The Psychology of Belonging

A short synthesis of the whole field, including the parts about belonging online that the older literature could not have written.

Kelly-Ann Allen (2020). Routledge.

Primary reading — read it before the lecture that sets it.

Allen pulls together what is known about belonging across schools, workplaces, online spaces and later life, and is useful to this course mainly for being recent. The competencies framing — that belonging is partly a skill, partly an opportunity, and partly a motivation — gives you vocabulary for something the fieldwork keeps turning up: two people in the same room getting very different amounts out of it.

Week 10 is the front porch that is a server. You will observe a Discord, which is harder than it sounds, because there is no closing time and the archive is total. Read the chapters on belonging online before you start, particularly on what changes when the room keeps a perfect transcript of itself.