Date: TBD

Time: TBD

CFP 1 - Critical Dialogue: CRITICAL DIALOGUE: Where We Belong: Community Responses to Exclusion and Harm in 2026
Room: TBD

Sponsor: Community, Research, and Practice

Organizer &

Presider/Discussant: Sarah E. Stanlick, Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Description: 

Many communities are facing divisions over what or who “belongs” and where; what and whose history should be memorialized and how; and what and whose futures are invested in and why. Questions of belonging have been further complicated in the current political moment. This session centers on contested places shaped by legacies of exclusion, violence, and threats to well-being that result from the devaluation of certain people and communities and, concurrently, the places they inhabit. The papers in this session explore how communities are responding to place-based harms, including activist and grassroots efforts, NGO initiatives, and state-sponsored policies.

Papers:

“A Place to Belong: Homelessness and the Counter Third Space,” Sara Brallier and Stephanie Southworth, Coastal Carolina University

“Conflicting Ethnographies of Unhoused Communities on Manhattan’s West Side: A Spectrum Theory of Cooperation and Competition,” Minseung Kim, Independent Scholar

“From the Ground Up: A Relational Account of Migration Governance in Chicago, 2022–2025,” Sophia Costa, The University of Chicago

“Hanging Out or Staying In: Belonging and Exclusion in the Social Life of Students on a Small Rural Campus,” Michael O. Johnston, William Penn University

“Legal Inclusion, Spatial Exclusion: Housing Vouchers and Source-of-Income Laws,” Zehra Sahin Ilkorkor, Virginia Commonwealth University

“Segregated Pasts, Fragmented Presents: Historical Spatial Exclusion and Its Impact on the Contemporary Relationship between Racial Diversity and Social Capital,” Victor Tan Chen, Virginia Commonwealth University, Giemyung Lee and Myeong Lee, George Mason University, Alex Mikulas, University of Colorado Boulder and Sara A. Peters, University of Wisconsin–Madison

“Solidarity in the Streets: Community, Support, and Tensions among Street Vendors in Shared and Contested Spaces,” Arianna Quetzal Vargas, Arizona State University

“Symbolic Violence and Trans* Kids in Rural Texas,” Nicole Kraus and Shanna Peeples, West Texas A&M University

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