The Belonging Exploratory

What is the Belonging Exploratory?

The Belonging Exploratory is a collaborative scholarly project to explore how research, teaching and practice across a range of subjects and disciplines can be used to understand belonging and unbelonging in new, creative and effective ways.

Our ambition is to extend, stretch and question interdisciplinary understandings of belonging and unbelonging, always with a view to the consequences of these conceptualisations in the material world; to engage with those inside and outside the university using ideas about belonging in their everyday work; to understand what this allows and what it restricts; and to challenge and build on existing uses of belonging in ways that enable alternative perspectives on social life and power.

We seek to advance scholarship that problematises practices of exclusion, separation, hostility, and rupture – including those that promote limited and abstract forms of inclusion – and that contemplates concrete possibilities for solidarity and connection. At the heart of our research and practice are emergent forms of un/belonging. We imagine belonging as sometimes restrictive but also as holding possibility and we consider its many inflections: as in process, as transitional, as hopeful, as oppressive, as exclusive, as collective, as individual, as relational, as unfixed, as both measurable and immeasurable, as emotional, and as materially consequential.

Read our in-progress manifesto to find out more about our ideas, research and approach.

Join us

We are holding a series of Thinking Spaces to develop and test ideas together. Click on the links below to find out more and to join us.

These events are participatory and engaged, a chance to actively share and develop ideas together, and to see where it takes us.

They generate new connections and possibilities by encouraging everyone who attends to bring reflections on how aspects of belonging are relevant to their research, learning, teaching or practice.

Each session has a particular theme and a set of prompts to consider beforehand, and everyone who comes will be invited to share their responses to the prompts and one another. If you would like to take part, please register using the links below.

Unbelonging as Political Possibility
Monday 23 March 2026
3pm-5pm
Creative Community Place, Floor 2, The Library, University of Warwick

Creativity and Unbelonging
Date and time tbc

Longing for Justice: Climate Crisis and Un/Belonging
Date and time tbc