About this ebook
In Contested Belonging: Spaces, Practices, Biographies contributions by well-known international scholars from different disciplines address the sites, practices, and narratives in which belonging is imagined, enacted and constrained, negotiated and contested. Belonging is viewed from the perspectives of both migrants and refugees in their host countries as well as from people who are ostensibly ‘at home’ and yet may experience various degrees of alienation in their countries of origin. The book focuses on three particular dimensions of belonging: belonging as space (neighbourhood, workplace, home), as practice (virtual, physical, cultural), and as biography (life stories, group narratives). What role do physical, digital, transnational and in-between spaces play and how are they used in order to create/contest belonging? Which practices do people engage in in order to gain/foster/invent a certain/new sense of belonging? What can the biographies and narratives of people reveal about their complicated and contested experiences of belonging? Contested Belonging: Spaces, Practices, Biographies convincingly shows how individual and collective struggles for belonging are not only associated with exclusion and ‘othering’, but also lead to surprising and inspiring forms of social action and transformation, suggesting that there may be more reason for hope than for despair.
About the author
Kathy Davis is a senior research fellow in the Sociology Department at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Her most recent book is Dancing Tango: Passionate Encounters in a Globalizing World (2015). Halleh Ghorashi is Full Professor of Diversity and Integration in the Department of Sociology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She is co-editor of Paradoxes of Cultural Recognition: Perspectives from Northern Europe (2009) and Muslim diaspora in the West: Negotiating Gender, Home and Belonging (2010). Peer Smets is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands. His recent co-edited volumes include Affordable Housing in the Urban Global South: Seeking Sustainable Solutions; Earthscan (2014), and Social Housing and Urban Renewal: A Cross-National Perspective (2017).
Rate this ebook
Tell us what you think.
Reading information
Smartphones and tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and computers
You can listen to audiobooks purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.
eReaders and other devices
To read on e-ink devices like Kobo eReaders, you'll need to download a file and transfer it to your device. Follow the detailed Help Center instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders.
