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.

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.

This epilogue explores the multifaceted experiences of migration and mobility among college students of immigrant origin, revealing their intricate journeys through higher education systems. The authors note the various ways this volume documents the processes by which students from immigrant backgrounds navigate oppressive and exclusionary spaces, seeking avenues of belonging and success on their campuses. Closing on a note of audacious hope, the epilogue presents the narratives of two focal participants, Cecilia and Manuela, interviewed as part of a larger study of the effects of membership in a student-led mutual support network among aspiring teachers of color in a historically white institution. These student leaders articulated themes of belonging and exclusion, the necessity of building community, the centrality of their personal and professional identities as women of color, and the importance of creating and maintaining sources of emotional support and encouragement. Through their narratives, we see ways their community-building efforts serve as a form of resistance so that they can thrive in places that were never designed for them.

Lawyer leaders can transform cultures that feature chronic stress, overwork, and lawyer impairment into neuro-intelligent cultures that make cognitive well-being a priority, reaping benefit at both the individual and institutional levels. Neuro-intelligent cultures promote brain health and mental strength, and they develop environments rich with cognitive power. Neuroscience and psychology research reveals what a culture of concern and respect can mean to individual lawyers. It also supports moving away from grind culture and toward a healthier and more productive neuro-intelligent culture. The American and International Bar Associations have called for action that improves the well-being of individual lawyers. They have also challenged legal organizations to make the legal profession more sustainable. Transformation of the lawyering culture will involve detoxing from overwork, minimizing burnout, leveraging the energy of both introvert and extrovert lawyers, cultivating neurosignature diversity, facilitating psychological safety, reducing hierarchy, limiting competition, and embracing the Maverick lawyer leader professional identity.

This chapter treats liturgical experience. It finds that there are few textual sources for the study of this experience and that instead practices, postures, gestures, and other elements of lived ritual experience must be considered. Liturgical experience is characterized by structures of repetition and predictability that enable participants to integrate their own experiences and to feel that they belong to something that has preceded them, thus providing a sense of stability and meaningful identity. Liturgy features cycles of confession and celebration that in their back-and-forth movements allow people to process their emotions and to participate in bodily practices that express their convictions and deepest concerns. Liturgical participants are thus shaped in their identity within communities of belonging that provide meaning to their daily experience, both regular and extraordinary.

Some neo-Aristotelians see a strong link between virtues and eudaimonia or flourishing, but others do not. After acknowledging this difference, the chapter explores some of the possible implications of this link. The view explored in this chapter is that virtues contribute to success in goal and good pursuit, which, in turn, contributes to a flourishing life. The neo-Aristotelian view examined holds that there are things that are good for humans qua humans (e.g., close personal relationships, group belonging). Success in pursuing these goods is hypothesized to be correlated with eudaimonia. It explores several challenges in studying eudaimonia, but concludes that eudaimonia research should continue and be updated as conceptualization and measurement improves. The chapter concludes with a discussion of three well-documented human goods (close personal relationships, group belonging, and meaning) and their hypothesized relationships with specific virtues (e.g., loyalty, forgiveness, honesty).

The variety of immigrant experiences expressed through the essay form is the subject of this chapter, which presents a panorama of writing by US immigrants who have found unique ways to give language to an often disorienting venture. The personal essay has proven to be a powerful tool for US writers exploring what it means to be a migrant or a descendant of migrants. Social scientists tend to look at the big picture when it comes to migration, theorizing and investigating migration as the large-scale movement of people from one place to another. But every mass migration is an aggregation of individual experiences, fraught with hardship, sacrifice, and the full gamut of human emotions, from hope to despair. Personal essays about migration and its effects chart the transformations that occur when people leave one place for another. Leaving home is inevitably wrenching, and many essays about migration register a nostalgia for the place – and the life – left behind. The personal essay is a form ideally suited for capturing the motivations, achievements, and disappointments of migrants who have often come to the United States because of the promise of the nation’s democratic principles.

Humans have a deep longing and need for connection and a sense of belonging. Social groups provide safety, a sense of purpose, and identity, and fulfil the psychological need to belong. For many, that need is fulfilled through family, peers, co-workers and other pro-social institutions. But others struggle to find their place. The online space provides opportunities for people to connect with others, especially during times of physical disconnection yet it is vulnerable to misuse and manipulation. This chapter discusses the need for belonging, and how struggles to belong contribute to participation in anti-social groups such as gangs, cults, and conspiracy groups. Using QAnon as an example, this chapter illustrates how conspiracy groups provide a sense of community, as people find and create meaning around shared and constructed identities which can lead to personal and societal risks. The chapter demonstrates how the need for belonging intersects with various other factors, in potentially beneficial or detrimental ways.

Contrary to decades of speculation about the poor mental health of heavy metal fans, newer research (and research conducted with heavy metal fans) has begun to reveal some of the more positive and nuanced outcomes of heavy metal music and culture for well-being (for examples see Dingle and Sharman 2015; Rowe and Guerin 2018). Moving beyond a focus on the music itself, this chapter builds on notions of metal as a protective factor for mental health by exploring three domains of psychosocial well-being through a lens of heavy metal identity formations. Those being stress and coping, belonging and purpose, and certainty of self in an unpredictable world. Concluding comments propose that the internal identity dialogue of metal fans and its interplay with the embodiment of metal identities have significant value for steeling oneself against some of the most pervasive social and emotional threats of modern life.

This chapter introduces the interdisciplinary field of relationship science. It describes the human drive for belonging, including the biological underpinning of sociality and the harmful consequences of social isolation and social exclusion. It also defines romantic relationships and the characteristics that differentiate romantic relationships from other close relationships (high interdependence, high intimate knowledge, high commitment). In addition to emphasizing the core commonalities across romantic relationships, this chapter explores the many ways in which romantic relationships are diverse (e.g., structure, exclusivity, composition, duration, motives). Finally, this chapter highlights the critical importance of close relationships for individual health and well-being as well, as for society more broadly.

The German word Geborgenheit – that deep and infinitely warm sense of safety and security, comfort and trust, loving protection and being taken care of that constitutes the feeling of belonging – is one of the most powerful emotions, albeit one difficult to translate into other languages. Geborgenheit is primarily formed in private spaces, especially within the family, but some also find it in language, literature or nature. Others simply associate it with Heimat, home, another emotionally laden concept, which seems to be a primarily private matter. This chapter though explores the political dimension of Geborgenheit and Heimat. It becomes an issue whenever a threat appears, especially in wartime, when soldiers go into the field under the banner of their endangered homeland and seek to protect the place and social context to which they felt they belong. Beyond the narrow horizon of each individual, that is, the region, family and cultural environment in which they had grown up, the feeling can also be projected to and from the fatherland or the nation. This chapter also explores the question of how being absent from home feels and translates into political action, namely by millions of refugees, expellees and migrants.

This chapter traces the turn in diasporic thought, particularly in the settler nations of Australia, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand, and the United States, toward engagement with the settler colonial histories of dispossession that were a condition of possibility for our arrivals here. It develops brief close readings of literary texts by Black, Asian diasporic, and Indigenous writers as a way to show how the entanglement of Indigenous and diasporic struggles for justice and transformation might be inhabited and mobilized. At stake, this chapter argues, is the possibility of imagining other worlds than the modernities that were born in the conjunction of Indigenous dispossession and racial slavery, worlds shaped by better, more sustaining (and sustainable) practices for relating with human and nonhuman others, including the land itself.

From the 1920s through to the early 1960s, a popular genre of Australian commercial fiction focused on exploring or narrating stories about the outback and more exotic parts of Australian life and geography. Writers as diverse as Ion Idriess, F. J. Thwaites and E. V. Timms used their books to help other non-indigenous Australians engage with their ‘new’ nation. This chapter draws on a some of these novels and uses them to demonstrate how these stories brought to the fore issues of belonging, race, desire and anxiety. The analysis will focus on these texts’ descriptions of love and romance, including how and when intercultural desire was represented. The chapter explores how a settler-colonial logic based on dispossession, erasure and/or assimilation is deployed by the range of authors to mark out social as well as political boundaries of belonging. Overall, the chapter addresses two questions: first, how was Australia imagined and how were its citizens/subjects imagined as belonging to the nation in commercial fiction about race relations at this time; and second, how do stories of intimacy – mostly cis, heterosexual romance – shape these narratives of difference and national belonging? The chapter answers these questions using textual analysis and theories of difference.

Chapter 3 considers the making into ‘migrants’ of those who moved and asks what it meant for their kinship relations. It looks at processes of migrant-making through encounters at three different scales: nationally (with the British state), locally (with their neighbours, strangers, and other Christians), and transnationally (with their kin), arguing that migration compressed these two historical generations into one ‘migrant’ generation. At the same time, I show how migrants participated in these processes, particularly vis-à-vis their kin and, in doing so, fuelled the latter’s expectations of economic and other support. Central to the discussion are the ways in which the imaginings of migrant and non-migrant kin diverged post-migration, creating friction transnationally. Christianity also features prominently in this chapter, as migrants sought to make sense of their dashed expectations, while seeking means to pursue their aspirations and cultivate a sense of belonging.

Devoted to issues of change and continuity, Chapter 6 considers the social reproduction of families, particularly the ways in which ‘change’ and ‘continuity’ (understood as tradition) are drawn upon as tropes in moral economies of transnational kinship. In examining each generation of migrants in turn, I suggest that younger migrants assert ‘continuity through change’, a moral claim with important historical resonances, while older women generate ‘change through continuity’ in familial practices. ‘Change’ emerges as a form of social betrayal, complicating ideas of change as understood in narratives of modernity and in Christianity, particularly its presumed desirability. What is at stake in ‘having changed’, an accusation non-migrants level at migrant kin, are existential questions of personhood and belonging, along with potential access to symbolic and material resources.