Suchergebnisse

This article contributes to a growing debate within the field of early childhood education about the concept of 'belonging'. It continues from earlier discussions that commented on the adoption of Belonging as a key term in the development of a national curriculum for the early years in Australia in 2009, as well as increasingly common references to belonging in various aspects of debate within the field. The article focuses specifically on the idea of belonging as it has emerged within existentialist philosophy in the 20th century, and more recent post-structuralist theories, especially the work of Jacques Derrida. The article ties belonging to language as a means of redefining approaches in early childhood education to the notions of place and context, so as to more rigorously connect 'belonging' to the philosophical debates of the 21st century.

Even though it is a common understanding among policymakers that playing sport creates feelings of belonging to a community, there is little research that confirms this assumption. The present article focuses on the relationship between sport and belonging. The study is based on life history interviews with 21 young Norwegian Muslim women with immigrant backgrounds, aged between 16 and 25 years. The article suggests that there are different forms of belonging produced through sport. The analysis separates between traditional sport communities that produce social support and more expressivity based sport communities that contribute to identity confirmation and self-image building. Moreover, the article points to the finding that young Muslim women experience a sense of belonging within sports because playing sports is sometimes perceived as a `place of refuge'.

This article examines notions of "labor" and "belonging" in contemporary indigenous-settler relations on the Wampanoag island of Noëpe, a place known all too well in the U.S. as "Martha's Vineyard". I focus on an ethnographic incident in which a Wampanoag fisherman stands before a town council on Noëpe and appeals for the right to fish in ancestral waters without penalty. Conceptualizing labor as agency, I am interested in the kind of work indigenous belonging demands in contested places. I am especially concerned about the vulnerability of small, financially stressed tribes and indigenous selves who must out-maneuver the labored manipulations of settler law and regulation at the level of locality. What are the political alternatives for Indians who are not rich, who are not members of rich tribes? What kind of "labor" must small tribes exert in order to preserve and protect indigenous selves and articulations of self-rule? It is within an economy of labored belonging that this project situates indigenous agency and contemplates the intensity and complexity of its work.

This article, based on a collection of 53 interviews with people who migrated from Poland to Norway, discusses how transnational sentiments, nostalgia, and attachments to places and people materialize through the bodily experiences of the mobile subjects. It conceptualizes the notion of embodied transnational belonging, understood as a dynamic, bodily felt materialization of social, cultural, political, economic, and affective processes that assist the emplacement of mobile people in new localities, and that span the borders of nation-states. Theoretically, the article builds on the premises of the sensory turn in social sciences and utilizes the concepts from anthropology, health studies and migration and mobility studies interdisciplinarily. Methodologically, it employs photo elicitation interviews. It discusses how the concept of embodied transnational belonging can be used to extend the understanding of migrant persons' transnationality. By doing so, it addresses a knowledge gap in transnational studies, attempting to theoretically open the conceptualization of transnational belonging to the bodily dimension. The article suggests that transnationalism is exercised on a level of a bodily experience of the migrant persons, and hence transnationality is not a solely mental/rational phenomenon, but also a bodily/physical one.

AbstractThis article explores the role that funerary practices and burial decisions play in the construction of national and political identities amongst Muslim immigrants in Germany. Drawing on ethnographic research and interviews with Islamic undertakers, migrant families, and religious leaders in Berlin it argues that the act of burial serves as a powerful means to assert belonging in migratory settings. While local burial laws impact the feasibility of Islamic funerary rites, this article suggests that family ties, ideas about the soil, and feelings of social exclusion play a larger role in shaping burial outcomes than the laws of the dead. By conferring a sense of fixity or permanence to identities that are more fluid or ambivalent in life, determining where a dead body belongs helps demarcate social and communal boundaries.