One paper a week, what it argues, and why this course sets it.
Readings#
Twelve primary readings, one per week, plus a few that are here if the week caught your interest. Read the primary one before the Monday lecture, not after — the lecture argues with it, and an argument you have not heard the other side of is just a lecture.
Every reading page says what the paper claims and what this course wants you to take from it, which is not always the same thing. Several of them are studies of places that no longer exist. That is part of the point.
The Great Good Place
Ray Oldenburg (1989) · Paragon House
The book that named the third place and gave it eight characteristics. Every other reading on this list is either evidence for it or an argument with it.
Week 1 · Read before the lecture
The need to belong: desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation
Baumeister & Leary (1995) · Psychological Bulletin 117(3), 497–529
The case that belonging is a drive rather than a preference, assembled from evidence across the whole of psychology.
Week 2 · Read before the lecture
Attachment and Loss, Volume 1: Attachment
John Bowlby (1982) · Basic Books (2nd edition)
Where the need to belong comes from developmentally. Background for week 2, not required.
Week 2 · If the week caught you
Ostracism
Kipling D. Williams (2007) · Annual Review of Psychology 58, 425–452
What exclusion does, measured in a lab with a ball game so trivial it should not work — and it works every time.
Week 3 · Read before the lecture
An integrative theory of intergroup conflict
Tajfel & Turner (1979) · In Austin & Worchel (eds), The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations, 33–47
Social identity theory — how a group becomes part of who you are, and why the minimal conditions for that are so shockingly minimal.
Week 4 · Read before the lecture
The cosmopolitan canopy
Elijah Anderson (2004) · The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 595(1), 14–31
An ethnography of one market hall where people who avoid each other everywhere else behave well, and what the room is doing to make that happen.
Week 5 · Read before the lecture
The strength of weak ties
Mark S. Granovetter (1973) · American Journal of Sociology 78(6), 1360–1380
Why the people you barely know are the ones who change your life, and why third places manufacture exactly that kind of tie.
Week 6 · Read before the lecture
Mingling, observing, and lingering: everyday public spaces and their implications for well-being and social relations
Cattell, Dines, Gesler & Curtis (2008) · Health & Place 14(3), 544–561
A study of ordinary public space in East London that takes seriously the people who are only there because they have to be.
Week 7 · Read before the lecture
Bowling Alone: the collapse and revival of American community
Robert D. Putnam (2000) · Simon & Schuster
The measurement of what was lost, decade by decade, and the argument about what caused it.
Week 8 · Read before the lecture
Where everybody knows your (screen) name: online games as third places
Steinkuehler & Williams (2006) · Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 11(4), 885–909
The paper that took Oldenburg's eight rules and tested them against a massively multiplayer game.
Week 9 · Read before the lecture
The Psychology of Belonging
Kelly-Ann Allen (2020) · Routledge
A short synthesis of the whole field, including the parts about belonging online that the older literature could not have written.
Week 10 · Read before the lecture
Perceived social isolation and cognition
Cacioppo & Hawkley (2009) · Trends in Cognitive Sciences 13(10), 447–454
The mechanism behind week 11's mortality figures — what loneliness does to attention, threat detection and sleep.
Week 11 · If the week caught you
Social relationships and mortality risk: a meta-analytic review
Holt-Lunstad, Smith & Layton (2010) · PLoS Medicine 7(7), e1000316
148 studies, 308,000 people, and the effect size that turned loneliness into a public health problem.
Week 11 · Read before the lecture
Belonging: a review of conceptual issues, an integrative framework, and directions for future research
Allen, Kern, Rozek, McInerney & Slavich (2021) · Australian Journal of Psychology 73(1), 87–102
The tidy-up — four components of belonging, and an honest account of how badly the field has defined its own term.
Week 12 · Read before the lecture