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Recommendations for enhancing belonging in STEM higher education.

In Belonging and Identity in STEM Higher Education, Camille Kandiko Howson and Martyn Kingsbury examine the role of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) pedagogies in facilitating belonging, variable impacts across student characteristics, and the experiences of STEM students in higher education. Through case study contributions, the book analyzes the unique educational environments for STEM staff and students throughout Europe and Asia, challenging the assumptions that STEM fields are inherently unemotional and impersonal disciplines.
 

Higher education is in trouble, and not only due to a decline of public trust. As a microcosm of our broader culture, universities are inequitable and often harmful, especially for marginalized people. This is despite the democratic promise of higher education as a path for learning and social mobility. Women, people of color, First Gen, disabled, LGBTQ+, and other minoritized groups are disproportionately harmed in educational institutions that are hierarchical and reproduce inequality. Efforts to foster belonging for faculty, staff, and students may be highly effective but are under attack.
 
Betrayal U intervenes in this context with a diverse, rich collection of essays, art, poetry, and research that explores these inequities through the lens of institutional betrayal, theorized by psychologist Jennifer Freyd. Edited by Rebecca G. Martínez and Monica J. Casper, this collection brings together thirty-six contributors who share personal experiences covering a range of topics in higher education. The work spans five thematic sections that examine the complexities of belonging and exclusion in academic settings.
 
The contributors share their lived experiences of academic life from diverse vantage points, showing the ways minoritized groups are made to feel unwelcome, further marginalized, and often positioned as the problem. Exhibiting courage, compassion, and a commitment to better futures, the voices in this collection offer both a searing indictment of higher education and pathways to alternative practices and structures. They shine a spotlight on academia today, including the promise of inclusion and the perils of exclusion.

Contributors
Celeste Atkins
Jasmine Banks
Krista L. Benson
Jessica Bishop-Royse
Samit Dipon Bordoloi
Monica J. Casper
Aparajita De
Kathy Diehl
Taylor Marie Doherty
Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt
Alma Flores
Alanna Gillis
C. Goldberg
Jennifer M. Gómez
Kristina Gupta
Jasmine L. Harris
Susan Hillock
Doreen Hsu
Jennifer Lai
Amy Andrea Martinez
Rebecca G. Martínez
Shantel Martinez
Sara A. Mata
Rachael McCollum
Wang Ping
Emily Rosser
Angélica Ruvalcaba
Brandy L. Simula
Rashna Batliwala Singh
Cierra Raine Sorin
Connor Spencer
Chantelle Spicer
James M. Thomas
Mercedes Valadez
Meg A. Warren
Matthew Wills
 

Fourteen writers reflect on the complexities of Mexican American identity in hyphenated America.

At a time when memoir has become an increasingly popular form of self-expression, fourteen writers from diverse backgrounds engaged with one another in a series of writing workshops sponsored by the Center for Mexican American Studies at UT Austin to reflect on their life journeys. They wrestle with issues that shaped them in provocative, evocative, and sometimes humorous short essays. The writers include a lawyer, a civil rights activist, actors, journalists, and professors who write of belonging, national and sexual identity, coping with illness and loss, career challenges, and life-altering events familiar to us all. The contributors write poignantly about losing a parent at an early age; growing up in segregated communities; bravely confronting serious health problems; living in a household with a mentally disturbed family member; the complexity of being “American” as well as “Mexican”; and the professional challenges facing all hyphenated Americans, many of whom are often the first person of color in their workplaces.

The Caribbean has a global reputation for extending unparalleled hospitality to foreign guests. Yet local citizens express feeling alienated from the Caribbean nations they call home. Here, Natalie Lauren Belisle probes the relationship between these incompatible narratives of Caribbean life. Departing from tourist-centered critiques of the Caribbean’s visitor economy, Belisle instead gives primacy to the political life of the Caribbean citizen-subject within a broader hospitality regime. Reading literary, cinematic, and digital texts that traverse the Spanish, Anglophone, and Francophone Caribbean, Belisle interprets citizens’ estrangement through misdirected political deliberation and demonstrates that inhospitality is institutionalized through the aesthetic, reproducing itself in the laws that condition belonging and membership in the nation-state. Ultimately, Caribbean Inhospitality recasts the decay of nation/state sovereignty in the postcolonial Caribbean within the contours of neoliberalism, international relations, and cosmopolitanism.

College Belonging reveals how colleges’ and universities’ efforts to foster a sense of belonging in their students are misguided. Colleges bombard new students with the message to “get out there!” and “find your place” by joining student organizations, sports teams, clubs and the like. Nunn shows that this reflects a flawed understanding of what belonging is and how it works. Drawing on the sociological theories of Emile Durkheim, College Belonging shows that belonging is something that members of a community offer to each other. It is something that must be given, like a gift. Individuals cannot simply walk up to a group or community and demand belonging. That’s not how it works. The group must extend a sense of belonging to each and every member. It happens by making a person feel welcome, to feel that their presence matters to the group, that they would be missed if they were gone. This critical insight helps us understand why colleges' push for students simply to “get out there!” does not always work. 

China is a multicultural country home to fifty-five ethnic minority groups, yet due to linguistic and cultural barriers many of these groups remain understudied or unknown in the West. The Qiang, one of modern China’s officially recognized ethnic minorities, is also China’s longest-standing ethnoracial identity marker that has existed since the earliest recorded history of China. Creative Belonging investigates the formation and evolution of the Qiang as a people, a concept, and a cultural history in China. It further examines how the contemporary Qiang ethnic group interacts strategically with mainstream Chinese society, challenging the historically entrenched hierarchies between the sociocultural “centers” of China and its ethnic “peripheries.” 

This book is based on years of ethnographic and textual-archival research in the Himalayan regions of southwest China, where the contemporary Qiang group resides. Drawing on a diverse range of official and local political discourses and previously unstudied literary, historiographical, and cinematic works, Yanshuo Zhang illuminates how the Qiang have carved out spaces of “creative belonging” within the parameters of multiculturalism in contemporary China. Rooted in ethnographic and textual-archival research, the book presents original materials produced by Qiang indigenous writers, scholars, artists, grassroots village cultural activists, and entrepreneurs at both the local and the global levels. Creative Belonging invites readers to rethink ethnicity and national belonging in China by centering minority groups’ efforts to expand the meanings and implications of “Chinese culture.” 

“An exquisite, aching memoir of adolescent girlhood. . . . Treasures await.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

“A lovely and rapturous excavation and examination of the past, a lesson in writing oneself into history when it doesn’t offer you a space.” —Jenny Boully, author of Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life

After spending four years of adolescence in suburban North Carolina, Kristine Langley Mahler, even as an adult, is still buffeted by the cultural differences between her pioneer-like upbringing in Oregon and the settled southern traditions into which she could never assimilate. Collecting evidence of displacement—a graveyard in a mall parking lot, a suburban neighborhood of white kids bused to desegregate public schools in the 1990s, and the death of her best friend—Curing Season is an attempt to understand her failed grasp at belonging.

Mahler’s yearning for acceptance remains buried like a splinter, which she carefully tweezes out in the form of artifacts from her youth. But it isn’t until she encounters a book of local family histories that she takes inhabitation and truth apart, grafting and twisting and imprinting her history on theirs, until even she can no longer tell the difference between their truth and her own. Using inventive essay forms, Mahler pries apart the cracks of exclusion and experiments with the nature of belonging, memory, and place. Curing Season is a coming-of-age memoir for anyone who grew up anywhere but home.
 

Embracing Queer Students’ Diverse Identities at Historically Black Colleges and Universities: A Primer for Presidents, Administrators, and Faculty is both a call to action and a resource for historically Black college and university (HBCU) leaders and administrators, focusing on historical and contemporary issues related to expanding inclusionary policies and practices for members of HBCU communities who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+). The essays, by HBCU presidents, faculty, administrators, alumni, and researchers, explore the specific challenges and considerations of serving LGBTQ+ students within these distinct college and university settings, with the ultimate goal of summoning HBCU communities, higher education scholars, and scholar-practitioners to take thoughtful and urgent action to support and recognize LGBTQ+ students. With this book as a primary resource, HBCUs can work toward becoming fully inclusive campus communities for all of their students.

 

A home is dismantled to make another home habitable. This is where Homeplaces begins. Spanning continents, this landmark volume brings together leading anthropologists to chart “house-ing,” the unrelenting, reciprocal process of people making houses and houses making people amid ongoing calamity. Their oikographies—vivid, writerly ethnographies of home as sense and action—blow open the fantasy of the private domicile and reveal houses as live forms: porous, incomplete, bleeding into neighborhoods, economies, ecologies, and the dead. They detonate philosophical abstractions about dwelling and technocratic assumptions about homemaking, revealing why home plays such a vital role in worldmaking. Refusing end-times thinking, Homeplaces reveals incompleteness as generative drive. The dissolution of forms, bodies, and buildings becomes the material from which people craft shelter, dignity, and transcendence. As war, climate catastrophe, and toxic landscapes dehouse the planet, Homeplaces captures the stubborn human insistence on dwelling—provisional, fierce, and alive.

From a grandmother’s inter-generational care to the strategic and slow consensus work of elected tribal leaders, Indigenous community builders perform the daily work of culture and communalism. Indigenous Communalism conveys age-old lessons about culture, communalism, and the universal tension between the individual and the collective. It is also a critical ethnography challenging the moral and cultural assumptions of a hyper-individualist, twenty-first century global society.
 
Told in vibrant detail, the narrative of the book conveys the importance of communalism as a value system present in all human groups and one at the center of Indigenous survival. Carolyn Smith-Morris draws on her work among the Akimel O'odham and the Wiradjuri to show how communal work and culture help these communities form distinctive Indigenous bonds. The results are not only a rich study of Indigenous relational lifeways, but a serious inquiry to the continuing acculturative atmosphere that Indigenous communities struggle to resist. Recognizing both positive and negative sides to the issue, she asks whether there is a global Indigenous communalism. And if so, what lessons does it teach about healthy communities, the universal human need for belonging, and the potential for the collective to do good?
 

What does it mean to be Latinx? This pressing question forms the core of Latinx Belonging, which brings together cutting-edge research to discuss the multilayered ways this might be answered.

Latinx Belonging is anchored in the claim that Latinx people are not defined by their marginalization but should instead be understood as active participants in their communities and contributors to U.S. society. The volume’s overarching analytical approach recognizes the differences, identities, and divisions among people of Latin American origin in the United States, while also attending to the power of mainstream institutions to shape their lives and identities. Contributors to this volume view “belonging” as actively produced through struggle, survival, agency, resilience, and engagement.

This work positions Latinxs’ struggles for recognition and inclusion as squarely located within intersecting power structures of gender, race, sexuality, and class and as shaped by state-level and transnational forces such as U.S. immigration policies and histories of colonialism. From the case of Latinxs’ struggles for recognition in the arts, to queer Latinx community resilience during COVID-19 and in the wake of mass shootings, to Indigenous youth’s endurance and survival as unaccompanied minors in Los Angeles, the case studies featured in this collection present a rich and textured picture of the diversity of the U.S. Latinx experience in the twenty-first century.

Contributors
Andrés Acosta
Jack “Trey” Allen
Jennifer Bickham Mendez
Stephanie L. Canizales
Christopher Cuevas
Natalia Deeb-Sossa
Yvette G. Flores
Melanie Jones Gast
Monika Gosin
Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo
Nolan Kline
Verónica Montes
Yvonne Montoya
Michael De Anda Muñiz
Suzanne Oboler
Gilda L. Ochoa
Dina G. Okamoto
Marco Antonio Quiroga
Michelle Téllez

Who are we, where do we come from, and why does it matter?
 
 From whom do I come? Our Blood describes the central importance of our sense not just of our heritage, but our embodied heritage: that our past is in our bodies and runs in our blood, and that our embodied past is central to our futures. Deeply felt heritas, as Michael M. Bell, Loka Ashwood, and Jay Orne call it, can be a source of great love and kindness for one another. But it can also be a beautiful horror, the source of some of our greatest hate and meanness towards one another. We think of our embodied heritage as natural and historical facts, beyond our choice, and therefore free of manipulation for social gain. We think of it as spirited presences in our bodies that we did not choose. We think of its origins as external to us, whether we are talking about family, class, caste, places, things, ethnoraciality, or our professions. We think of it as legitimate and rightful, therefore. But we do choose. We do select. Bell, Ashwood, and Orne argue that greater awareness of heritas’s social origins and social selectivity can help us cultivate a wider sense of mutual care and ease the divisiveness of our time. Ultimately, Our Blood asks us all to consider heritas, and in doing so, to perhaps even reconsider our very selves. 


 

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.
 
 

Remittance as Belonging: Global Migration, Transnationalism, and the Quest for Home argues that migrants' remittances express their  sense of belonging and connectedness to their home country of origin, making an integral part of both migrants’ ethnic identity and sense of what they call home. Drawing on three and a half years of ethnographic fieldwork with Bangladeshi migrants in Tokyo and Los Angeles, Hasan Mahmud demonstrates that while migrants go abroad for various reasons, they do not travel alone. Although they leave behind their families in Bangladesh, they move abroad essentially as members of their family and community and maintain their belonging to home through transnational practices, including remittance sending. By conceptualizing remittance as an expression of migrants’ belonging, this book presents detailed accounts of the emergence, growth, decline, and revival of remittances as a function of transformations in migrants’ sense of belonging to home.

In disease cluster communities across the country, environmental contamination from local industries is often suspected as a source of disease. But civic action is notoriously hampered by the slow response from government agencies to investigate the cause of disease and the complexities of risk assessment. 

In Risk and Adaptation in a Cancer Cluster Town, Laura Hart examines another understudied dimension of community inaction: the role of emotion and its relationship to community experiences of social belonging and inequality. Using a cancer cluster community in Northwest Ohio as a case study, Hart advances an approach to risk that grapples with the complexities of community belonging, disconnect, and disruption in the wake of suspected industrial pollution. Her research points to a fear driven not only by economic anxiety, but also by a fear of losing security within the community—a sort of pride that is not only about status, but connectedness. Hart reveals the importance of this social form of risk—the desire for belonging and the risk of not belonging—ultimately arguing that this is consequential to how people make judgements and respond to issues. Within this context where the imperative for self-protection is elusive, affected families experience psychosocial and practical conflicts as they adapt to cancer as a way of life. Considering a future where debates about risk and science will inevitably increase, Hart considers possibilities for the democratization of risk management and the need for transformative approaches to environmental justice.

A New York TimesBook Review Editors’ Choice

A Shelf Awareness Best Book of the Year

Hudson Booksellers Book of the Year

One of the New York Post’s Best Books of the Summer

One of The Millions’s Most Anticipated Books of the Year

IndieNext Pick

A Time Magazine “What to Read Now” Selection

A wry novel set at the edge of the earth about the courage it takes to band together, even as everything around you falls apart

Unmoored by a recent family tragedy, Cooper Gosling is adrift at thirty and on the verge of ruining her career. So when the opportunity arises to join the National Science Foundation’s Artists & Writers Program in Antarctica, she jumps at the chance—and finds herself in the company of others who are just abnormal enough for Polar life, a group of eccentrics motivated by desires as ambiguous as her own. When they are joined by a fringe scientist who claims climate change is a hoax, the Polies’ already-imbalanced community is rattled, bringing them to the center of a global controversy and threatening the ancient ice chip they call home.

The Pipeline Is Broken explores the reality of racial exclusion and bias in graduate student education, arguing that the insidious effects of structural and institutional racism substantially chip away at the very pipeline of future BIPOC academics—already limited for other racialized reasons.

A series of letters written by graduate students of color, this collection offers a multifaceted account of the challenges, oppositions, microaggressions, and outright discrimination that these students face in higher education settings. Graduate students describe navigating hostile mentoring relationships and unwelcoming campus cultures and peers and laboring for poverty wages to earn their degrees. Yet these letters celebrate joy, community, and agency, offering a more complete and affirming view of graduate student life. Through these brave personal stories, The Pipeline Is Broken asks readers to interrogate what it means to navigate higher education as a person of color and to understand that the reality of faculty of color’s numerical-minority status is a complicated phenomenon whose genesis rests not at the moment of job interview. Rather, these letters show, this status is an intricate manifestation of a process that begins in elementary schools, is reinforced in high schools and colleges, and is part and parcel of the minefield that is graduate education in America.

Essential reading for anyone who cares about racial equity in education, mentorship, leadership development, or student well-being, The Pipeline Is Broken is a guide, a mirror, and a call to action all in one, challenging graduate programs, faculty, and administrators to examine their complicity in maintaining inequitable systems and offering suggestions for building cultures of care.