We Belong: Collaboration for Community-Engaged Research and Immigrant Justice

Sean Macnaughton, UC Santa Cruz

The aim of this project is to produce a visual narrative and definition of what it means to “belong.” This collection is the visual documentation aspect of We Belong: Collaboration for Community-Engaged Research and Immigrant Justice, a research project headed by the UC Santa Cruz Sociology Department that centers around the experiences of individuals from families of mixed citizenship statuses in Santa Cruz county.

We Belong is a Community Initiated Student Engaged Research (CISER) project designed to mentor first-generation undergraduate researchers, while generating new, locally actionable knowledge on the experiences of mixed-status immigrant families in Santa Cruz. We have begun to collect photographs made by students in the Sociology 139T Research Practicum course associated with We Belong that are representative of their subjective definition of belonging, while other students in the class reachout to members of the aforementioned communities and conducting interviews. “Spaces” photographed won’t be restricted to physical locations or places; they are images representative of communities that make the picture-makers feel at home or apart of something greater than themselves, or they can be structures or power dynamics that contribute to belonging or not belonging. We hope to answer the question “what does it mean to belong?” and display it in public areas with the intention that others may be able to better understand the experience and phenomenon of belonging.

The aim of this project is to produce a visual narrative and definition of what it means to “belong.” This collection is the visual documentation aspect of We Belong: Collaboration for Community-Engaged Research and Immigrant Justice, a research project headed by the UC Santa Cruz Sociology Department that centers around the experiences of individuals from families of mixed citizenship statuses in Santa Cruz county. We Belong is a Community Initiated Student Engaged Research (CISER) project designed to mentor first-generation undergraduate researchers, while generating new, locally actionable knowledge on the experiences of mixed-status immigrant families in Santa Cruz. We have begun to collect photographs made by students in the Sociology 139T Research Practicum course associated with We Belong that are representative of their subjective definition of belonging, while other students in the class reachout to members of the aforementioned communities and conducting interviews. “Spaces” photographed won’t be restricted to physical locations or places; they are images representative of communities that make the picture-makers feel at home or apart of something greater than themselves, or they can be structures or power dynamics that contribute to belonging or not belonging. We hope to answer the question “what does it mean to belong?” and display it in public areas with the intention that others may be able to better understand the experience and phenomenon of belonging.