reveals belonging not as a fixed state but as a process of navigation, reminding us that belonging is deeply tied to place.
Recent work (GeoJournal, 2024) distinguishes between place-belongingness, the felt sense of being at home, and the politics of belonging, as mentioned above, the structures that decide who is included or excluded. Migrant youth studies (MDPI, 2023) show how belonging is relational, constructed through community ties and cultural practices. Belonging is understood as fragile, yet mattering emerges when young people’s dignity and contributions are recognised by the communities they inhabit.
Philosophy: The Other Side of Belonging
Philosophers have begun to explore the shadow side of belonging, for example what happens when it fails. The Other Side of Belonging (2020) argues that ‘unbelonging’, can damage identity and fracture community. I used this concept extensively in my research to explain the historical context, one that casts a long shadow, in how we think about children involved with ‘the state’ in the UK (Cherry, 2025).
For refugees and asylum seekers, belonging is often ambiguous, reciprocal and contested (Research Papers in Education, 2025). Living between cultures, living without recognition, living with invisibility. Becoming significant can become the antidote, affirming that even in unbelonging, one’s existence carries value.
The Philosophy of Belonging asks not only what it means to belong but also what happens when belonging fails, providing philosophical debates about agency, recognition and relational ethics. It argues belonging not as a static state but as a dynamic negotiation of self and other, individual and community.
Sociology: Belonging as Social Capital
Belonging in sociology is understood as a social, relational and institutional process rather than simply a private feeling as to whether we feel the lived experience of belonging and mattering; our individual psychology. Rather, it is negotiated through norms, networks and of course, power. Belonging is seen as a key resource that shapes participation, well-being and identity across all aspects of our social life. It is produced (and sometimes denied) through everyday practices, policies and the symbolic boundaries that mark who belongs to a place or group.
Recent sociological research highlights belonging as a dynamic process shaped by everyday practices, social norms and community spaces. Thurnell‑Read (2024) explores pub culture in the UK, showing how pubs act as focal points for community belonging even as they undergo significant social and economic change (particularly post COVID). This study demonstrates that simply talking about pub‑going is a way for people to articulate both personal attachments and perceptions of wider social transformation. Belonging in this regard sits at the intersection of individual life and collective change. This work underscores how belonging is embedded in cultural institutions that provide continuity and also disruption in social life.
Understanding how an individual's sense of belonging and transformation intersect in pub culture might explain the mainstream development of more extreme political views, the recruitment to which relies on people feeling that they belong to something bigger. I don’t have time to explore this assertion fully here, but I hope it stimulates your own thinking about how cultivating belonging can provide what we need as humans, regardless of whether that is for the good of humanity as a whole or not!
Conclusion: Belonging and Mattering as Transformative
Across these disciplines, a pattern emerges about the complexity of belonging and its relationship with place, power and self. It also invites us to dance between (and hold) the individual experience of belonging and the social fabric that we may belong (or not belong) to. This deeper understanding helps us widen the lens for considering what our own role is in cultivating belonging and where we may feel limited (the politics of belonging, for example). It also provides us with a framework for understanding how our inherent need to belong will be met somewhere, whether that is good for us as individuals and our communities or not.
Belonging and mattering shape individual capacity, strengthen communities, enhance well-being and provide a context for transformation. Belonging and mattering are not the goal, as in ‘an ending’, but they are ongoing practices that cultivate recognition, reciprocity and care and hopefully, make the world a better place rather than a more fractured one.
References
Allen, K.-A. (2025). School belonging: Evidence, experts, and everyday gaps. Educational Psychology Review. Advance online publication.
Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117(3), 497–529.
Cherry, L. (2025). Weaving a Web of Belonging: Developing a Trauma Informed Culture for All Children. Routledge.
Flett, G. L. (2025). Description and conceptualization of mattering. In G. L. Flett, Mattering as a core need in children and adolescents: Theoretical, clinical, and research perspectives (pp. 33–53). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
GeoJournal. (2024). Place-belongingness in real-life contexts: A review of practical meanings, contributing factors, and evaluation methods. GeoJournal, 89(2), 1–15.
Gilani, D., & Thomas, L. (2025). Understanding the factors and consequences of student belonging in higher education: A critical literature review. Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education, 1(38).
Higher Education Research & Development. (2024). Students, community and belonging: An investigation of student experience across six European countries. Higher Education Research & Development, 43(2), 1–18
Mellinger, C., Fritzson, A., Park, B., & Dimidjian, S. (2023). Developing the Sense of Belonging Scale and understanding its relationship to loneliness, need to belong, and general well-being outcomes. Journal of Personality Assessment, 105(5), 589–602.
McIntyre, J. (2025). Conceptualising the art of belonging for young refugees and asylum seekers: Reflections from England and Sweden. Research Papers in Education, 40(1), 1–20.
Research Papers in Education. (2025). Conceptualising the art of belonging for young refugees and asylum seekers. Research Papers in Education, 40(1), 1–20.
Social Sciences. (2023). Geographies of belonging: Migrant youth and relational spaces. Social Sciences, 12(3), 167.
Smith, T. (2026) Working-Class Teachers and the Issue of Belonging in a Middle-Class Profession. Unpublished (forthcoming) thesis, University of Buckingham.
Studies in Philosophy and Education. (2020). The other side of belonging. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 39(5), 1–15.
Thurnell‑Read, T. (2024). ‘It’s a small little pub, but everybody knew everybody’: Pub culture, belonging and social change. Sociology, 58(2), 420–436.