This chapter focusses on ubiquitous plant presences in some of the literatures of southern Africa, essentially of South Africa and Zimbabwe. Both Indigenous societies and incursive colonial regimes depended fundamentally on plant life for shelter, food, materials, and aesthetics of belonging. Colonials imported numerous alien species, both deliberately cultivated and inadvertently ‘released’, with incalculable impacts on the subcontinent’s variegated local environments. The governing divide between ‘indigenous’ and ‘alien’, however, is complicated by sundry blurrings and ironic cross-overs. These dynamics, affecting commercial, societal, and emotional dimensions alike, are explored through some selected nodes, particularly the iconography of Eden or Arcadia; the complex aesthetic ecology of the suburban garden; and the treatment of trees, especially the native yellowwood and the alien jacaranda.

This chapter explores inclusions and exclusions embedded within the Omani economy as experienced by citizens and foreigners. The chapter shows, first, that contestations around labour market belonging and experiences emerge within the local structures of segmentation and the global nature of Oman’s labour market. Second, in order to understand economic belonging and citizenship in the Gulf, class has to take a central role. The production of difference and competing identities of local regionalism, tribal and community affiliation, religion, interior and coastal cultures, race, heritage, and gender all matter but need to be understood alongside the intervening variable of class. The subjectivity of experiences and perceptions of inclusion and exclusion exposes how the politics and practice of difference in global capitalism produces tensions, value, and forms of power that manifest in labour and class relations. These dynamics also generate resistance and contestation around the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion.

The current context of regressive border regimes challenges critical theory’s commitments. Can we still take recent legal and political practices as starting points for reimagining political norms and institutions based on a reconstruction of hidden emancipatory potentials? The chapter argues that critical border theory could benefit from recentering the idea of political representation, and especially from building on insights of the recent constructivist turn in representation theory. Understanding political representation as shape-shifting and constituency-mobilizing changes long-held assumptions about the spaces, subjects, and demands articulated in border politics. While this representative perspective has diagnostic advantages, it is unable to criticize the legitimacy of existing border regimes owing to its thin normative assumptions. Reconstructive approaches to border politics should therefore use the diagnostic tools of the recent representation scholarship without committing to their limited critical potential

The Introduction defines the book’s major concepts, such as belonging with, elucidates its major keywords – movement, listening, radiance, resuscitating, restoring, and recycling, and explains its foundational ideas and methodology. These intertwine feminist, historical, ecological, and subject–object analyses to underpin how diminishing women and objects is a related activity. Second, it establishes how texts heal injurious mergings between women and matter and jettison the supposed “female virtues” – dissimulation and passivity – in order to embrace actual ethical beliefs and independence, reconnect women’s corporeality, reason, spirit, sexuality, and virtue, rendering these cooperating, rather than sparring, bodies. Third, it argues that these materialist ethics reveal how consumption can be constructive, a finding that disputes mainstream concerns that women were merely thoughtless consumers. Finally, it illuminates how the political and personal need to incarnate ideals by rendering concrete such abstractions as the “rights of man” entwines with gender debates and subject–object explorations during the revolutionary years.

The focus of this chapter is on how language policies are resisted. The chapter begins by articulating in a theoretical and practical way what resistance to language policy looks like, particularly from a discursive point of view. It concludes with a case study of resistance to language policy in an online forum for non-local teachers of English in Thailand, highlighting the entanglements between resistance to limits on what ‘named languages’ could be used and a broader struggle to overcome a hegemonic racial ideology around the concept of ‘native speaker’.

This chapter explores how contemporary novelist Kamila Shamsie adapts dramatic forms to stage ideological and ethical conflicts in her works, focusing on her acclaimed 2017 novel Home Fire in particular. Through a discussion of Home Fire’s thematic and formal reworking of Sophocles’ Antigone in the context of contemporary debates about citizenship and civil rights in the UK, the chapter investigates the ways in which Shamsie’s novelistic dramatisation of ideas engenders a critique of the politics of belonging in the post-9/11 age. In particular, the chapter focuses on the staging of competing ethical and political demands via interpersonal conflict, the use of multi-perspectival narration to critically refract contemporary concerns about citizenship and civil rights, and the representation of forms of mediation and public discourse in Shamsie’s novel.

Moving prevention for college students out of the mental health clinic and into the classroom changes the campus environment. A curricular approach to enhancing student resilience is described through an exemplar of a one-credit general education course focused on adaptive responses to stress, Changing Minds, Changing Lives (CMCL). The experiential, strength-based curriculum is designed to meet basic psychological needs, buffer predictable stress, and boost adaptive resilience. Based on a social–ecological model of resilience, the CMCL program functions as a campus opportunity structure teaching self-regulation skills, facilitating greater connectedness, and strengthening resilience capacities. The model operationalizes the resilience response as a set of concrete actions that facilitate adaptive reorientation and reorganization in the face of challenge, mobilize relevant assets and resources, and leverage social connections to navigate adversity. Evidence-based applications of strength-based pedagogy, mindfulness practices, expressive writing, and inclusive group process in the course structure are described, and empirical validation of model efficacy is reviewed.

Provides a brief overview of elements of the Islamic normative tradition. I consider three key concepts – justice, the common good and community – and ambiguities of their contemporary application. The primary focus of the discussion concerns resources (including wealth and property) – their attribution and distribution. To whom do wealth, property and resources belong, and what are their responsibilities? How, by whom, and for what purposes are wealth and resources to be distributed, and who has the authority to make such determinations? In broad strokes, I outline how, according to religious norms, resources ought to be utilized and managed for the sake of the "common good." The purpose of this discussion is to provide a framework that facilitates a deeper understanding of the extent to which religious norms have been instrumentalized and at times, reformulated in the conduct of the four oil-financed institutionalized practices explored in subsequent chapters.

This chapter provides an overview of folk and multicultural festivals in Australia, especially as to how these events have been important to the creation and celebration of community identity since the 1950s. It begins with a brief outline and critique of the policies that have shaped modern Australia as a culturally diverse nation and the role of festivals as a vehicle for representing ethnic identity, inclusivity and tolerance. This discussion also considers the contentious positioning of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures as part of a broader notion of diversity, as well as debates raised by a focus on the performance of ethnic identity that emphasises authentic practice and devalues cross-cultural collaboration. This is followed by a discussion of the origins of an Australian folk culture in British folk music traditions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the revivalist folk movement of the 1960s. The final section outlines the development of national folk festivals as events representing an authentic Australian folklore and culture that, like multicultural festivals, offer insight into the problematic relationships between place, community, belonging and the national space.

The themes in Chapter 6 cluster around the negotiation of cultural differences. For first-generations psychiatrists this meant learning about different cultures and practices, which often involved comparison with their formative medical school education. Adjustments were often motivated in the interests of meeting the needs of patients such as learning about cultural nuances. There were times when the psychiatrists felt like they were made to feel different and were not accepted. This happened in subtle and more overt ways, both of which pointed out their differences. Experiences ranged from cases of explicit discrimination from vulnerable patients to comments and actions within the institution, for example, that pointed out their differences. These latter practices may have been infrequent or implicit but contributed to a sense of ostracization, of feeling as if one does not quite belong. Being asked where one was from, although in itself, not intended to cause harm or offence was distancing. The psychiatrists moved between South Asian culture and British culture in their identity positions, sometimes consciously and explicitly, at other times, less so.

Immigrant authors in the United States write under the shadow of hostile laws that challenge expectations of political equality and belonging. Tales of repudiation and resistance mark the uncertainties of transit and the dangers of arrival. This study of Asian American texts exposes how US immigration laws naturalize race and redefine identities and lineage. Immigration law transformed American narrative forms to create a global and intercultural literature in which Asian migrants refuse to be turned into perpetual outsiders.