Citation: ANTONSICH, M., 2010. Searching for belonging: an analytical framework. Geography Compass, 4 (6), pp.644-659. Additional Information:• This is the accepted version of the article, which has been published in AbstractBelonging is a notion both vaguely-defined and ill-theorized. Scholars in various social disciplines often take this notion for granted, as if its meaning is somewhat selfexplanatory. Others tend to equate it with the notion of identity, citizenship, or both.By relying on a critical reading of an extensive literature across academic disciplines, this article aims to offer an analytical framework for the study of belonging. I argue that belonging should be analyzed both as a personal, intimate, feeling of being 'at home' in a place (place-belongingness) and as a discursive resource which constructs, claims, justifies, or resists forms of socio-spatial inclusion/exclusion (politics of belonging). The risk of focusing only on one of these two dimensions is to fall in the trap of either a socially de-contextualized individualism or an all-encompassing social(izing) discourse. The open question is whether the increasing cultural and ethnic diversification of contemporary societies can lead to the formation of communities of belonging beyond communities of identity.

In 1995, Banal Nationalism set a new way to study nationhood. Away from the traditional concern with its historical origins ('when') and its substantialist features ('what'), Banal Nationalism offered a systematic analysis of its reproduction ('how'). Informed by social and discursive psychology, Billig pointed to the role played by familiar, unremarkable 'little words' (deixis) to explain the persistence and pervasiveness of the idea of a world divided into nations. The present article aims to expand Billig's seminal study on the reproduction of nationalism, by incorporating an 'everyday nationhood' perspective, which attends more closely to human agency and contextual interaction. To give empirical substance to this move, the article relies on photo-elicitation group discussions and written essays collected in a vocational school in Milan, Italy, among an ethno-culturally diverse sample. By bringing the voices of people in as active producers of national meanings, the article offers a more complex picture of a world banally divided into nations. Both a national 'we' and a national 'here' emerge in fact as socio-spatially differentiated, fragmented and articulated at a plurality of scales, thus defying the logical linearity of banal nationalism, which unwittingly reproduces nations as singular, internally homogenous discursive entities. The article concludes by arguing for the need to complement the banal with the everyday in order to more fully capture processes of national reproduction in contexts of increasing ethno-cultural diversity.

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This article aims to stimulate a new theoretical debate around the notion of territory in the age of globalization. Rather than espousing the neoliberalist view on de-territorialization or contributing to the examination of the new 'spatial fixes' associated with the re-territorialization of modes of capital production and accumulation, the article focuses on the politicoinstitutional dimension of territory. My argument is that we should not limit our understanding of territory to a device in the hands of the state to control and to contain people, but explore the role that territory plays as a principle of social organization and integration in today's multicultural societies. This argument is discussed in relation to the so-called 'crisis of the hyphen', i.e. the increasingly problematic link between the nation and the state within Western European societies.

Over the last two decades, banal and everyday nationalism have been the main theoretical and methodological approaches for studying how nations are reproduced “from below”. The present article advances this literature by paying close attention to racially differentiated subjects and, more precisely, subjects who are perceived to look different from, but sound like, the national majority group. Building on the feminist attention to the corporeal, I argue that face‐to‐face encounters with the simultaneous embodiment of (somatic) strangeness and (linguistic) sameness generate a sense of surprise which interrupts the reproduction of the nation. This, in turn, allows for the “troubling” of the very identity category (nation) which both banal and everyday nationalism avoid interrogating directly. I support and illustrate this argument by focusing on the case of the children of migrants born and raised in Italy and their personal experiences in mundane settings. The article discusses the implications of this short circuit in the banal and everyday processes of national reproduction in terms of potential openings of the nation to more inclusive forms.

In an age of increasing globalisation and political fragmentation, does the nation have the relevance it once had? Is the re-scaling of political and economic processes associated with a similar re-scaling of national identities? The aim of the present paper is to offer an answer to these two questions on the basis of both quantitative and qualitative data recently collected for Western Europe. Cross-country trends for both national pride and national attachment are analyzed through Eurobarometer Standard surveys. Furthermore, the notion of national attachment is discussed in relation to qualitative data collected in four regional case-studies in Western Europe. On the basis of this analysis I argue that, when viewed 'from below', i.e. from the eyes of ordinary citizens, national identity continues to shape the predominant ways in which people make sense of themselves and others.

As contemporary societies are undergoing a demographic change, spurred in great part by international immigration, living in diversity continues to remain a topical issue. Moving away from the nation, considered as a site of discrimination and exclusion, geographers and social scientist more broadly have focused on alternative socio-spatial formations. Over the last two decades or so, the local place, particularly the city or the neighbourhood within the city, has attracted considerable attention. Imbued with transnational and cosmopolitan traits, these local places have been narrated as progressive and empowering in contrast to a nation perceived as to embodying opposite dimensions. The present study critically interrogates this local/national divide. Drawing on narratives of Italians with foreign background talking and writing about their individual experiences of living and growing up in Italy, the article offers empirical evidence which challenges the local/national divide in two ways. First, participants blurred the distinction between these two scales, as identification and attachment to local places were narrated by also mobilizing national markers. Second, the sense of local rootedness of the participants was not cast against the nation, but it was strategically deployed to claim a place in the nation. These findings invite scholars to explore the different ways in which the nation intervenes in shaping life in diversity, beyond the dominant narrative of the local/national divide.

This critical commentary engages, both methodologically and theoretically, the notion of territory as discussed by Stuart Elden (2010). Methodologically, I suggest that Elden’s philological concern with the term ‘territory’ rather than with the idea of ‘bounded political space’ risks producing a partial historical account. As a way to enlarge the scope of analysis and include also forms of ‘bounded political spaces’ which existed before, during, and after the emergence of modern territory, I propose a new theoretical category, ‘territorial’. This category reinstates the importance of ‘b-ordering’ practices, downgraded as second-order problem by Elden. Theoretically, the commentary also suggests the importance of ‘peopling’ territory, in order to bring social agency back in and avoiding treating modern territory as a mere terror(izing) tool. Prompted by Elden’s account, this piece aims to stimulate a ‘territory debate’.