Pedagogies of civic belonging : finding one's way through social space

What does it mean ‘to belong’? We too easily conceive belonging as a symbolic attachment to social categories of identity and community, drawing on elaborations of the idea of the ‘imagining’ of community at the expense of examining the practices and materialities that produce the grounds of that belonging (Noble 2002). A focus on the representational character of belonging leaves little room to explore the temporal and spatial processes of how we come to learn to belong. This chapter emerges out of a preoccupation with habits of ‘civic belonging’ in the domains of everyday life. It suggests that ‘civic belonging’ entails a set of questions not just around the ‘cultural’ dimensions of national citizenship (as others have also argued), but around the multiplicities of one’s belongings, the things they attach to, their degrees of intensity, the practices which produce belonging, the capacities they entail and, centrally, how one learns to inhabit and belong (or not) in shared social space. Drawing on a focused examination of my son’s movement in and through the local neighbourhood, it argues that such forms of belonging are embodied, iterative and interactive practices that accrue from infancy. These practices constitute a kind of ‘wayfinding’ through local social spaces, but it importantly argues that any social space involves a pedagogic ensemble of social actors, human and non-human, and pedagogic practices through which human conduct is shaped.