The interplay between personal feelings of home in relation to different places and professional status in shaping belonging of culturally diverse well-established academics is unexplored area. This article reconceptualises belonging among well-established academics in the United Kingdom who have come from different national, linguistic and cultural backgrounds from a critical perspective in light of the interplay between these academics' personal feelings of home in various places and their professional status in the United Kingdom.
The article draws on a larger study conducted by the author (Kebabi, 2022) on the personal lived experiences of well-established academics in the United Kingdom who have come from different national, linguistic and cultural backgrounds. The data presented were generated from semi-structured interviews and concern the ways in which belonging is construed and navigated by five well-established academics in the United Kingdom.
The study shows intersection between the personal life and the professional life in shaping the academics' enactment of their sense of belonging, which is characterised by shifting positioning and resistance to competing essentialist discourses which fix identities within nationhood and physical borders (Pollock et al., 2000) and frames people along the highly politicised discourse of native versus foreigner.
The study promotes a dialogue between different understandings of belonging manifested in nationalist and critical discourses while foregrounding a critical view of belonging in a highly mobile, intercultural, unequal and inter-dependent world.
