The Geography of Belonging: Making a Place for Community Within Difference

• In Event: Identity Making and World Making

Abstract

Using narrative inquiry as a primary methodology and infusing it with poetic expressions of the field texts generated from recorded and transcribed research conversations, I explored one participant’s process for building chosen communities (Lindemann Nelson, 1995) from the perspective of someone who had been externally positioned as marginalized. The participant’s experiences demonstrated the complexity of difference as a shaping influence on both identity making and curriculum making and contributed to the development of a geography of belonging that was both fluid and shifting. As the experiences of this participant illustrated, place entwined with belonging has the potential to create a landscape of community for those living on the edges of community in spaces/places conventionally characterized as marginalized.

Author

• Cindy (Cynthia) Lynne Clarke, Brandon University