Belonging as / at Work

Both issues of belonging and work have increasingly been made flexible, but not for all in the same way and to the same degree. It seems that the precarities of belonging and work somehow neatly map onto each other, with those in search of ways to belong culturally also struggle to belong economically and vice versa. But what work does it take to enact forms of belonging? And how do and might work-places and work-arrangements accommodate belonging in ways that do justice to people’s increasingly mobile and multiple affiliations and affects?

Sphere Curator: Leo Lucassen

Sessions, researchers and papers (in progress):

1. Difference and institutional inclusion

• Proma Raychaudhury – Seva (Service) and Sangharsh (Struggle): Institutional Belonging and Political Self- makings of Women Political Party Members in India.
• Maria Cervantes – The global race for talent starts in kindergarten
• Tina Sikka & Helen Proctor – Belonging, Scholarship and the Politics of Labour: International Graduate Students

2. Mobility, gender and skill

• Amal Latif – Being A Khaddama: Narratives Of Work, Home, And Belonging From Migrant Women Domestic Workers In The Gulf
• Aurora Ganz – We are workers
• Elizabeth Alexander – In-between: Women and migration for work in the Indian state of Kerala

3. Space and marginalization

• Jesus Palomino – Failed mobility, lost causes, and the art of activism
• Seda Muftugil-Yalcin – Migrant Women in Elderly Care in the Turkish Contex
• Ipsita Pradhan – Working at the Mall: Understanding Layered Space(s
• Norrell Edwards – Violence and Vanished Youth: Belonging and Loss in Edward P. Jones’ Chocolate City

4. Staging belonging: increasing mobile working places in not-so-inclusive environments

• Diana Dudurych – Between “Nurture” and “Survival”: Early-Stage Tech Startups Approaches to Organizational Culture
• Ioana vrabiescu – Belonging by default: Passive practices of D&I policy implementation in a start-up company in the Netherlands
• Cheryl Leske – The house of good people: Sensemaking in transnational charity affiliates from Northern Ireland and Canada
• Ashling Turner Derksen – “U moet verplicht inburgeren”: How do female migrant partners of Dutch citizens make sense of their integration in the Netherlands?