Belonging: exploring students’ ideas around belonging, comfort and discomfort in library and learning spaces

This chapter explores how a diverse student body views and expresses ideas of belonging, comfort and discomfort within university spaces. Research on closing the attainment gap for BAME students highlights the significance of a sense of belonging (or of not belonging). We also wanted to explore the experience of other groups of students or identities. We intended to use the feedback from these interviews to help us think about the ways in which we might most effectively uncover and explore issues of belonging on campus, and provide initial evidence to help plan changes and improvements to physical spaces and the ways we promote these.
The chapter reports on the use of cognitive mapping techniques and individual in-depth interviews to explore ideas of belonging and comfort with specific groups of students, and reflects on themes of positionality, talking about race, identity and labelling.