DiaLogic: Thinking Through Big Questions for Dialogue

Practices that Support Belonging

What is something that someone once said or did that made you feel like you belonged? 

Someone held the door open for me on my first day at a new job, in a new part of the country I had just moved to.  

At lunch with friends, one person noticed I had wanted to speak up but had been interrupted, and they came back to me and asked me if I still wanted to share. 

I saw a redbud tree this morning, and I thought about how it gives food, and the thought that the tree could nourish me made me feel at home. 

A professor told me, “You belong here,” when I was experiencing imposter syndrome in college. 

I was invited to join a slam poetry group even though I’d never done slam poetry before. I fell in love with it.  

The director of the student center remembered my name after only meeting me once, and when I went back, she called me by my name. 

My two-year-old grandchild took the food I offered her, and let me feed her. 

***  

This is the opening check-in prompt I posed to our reading group on the day in March that we gathered to discuss the book Belonging: The Science of Creating Connection and Bridging Divides by social psychologist Geoffrey L. Cohen (2022) and some of the responses that people shared. I have paraphrased from memory, so I both thank the people in the group for sharing these stories and apologize to them for any errors or misrepresentations.  

For the past couple of years it has been my huge pleasure to facilitate a monthly reading group as part of my job as Dialogue Director with the SNF Paideia program. It’s a very simple, low-concept setup – we meet up once a month over lunch to talk about a book – but it has become a major source of belonging for me, one of the things that makes me feel at home and connected to community at Penn. I am really grateful that others who have been a part of the group – whether they have only been able to come to one meeting or come regularly – have often shared similar sentiments.  

Belonging, however, doesn’t just happen, even if you have managed to gather a group of engaged, thoughtful people who are looking for a dialogic community built around mutuality and exchange and eager to contribute to one. (Which is not rare – in my experience as a teacher and facilitator, this describes most people!) This month, I am thinking about the following questions: 

What is “belonging”? How does dialogue help create and strengthen belonging? How does a sense of belonging help create and strengthen dialogue? What are practices that support belonging in the dialogue process? 

Unlike Geoffrey Cohen, I am not a psychologist or a social scientist – so my responses to these questions are not drawn from disciplinarily specific definitions or my own large-scale qualitative or quantitative research studies (although I will refer, with gratitude, to Cohen’s work, as well as the work of other social scientists, all of which in turn refer to many other scientists and studies; this is the beauty of inquiry as an ultimately highly collective and collaborative endeavor). But we are all qualified to think and talk about belonging because we all interact in many different group settings and have all almost certainly experienced both belonging and estrangement in many different contexts, flavors, and strengths. I am as interested in what my 9-year-old son, or my student who majors in Computer Science, or my biologist friends, or my favorite poet, or my mentor teacher has to say about belonging as I am in Cohen’s findings.  

Still: why not go to an expert if one happens to have an office across from yours? My brilliant colleague Rhina El-Amin is finishing a dissertation in Education entitled Cultivating Belonging: How Black and Latinx Students Leverage Cultural Capital to Navigate and Thrive in Predominantly White Institutions. Rhina told me that belonging is “a basic need” for survival akin to food, water, shelter, and safety. “It’s mattering,” she said. “It’s feeling like you can contribute.” 

This echoes Cohen’s definition of belonging as “the feeling that we’re part of a larger group that values, respects, and cares for us – and to which we feel we have something to contribute” (Belonging 5). Terrell L. Strayhorn, in his 2019 book College Students’ Sense of Belonging, writes that “all people share a strong need to belong” and identifies “belongingness” as a “feeling of connection, that one is important” (1).  

I love Rhina’s phrasing of mattering, though, because while to matter is an abstract verb describing a feeling – to be of importance; to be valued, respected, cared for, as Cohen says – matter, the noun, is by definition a physical substance that takes up space. Belonging, then, is a feeling of connection and security, but it’s also the freedom or privilege of presence, of “taking up space” literally and metaphorically within a community of others. If belonging means feeling like you matter, mattering means that in your absence something would be missing.  

What is the relationship between belonging and dialogue?  

A sense of belonging is important in many different contexts; Cohen suggests that, regardless of context, “a sense of belonging isn’t just a by-product of success but a condition for it” (x). This is especially true in dialogue work, however, where a sense of trust and mutuality is critical for people to be able to share freely of themselves – not just their ideas, but also their experiences, their identities, their histories, and their feelings: their fear, sorrow, desire, joy, hope, and rage. If people called to dialogue with one another do not feel as though what they have to contribute matters and will be received with generosity, they will not offer it. Or they will offer it in a spirit of antagonism, defensiveness, aggression, and fear rather than openness, humility, mutuality, and vulnerability.  

In Free Speech on Campus, our fearless Paideia faculty director Sigal Ben-Porath explains that access denotes the conditions that allow people to enter into, benefit from, and fully participate in an educational environment. There are three basic levels of access. The first is formal access, or the official allowance that a certain person or group may attend or apply to attend a school (for example, children without U.S. citizenship have the right to attend U.S. public schools). The second level of access is admittance, or the judgment that a student has the proper credentials to attend a school (for example, documentation that a student lives in a school’s catchment area, or high-enough GPA and test scores for a particular college). And the final level of access is belonging, or the student’s sense once they have arrived on campus that they are truly accepted, valued, and supported there.  

Full access within campus dialogue spaces (whether in the classroom or extracurricular) depends, Sigal explains, on dignitary safety, or the sense that your dignity as a member of the community and your value as a participant in the discussion will not be compromised by the identities and ideologies you represent or the ideas, feelings, and experiences you share. Dignitary safety for everyone in a dialogue community results from the confidence that those who insult or degrade your personhood will be held accountable for this harm, but in a way that does not perpetuate dehumanization by recurring to punitive, shame-based measures. In this way, both the dignitary safety of the harmed person and the dignitary safety of the harming person are protected. This does not mean that any and all behavior and rhetoric are tolerated; loving accountability in a dialogue process sometimes looks like removing a harmful person who refuses to acknowledge and amend the harm they have caused. But it means that members of the community can trust that if they make a mistake, the first response will not be excommunication or shunning. Sigal calls dignitary safety a “threshold condition for access,” that is, a baseline requirement that must be fulfilled in order for people in a campus community to be able to access and benefit from all that the educational environment can offer them (Free Speech on Campus 67).  

It is not enough, therefore, to announce that all are welcome in a particular dialogue environment (this is formal access). It is also not enough (though it’s a huge achievement!) to gather a diverse group of people together for the purpose of dialogue with one another (this is admittance). For full access to the dialogue process, and for any hope of deep, meaningful, transformative dialogue, everyone present must have a basic (and ever-deepening) sense of dignitary safety, trust, and connectedness in relation not just to the facilitator but to all others in the group. This is belonging.  

What are practices that support belonging in the dialogue process? 

So: how do we do it? While we have so far focused on belonging as a sense or a feeling, Rhina emphasizes that belonging is “a feeling created by actions.” Cohen calls these actions “interventions.” He suggests that, while we cannot immediately fix unjust and exclusive policies, rhetoric, and incidents that make a sense of belonging difficult to achieve (or even imagine at times), especially for the most negatively affected people and groups, actions that we take deliberately to try to foster belonging within our own loci of control are “akin to psychological shelters and protective gear that we design to shield people from the harsh gusts of history and the stinging rain of our social world” (xiii). This puts me in mind of Priya Parker’s suggestion that we have the opportunity anytime we gather together to create a “temporary alternative space” that operates by its own laws and norms, regardless of what tempests rage outside of our doors (from The Art of Gathering, 2018).  

Everything I have learned about practices that support belonging has been in community – with students in my many classrooms over the past 20 years and with other teachers I have been privileged to learn from and alongside.  The stories that people shared at our March reading group about moments that had created a sense of belonging for them were so rich and instructive, I wanted to hear more. When Lia Howard, another beloved Paideia colleague, and I recently hosted a lunch gathering for our Dialogue and Wellness Partners at Penn, I took advantage of the presence of some 15 or so people who work all over the university in staff and/or faculty roles, interacting with a wide variety of student populations to do work that in some way supports dialogue, wellness, or both at Penn. In the final few moments, I asked our partners the same question I had asked the reading group: What’s something someone once said or did that made you feel like you belonged?  

From their responses – jotted down onto sticky notes and left anonymously on the lunch table – and from the many practices Cohen describes throughout Belonging, I have compiled together a “starter pack” of practices that support belonging in the dialogue process (and beyond it, but my focus here is to think about how belonging supports and is supported by dialogue in particular).  

In reflecting on these practices, they all seemed to me to be emphasizing practices of affirmation – the positive assertion that something (in this case, the value and importance of someone’s presence in the dialogue community) is true and real, implicitly or explicitly. So, I have organized them into a few general principles of affirmation – guidelines or golden rules for facilitators to keep in mind when thinking about helping participants feel a sense of belonging – with related practices named as examples for each one. Some are summarized from Cohen’s book; some are quoted directly from Dialogue and Wellness Partners’ contributions (these are attributed to “D&W Partners”); some are drawn from my own practice (which reflects, of course, practices learned from myriad teachers and role models).  

These lists are not comprehensive! Like I said, this is a starter pack to build on, containing just a few samples of effective practices out of an infinite number of possible practices that support belonging. I have also abbreviated these principles and practices and incorporated them as the new page 1 of an SNF Paideia resource called Building Community in Dialogue (the other side of resource, page 2, goes deep on a particular practice to support belonging and is called “The Art of the Check-in”). As you read, I invite you to think and share (via the comments on this blog post or with me via email at sropp@upenn.edu):  

What additional practices and principles would you suggest to support belonging in the dialogue process? Where did you learn them? What makes them powerful, in your experience? 

Principles and Practices for Supporting Belonging 

PRINCIPLE: Affirm people’s inherent worth and humanity, without making them first meet a performance or behavior standard in order to earn your respect and warmth. 

PRACTICES:  

• Learn people’s names, pronounce them correctly, and use them.  

• Greet everyone individually as they come in (using their names if you know them).  

• Curate an environment that is warm, welcoming, and affirming of the whole person. See SNF Paideia resource “Curating the Environment for Dialogue” for ideas. 

• Express genuine gladness and appreciation for people’s presence with no “strings.” Welcome in latecomers with a sincere “So glad you made it” rather than a sarcastic one; acknowledge early leavers with a “thanks for coming” or at least eye contact, a smile and a wave if you can’t interrupt the dialogue. Practice really meaning it. You can’t control the factors that have made someone arrive late or leave early, but you can practice gratitude for any amount of time that people have chosen to spend in the dialogue space.  

• “Eating together!” (D&W Partners at Penn) 

• Offer feedback in a way that affirms the person while challenging the behavior. Express sincere trust in them as a good person that you are confident can and will learn from this without the need for punitive or shame-based measures.  

• “Sitting on a park bench and smiling” (D&W Partners at Penn) 

• Practice and express good faith: assume that people, in general, want to learn, want to contribute, want to be well-regarded, and want to do a good job. If they are behaving in ways that suggest otherwise, it is unlikely that it is a personal attack or a deliberate show of disrespect towards you.   

• “Whenever there is no RSVP needed, I feel like I belong” (D&W Partners at Penn). To me, this speaks to a “come as you are” ethos free of pressure or obligation. There may be good reasons to require RSVP (or mandate attendance in a class), but this attitude can still be expressed in other ways. For example, designing a session with assigned pre-reading or other “homework” such that people’s participation will be enhanced by having done the homework but not fully dependent on it ensures that everyone can be a part of the conversation even if they have not managed to complete the work. This communicates that the conversation itself, and the people in it, are more important and valuable than the facilitator’s assigned work.  

• Celebrate birthdays and appreciation days (D&W Partners at Penn) 

• Incorporate mindfulness practices that help participants tune in to their own physical and emotional reactions (Cohen 135). This SNF Paideia resource, “Practicing Presence,” includes 6 different mindfulness practices that are helpful for dialogue to share with participants. And for an overview of the value of mindfulness practices in dialogue work, see my summary of key ideas and practices from Beth Berila’s Integrating Mindfulness into Anti-Oppression Pedagogy (2016). 

• Critique or praise aspects of a person’s work rather than their personal qualities (Cohen 13) 

• Share bits of beauty with participants – poems, short texts, images of artworks – without requiring them to do any kind of analytical labor or perform understanding of them. I call these small gifts “offerings,” and I make a practice to begin and end every class gathering by sharing one or two with students. 

• “A simple hug, when appropriate, speaks volumes” (D&W Partners at Penn) 

PRINCIPLE: Affirm people’s value as members of the community. Invite contributions and make participation interdependent and collaborative. 

PRACTICES: 

• Leave time at the end of the session for clean up and ask participants to help. If possible, you can also enlist participants in helping to set up and even design the room. You might use this SNF Paideia resource as a starting point for inspiration to decide together what your shared space would most benefit from: Curating the Environment for Dialogue 

• Set an explicit purpose for the gathering: a destination that the group is trying to reach together (not just individual learning goals). In Cohen’s framing, one of the most powerful ways to create belonging is to provide people otherwise in opposition a common goal they must work together to achieve (8, 84). But people need not be “in opposition” to benefit from a shared sense of purpose. This SNF Paideia resource, “The WHY: Defining Your Purpose for Dialogue,” might be helpful in crafting a statement of purpose. 

• Generate norms or dialogue questions together. See these SNF Paideia resources for help: Effective Norms for Dialogue + The Art of the Question Set. You can also, if dialogue is part of a course, ask students to critically review the syllabus and note which voices are missing and what additional/alternative texts they would like to see included among the course texts.  

• If it’s not realistic (given time constraints or the nature of your learning outcomes) to have participants collaborate on the creation of norms, questions, or text lists, you can at least have them vote on the ones they most like out of a set of options, which question they would like to address first, which text they would like to revisit at the end, etc. Any kind of democratic process you can introduce into the dialogue process reinforces participants’ role as citizens in, rather than consumers of, what happens during your time together. 

• Interact with texts together (vs always asking people to prep readings beforehand). Close read a passage together; read a chapter aloud, taking turns by paragraph; use a collaborative annotation app like Perusall; etc.  

• Give participants defined facilitator-support roles within the dialogue process (e.g. notetaker; greeter & guide to any latecomers; slideshow clicker; timer; snack-passer; etc). This may feel silly, like elementary school classroom “jobs,” but in my experience, people are eager to feel as though they have a semi-defined role to play and that others/the dialogue process as a whole are depending on them to some small extent to do it well.  

• Invite + model vulnerable sharing via practices like a routine “check-in.”  For guidance on how to facilitate an effective check-in, as well as sample check-in prompts to choose from, see the SNF Paideia resource “Building Community in Dialogue: The Art of the Check-in” (page 2 of the same resource with “Practices that Support Belonging”!)  

• “My kid joined a new school and was given a class backpack. She was excited that she matched with her new friends” (D&W Partners at Penn). Think about a common token that creates a sense of shared identity: a notebook for everyone in the class; a gift (like a book or a coffee mug) that everyone gets; etc.  

• Ask them to share advice/guidance related to the topic (Cohen 43) or do a favor for you as the facilitator (Cohen 90). For example: rather than criticize a participant who tends to dominate the conversation by telling them they need to sit this one out, pull them aside and affirm their value as someone who is comfortable speaking up. Ask if they will help you draw others into the conversation or if they can offer advice to those feeling more shy. By the same token, rather than penalize a hesitant participant for not meeting their quota of comments, affirm the way that they make space for others and listen. Ask them to share advice around how they practice listening.  

PRINCIPLE: Affirm people’s agency, autonomy, and individuality. Honor their histories and other sources of belonging.  

 PRACTICES:  

• Let people express themselves authentically, rather than enforcing a singular, rigid, narrow standard for what communication and self-presentation “should” look like in the dialogue process. (For excellent discussion of this, and many suggestions for dialogue facilitators, see Derald Wing Sue’s Race Talk and the Conspiracy of Silence, 2015.) 

• Use the names, pronouns, and identity labels people use for themselves to refer to them (even if you don’t understand or “agree” with them).  

• Have participants set their own goals and name their own purpose and values related to participating in the dialogue.  

• Notice and name folks’ patterns of communication, without assigning a value judgment (e.g. “I notice you reference your hometown a lot,” “You use metaphors and analogies a great deal when explaining concepts,” etc.). The key here is not to frame your observation as either critique or praise – just signal that you are listening and noticing.  

• Incorporate multiple modalities to engage different learning styles (visual, embodied, audio, film as well as verbal/textual), even if you don’t believe the group “needs” these different modalities to comprehend the material.  

• Strive for diverse representation in the texts and authors you select and be mindful of the examples or case studies you cite as “normal” or “typical.” (I always think about the difficulty my middle-school English Language Arts students in bush Alaska had with a story set on a farm. “What’s a wheelbarrow?” they asked.)  

• Invite participants to share any access notes with the group, both general or specific to that day (e.g. “I need to leave early” or “Please face me when talking whenever possible so I can lipread” or “I am really distracted today”). For groups that will be meeting more than once, have participants draft a short “Access Statement” describing their needs + making a plan for how they will meet them.  

• Practice culturally relevant pedagogy (Cohen 218) – see this primer on culturally responsive teaching from the National Equity Project for many suggestions. 

• “I once went to a birthday party where the person being celebrated wrote handwritten notes to each invitee and put them at their place setting” (D&W Partners at Penn). You could put a note on each participant’s chair expressing that you’re glad they came, or write a note back in response to their “exit ticket” at the end of the dialogue process. In my classes, I have every student write a message to every other student in the group on the final day of class (sort of like a yearbook signing party), expressing what they appreciated about or learned from each other. (Of course, I participate, too.)   

• Share personal/cultural rituals with one another (in a way that is voluntary rather than coerced) (D&W Partners at Penn). I think about how a student in my Testimony class brought in moon cakes to share with us around Lunar New Year, for example.  

• “Ask people genuine questions about themselves and show interest in their answers, then follow up on that next time you see them” (D&W Partners at Penn) 

*** 

Final Thoughts: Back to the Paideia Reading Group 

There are so many more practices to add to these lists (and perhaps other core principles of affirmation) – please let me know your suggestions! But this is a start.  

I will end by sharing a bit more about our reading group, in case it is helpful to see a more complete example of how many small, simple practices to support belonging are intentionally incorporated in a dialogic community. Like I said at the beginning, the reading group is a very simple, low-concept setup: we meet up once a month over lunch to talk about a book. That’s it. It’s not a sophisticated, highly structured dialogue model with any particularly grand ambitions. I want to acknowledge and always remember that it is absolutely the case that, as Cohen says, “a [dialogue space] isn’t just a physical place common to all [participants] but a distinctive psychological reality for each [participant] in it” (116). I can’t pretend to know the internal world of everyone in our reading group or claim that we all experience it in the same positive way that I do, or in the way that many have expressed experiencing it. No dialogue space can be all things to all people, and that is okay.  

But I believe our reading group has consistently managed to be, thanks to our collective efforts, a truly dialogic community in which people have shared deeply personal and powerfully vulnerable beliefs, feelings, and experiences – and at times confronted real conflict – across a wide array of differences (including: academic disciplines; hierarchies of status and power; age; ethno-racial, religious, and cultural backgrounds; gender and sexuality identities; dis/ability; parents and non-parents; and more). People have been able to express when their sense of belonging felt compromised or threatened, and people have been able to acknowledge and adjust when their behavior was not supportive of others’ belonging. This, to me, is a sign that real trust exists here.  

Here are some of the choices that were made to try to make the reading group a space where belonging (and thus dialogue) could be fostered and continuously re-built and fortified. You can think about which principle you would categorize each of these practices under – does the choice I describe seem like affirmation of people’s inherent worth and humanity, affirmation of people’s value as community members, or affirmation of people’s agency, autonomy, and individuality? 

Though the reading group is officially for graduate students from all over the university, we turn no one who’s interested away, and have thus collected staff members, faculty, and undergrads along the way. Occasionally, a non-Penn-affiliated community member comes in as someone’s guest – we love this! Once, someone brought her mother – we loved this! 

There is no expectation of commitment. That is, I ask people to RSVP every month if they are able to come to the next month’s gathering. It’s okay if they can only make one out of six gatherings a year. It’s okay if they said they could come but had to cancel. It’s okay if they forgot to RSVP but show up anyway. It’s important to me to offer a space that is consistently available and forever welcoming, rather than the manufactured urgency and false sense of competition with other obligations created by a “ONE NIGHT ONLY!” kind of approach. Anyone who has come once is on the invitation list until they ask to be removed.  

When people come in, music is playing softly, twinkle lights form a glowing runner down the big conference table, and natural light streams in through the windows, while the harsh overhead fluorescents have been switched off.  

We always serve lunch, and when feasible given our program administration team’s bandwidth and availability, I ask participants to suggest food vendors or types of food. I either choose a vendor that’s been suggested that we haven’t used before, or ask participants to vote on what they’d like out of a short list.  

Often, lunch isn’t fully set up when they come in, and early-comers help unpack serving dishes, set up paper plates, and line up beverage cans. When we order Amma’s South Indian food (a suggestion from a participant back in the day that we return to regularly as a fan favorite), we serve it family style, passing dishes around the table. At our most recent gathering, the food was unlabeled, and the omnivores in the group helped the vegans and vegetarians by taste-testing bits of the food and reporting back whether it had meat and what kind. When latecomers arrived, folks made sure, quietly, that they got food passed to them, and whispered what each dish was as they handed it over.  

The first 15-20 minutes of our gathering is just social connection time, with no agenda. I try, without being too heavy-handed, to make sure that people who haven’t met before are introduced, but I mostly sit back a bit, greeting people as they come in and letting people chat with each other.  

When it’s time, I open every gathering with thanks and an invitation for people to go around the table and introduce themselves. Our rule is we are not allowed to introduce ourselves via our department/program/office at Penn, our area of research, or our role on campus. “Don’t tell us what you teach, what year of your program you’re in, or the topic of your thesis,” I advise. (In the undergraduate courses I teach, the rule is, “Don’t tell us your hometown, year, or major.”) The reason for this, I explain, is not that we are not interested to know these things about each other or that they are not important parts of who we are. But in academic spaces, we are almost always asked to identify in terms of the work that we do within and for academia, and hierarchies of power and assumptions based on discipline (letting the more “senior” people speak first without thinking, for example, or interpreting someone’s comment as “typical STEM mentality”) have a way of instantly asserting themselves in a way I find unhelpful for what the reading group exists to do, which is officially “to create sustained and sustaining interdisciplinary community.”  

 So, instead, I invite people to “check in” to the gathering by sharing their names and their response to a prompt related in some way to the text we’ll be discussing – but not designed to be a response to the text (let alone a sneaky “quiz” of some sort that will expose whether they read it or not, or how well they “got”). When we read Who Gets Believed: When the Truth Isn’t Enough by Dina Nayeri, I asked, “What’s something you really believe in, even though it’s hard sometimes?” When we read Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer, I asked, “What or who has been a non-human teacher in your life?” In this way, the stories and knowledges that participants have to contribute are foregrounded over, and equal to, what the text is offering. We are all honored first as people who have experience, and therefore something meaningful to contribute, related to the topics and themes of the text – rather than put immediately in the position of analysts of, servants to, the text. And we meet one another on a plane of shared humanity while revealing the richness and range of the differences in how we’ve each experienced that humanity.  

I let people know, as part of our norms, that they are free to opt out of responding to this opening prompt – if they’d rather just share their names, that’s fine.  

As each person shares, I say thanks and repeat their name. Once everyone has shared, I thank each person again individually and by name. This ritual formally affirms everyone’s presence and value in the conversation. I then thank the group as a whole for what they have shared and offer a few observations of connecting threads and patterns, as well as the range and diversity, in what has been shared.  

We then open our conversation of the book. This proceeds a bit differently, but in general, I ask people where they would like to start: what ideas resonated or produced friction for them from the text.  

Participants vote each month on which book we want to read. I try to curate a short list of texts I imagine might be broadly interesting across many disciplines, whether they are academic texts or published for a general audience. In general, I focus my curation on authors whose identities are less typically represented on academic reading lists. So most of the books we choose have been authored by women and/or people of color (Geoffrey Cohen being a recent exception). Participants are welcome to suggest text options, too. 

Thanks to funding from SNF Paideia, everyone receives their own copy of the book as a gift. I order the books several weeks ahead of time and leave them out in the Paideia office suite for people to pick up at their convenience, each one bearing a participant’s name on a sticky note.  

I select a passage from the book for us to focus our conversation on, usually about 2-3 chapters or not more than about 50-75 pages, so that the burden of preparation is not too heavy for all of us busy people. I explicitly communicate in writing that people should still please come even if they haven’t finished the reading (or started it). “Community > homework” is the motto. It’s clear in our conversations that there’s usually a wide range of engagement with the book: some have read far beyond the assignment, others far less than it. Because we are explicitly accepting and understanding if people have not managed to read, people tend to be honest and open about what they haven’t read and can’t comment on, rather than trying to perform familiarity they don’t have. We honor what people have to bring to the conversation, whether their comments are in direct response to the book or drawn from some other aspect of their lives.  

As we draw to the close, I ask for final thoughts. I share sincere thanks for our conversation and everyone present in the room. At the end of the gathering, people are encouraged to take any leftovers home with them to their roommates, friends, and families. Usually, people linger a bit afterwards, chatting with each other, thanking one another for what they shared, and gathering food to take with them. Always, always, people offer to help clean up.  

Acknowledgments 

My deep thanks to Rhina El-Amin for sitting with me and sharing her passion and brilliance in a conversation about belonging. Belonging is not just the topic of Rhina’s research; it is also infused in her methodology, in a way other researchers will be privileged to learn from. I know I am. I also thank, again and with all my heart, the SNF Paideia reading group, for the space we have created and shared together.