New concepts of belonging in a globalized world

The study of collective belongings such as ethnic and national belonging and the associated politics of belonging have engaged scholars of social sciences during the last decades to study why people in certain situation resort to essentialist notions of collectivity.

Space-sensitive studies on migration and globalization have recently challenged conventional notions of collective belongings and have provoked a conceptual shift from categories with inherent spatiality, territoriality and boundary making to concepts based upon movement and flow. In this context, a new concept of belonging reflects the complex relationships that individuals have with changing social, political and cultural landscapes, realities as well as human and non-human beings.

Such an understanding of belonging stresses the multiplicity and situatedness of individual attachments, which may be of social, material and sensual nature, and that are constantly re-articulated and re-negotiated by actors in their day-to-day practices and experiences. In such a reading, belonging overrides any form of legal legitimacy and regulation, and comes into being as a result of events and through individual life stories. In times of constant exchange through travel, mass media and communication technologies the concept indicates the compatibility of difference and thus stresses the permeability and not the establishment of social boundaries.

A more mobile theorization of social relations and belonging, exemplified at the case of a neighborhood in Madrid, Spain, where highly heterogeneous actors re-appropriate the urban space, opens up the possibility to go beyond the analysis of naturalized collectivities and their relations and to bring forward new findings of collectivization, social mobilization and change.