Belonging-in-interaction: expressing and performing translocal belongings through language and arts practice

This paper explores belonging, in a context of mobility. For newcomers to a country, their belongings are multiple and uncertain, as they retain links with the place they have left while attempting to attain legitimacy as members of the new society. We ask how recent migrants to the UK who are adult migrant language learners express and perform their understandings of belonging in a participatory arts project. In so doing, we uncover how the participants’ belongings, as they emerge in interaction, both shape and are shaped during the phases of co-production. We take into account the range of communicative resources including but also beyond language, deployed trans-semiotically in participatory arts practice. This trans-orientation allows insights into the interactive character of belonging in the process of preparing the arts performance that might otherwise go unnoticed. We conclude that our perspective on belonging-in-interaction presents a challenge to dominant discourses relating to social integration for new arrivals, where a narrow focus on the learning and use of the main societal language is a prerequisite for belonging.