ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a rich theoretical space for rethinking student belonging in higher education. It presents a broadly chronological overview of the construction of the borderland analysis, beginning with an outline of Bourdieusian individual habitus in or out of alignment with the structured social space of the academy. The chapter addresses the psychosocial dimension of belonging and a nuanced articulation of lived experience encapsulated in Avtar Brah’s concepts of diaspora and diaspora space. Abes’s intention in developing a borderland analysis is to link multiple theories in order ‘to portray a more complete picture of student identity’. This borderland places the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu, Brah and D. Massey in dialogue, to generate a multilayered analysis of a complex phenomenon – student belonging – compatible with the contemporary diversity of the student body. This borderland analysis critiques the prevailing, taken-for-granted narrative through problematising the naturalness of spatial relations in HE.
