University Place

Flourishing in a Culture of Belonging

Jessica Feggestad: Hi, everybody. Welcome to our Teaching and Learning Symposium here at Madison College. I really appreciate your time with us today. I know everybody’s very busy.

Jessica Feggestad: My name is Jessica Feggestad, my pronouns are she/her, and I’m a faculty member here at Madison College in the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning.

Jessica Feggestad: Today, we’re welcoming Dr. Tony Chambers, who’s here through Badger Talks, the speaker’s bureau for UW-Madison campus. And it’s a great free resource that UW-Madison provides. And if you’re interested, visit badgertalks.wisc.edu.

Jessica Feggestad: Before we begin, again, just a reminder that we’re gonna hold questions ’til the end. So, I’m really excited to introduce Tony Chambers to you today. He’s going to present “Flourishing in a Culture of Belonging.”

Jessica Feggestad: Tony is the director for Community Well-being at the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He also serves as a senior lecturer in the Department of Counseling Psychology, teaching in the area of human flourishing, and lead for community well-being focus in the Center for Black Excellence and Culture in Madison.

Jessica Feggestad: Tony was appointed and currently serves on the Wisconsin State Superintendent’s Equity Stakeholder Council and the Midwest Achievement Gap Research Alliance. He’s also published widely in professional journals and edited books, and I wanted to mention his publications include a co-edited book, edited book, Higher Education for the Public Good: Emerging Voices from a National Movement.

Jessica Feggestad: And so with that, please join me in welcoming Tony Chambers.

[audience applauding]

Tony Chambers: Thank you so much, thank you.

Tony Chambers: So, welcome. I, like most of my colleagues, like to start any conversation, collective conversation we have, with what we call a practice. My colleague Richie Davidson likes to call it clearing the lens. I don’t know what that means, but he uses that all the time, so I’m gonna use it, too. We’re gonna clear the lens for a minute.

Tony Chambers: So, for those who feel comfortable enough, I’d like to invite you to just find a relaxed space, if you would. We usually tell our students to close all of your computers and turn your phone off for a minute. If you could just find a space that’s comfortable for you.

Tony Chambers: I invite you, if you want to close your eyes, feel free to do so. If you don’t want to close your eyes or if you don’t even want to participate in this, if you could just, you know, gaze at something straight ahead and just find a peaceful and quiet place for yourself. So, I’d like to take a couple of minutes.

Tony Chambers: You know, belonging has never been more important in the world in which we live. The pandemic taught us so much. Many of us today, this week, this year, have been pushed into thinking about where we belong, if we belong, and in some cases, why we belong. So our discussion today is on everybody’s mind in one way or another.

Tony Chambers: The Zulu people in the southern part of Africa, when they encounter somebody, they greet them with this, this really interesting greeting. They say, “Sawubona,” “Sawubona,” which means, “I see you.” And the response is, “Sikhona,” which means “I am here to be seen.”

Tony Chambers: “I see you.” “I am here to be seen.” That’s the essence of belonging: to be seen and to be present to receive the seeing.

Tony Chambers: I’d like for us to think about that when we encounter one another, when we encounter our students, when we encounter our families, neighbors, friends. And most of all, I’d like for us to hold that and think about that when we encounter those who we think are others, who are not others, who are us. Sawubona, Sikhona.

Tony Chambers: Thank you all. Now, thank you for indulging me with that for a minute.

Tony Chambers: Flourishing in a culture of belonging, right? By the way, if you want to know how to spell that, because there it is. Okay.

Tony Chambers: So, let me continue with what I started with. The notion of belonging has shown up everywhere. In fact, it’s the buzzword of this last five, six, seven, nine, ten years. People have embraced the concept from a political perspective. They’ve embraced it from an emotional-psychological perspective.

Tony Chambers: We’ve evolved a cottage industry of researchers, researchers and others, who have tried to understand what that means and what are the implications of belonging or not belonging. I’ll mention in a little while the Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s recent report, 2023 report, on the epidemic of loneliness, which is related to the concept of belonging.

Tony Chambers: So, belonging is part of our current and probably our future lexicon. So we’ll be talking about this or at least trying to make sense of it for the next decades, maybe centuries.

Tony Chambers: And I will tell you that every conflict in our world, whether it’s on a personal level or whether it’s on a geo-global level, is related to the concept of belonging. It’s either those of us who are seeking to belong with and to something or those of us who are trying to restrict others from belonging.

Tony Chambers: So, we are looking for it, or we’re trying to restrict others from belonging. And that is the center of all of our conflicts. It’s also the center of most of our human joy and human flourishing around us because what we understand about belonging is that it has significant psychological, emotional, behavioral, physical implications, positive implications when one belongs. And we’re gonna get into that in a little bit.

Tony Chambers: So, we know that it’s the center of conflict. We know that it is at the foundation of most of our joy and most of our flourishing.

Tony Chambers: Let me start by sharing with you something that we do at the Center for Healthy Minds. Just for my entertainment, how many of you know about the Center for Healthy Minds? Good. Good. It’s an interesting place to work. It’s interesting things that we do there.

Tony Chambers: But for those who don’t know, the Center for Healthy Minds is a research center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that is a center that explores the brain, basically, and what happens in the brain when people engage in certain types of behavior that changes, you know, pretty much your physical, mental, and emotional health.

Tony Chambers: So, we explore what goes on in the brain, particularly when it comes to things like contemplative practice. We want to know what happens in the brains of people that have certain kind of maladies like Alzheimer’s disease, asthma, and these kind of things.

Tony Chambers: And what we try to do is try to work with those folks who are in those communities, health care professionals and others, teachers, to try to elevate these things and help people that they work with develop better lives. That’s shorthand for, I think, what we do.

Tony Chambers: And Richard Davidson, who some of you all may know, neuroscientist, and he likes to say, friend of the Dalai Lama. I’ve never met the Dalai Lama, so I can’t verify any of that. So let’s assume it’s true. And he leads, he tells us that we want to reduce suffering in the world by the scientific study of the mind. And that’s pretty much what we do. We also do quite a bit of outreach.

Tony Chambers: One of the things that we do and started doing is teaching. We have an initiative called the Human Flourishing Initiative. It’s actually called the Art and Science of Human Flourishing. And one of the things we do in that initiative is we teach undergraduate students. This semester, we have 360 of them in one class.

Tony Chambers: We teach them about some of the components of a flourishing life, of which these are some of them. And we have this model that’s both the research model as well as a model that guides us through our teaching. And the model is awareness, connection, insight, and purpose. We changed it to integration, but purpose. And in the 15-week class, we explore this model and have these related components, related themes for each of the class periods.

Tony Chambers: And the class period that we’re on this week, surprisingly enough, serendipitously, is belonging. So I was able to engage our 360 students this week, Monday and Wednesday, around the topic of belonging. Monday, Wednesday and Thursday, actually, on the topic of belonging.

Tony Chambers: And what I want to share with you all today are some of the lessons I’ve learned from my students, as well as some of the lessons that I’ve learned through this Badger Talk experience, of which I’ve been able to go around the state of Wisconsin. I’ve been able to experience, to explore the concept of belonging with folks at different universities across the country.

Tony Chambers: And I didn’t know I was doing this, but I was exploring the concept of belonging in previous life experiences, which I think are quite relevant and illuminates my understanding, and hopefully will be of value to you all, my understanding about the concept of belonging.

Tony Chambers: So, that’s all preface to say I’m a curious human being. I think I’ve learned some stuff. I’m quite open to learning more stuff from other folks anywhere about this concept of belonging because I think at some point, it’s the center of most of where we’re at right now as a world, certainly as a nation, right, and as a community here in Madison. So, all preface. Got me going.

Tony Chambers: This is what I do in class because I know first-year students, and I’m not saying, you all, I’m equating this group with first-year students, but I understand first-year students. They wannna know, “Well, what are you gonna tell us that’s gonna be on the test?” [audience laughing] Right, “What are you gonna, What am I supposed to pay attention to?”

Tony Chambers: So I start ’em off by telling ’em what to pay attention to. And then I tell them throughout my conversations with them what all of this stuff means. So, let me go through a couple of these things. These are the takeaways for today.

Tony Chambers: We’re primarily focusing on social and public belonging. There are other types of belonging, but we’re only focusing on the social and the public belonging. Belonging impacts well-being psychologically, emotionally, physically, socially, and pretty much every other way where there are relationships.

Tony Chambers: Belonging, and this is important, people, because we’ve conflated the concept of DEI with the concept of belonging. Belonging is not diversity, equity, and inclusion. I’ll let that settle in for a minute.

Tony Chambers: And belonging is not consistent across all human beings all the time or even the same human being all the time. Here’s another one. Belonging is not always or not necessarily a good thing.

Tony Chambers: Belonging does not mean fitting in la Bren Brown. Experiencing belonging is not the same as a sense of belonging. A sense of belonging is an affect. It’s a feeling, it’s an emotion. Experiencing belonging is behavioral. And those two are not always the same thing. Not that they’re mutually exclusive, but they’re not the same thing.

Tony Chambers: Now, here’s the one that my students struggle with the most and the biggest lesson I’ve ever learned. And it’s the simplest lesson I’ve ever learned. That to which you want to belong has to want you to belong to it.

Tony Chambers: That to which you want to belong has to want you to belong to it. It’s not enough to say, “I want to belong.” It’s not enough for us to tell our students and our colleagues and ourselves, “You belong, therefore, you belong.”

Tony Chambers: That to which you want to belong has to want you to belong to it. And as I mentioned before, belonging is at the center of all human conflicts and joys. If you don’t hear anything else I have to say for the rest of the minutes I’m standing here, this is it. This is it, folks. I don’t know if I have any much more to tell you.

Tony Chambers: But let’s try to make some sense out of this. Everybody has seen this thing. This is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. And Maslow pretty much tells us that we all, as human beings, have these basic needs on this system, right?

Tony Chambers: And he identifies belonging and love as positioned right between self-esteem and safety and security. It is three steps above or below, depending on how you look at it, above the need for safety and security and physiological needs. We need these things as human beings. In fact, Maslow would tell us is that it’s baked into our DNA. We are born with these needs, right?

Tony Chambers: I’m gonna contest that at some point in this conversation, or at least I’m gonna give a little bit of nuance to it as we go forward, but belonging is super important as human beings in our structure of needs.

Tony Chambers: Now, I mentioned earlier there are different types of belonging, and I’m not gonna go through all of these, but belonging, at least according to Joe Myers in his book The Search to Belong, identifies four areas, four types of belonging that each of us experience at some point in time and some of us experience at the same time, right, with the same people, right?

Tony Chambers: So, there’s the intimate belonging, which hopefully all of us have experienced, and that’s usually with a loved one or somebody that’s really close to us, or a best friend. And we share things and we expect things and we live in relationship with them in ways that we don’t live in relationships with anybody else. It is the closest relationship we can have, right?

Tony Chambers: Then there’s this personal belonging, which is the next level, with friends and families, and we have this mutual relationship of disclosing information. And we assume a high level of trust. Trust is critical in a belonging relationship.

Tony Chambers: Then there’s the social. And I did mention that most of the conversation and most of the exploration around belonging is centered around social and public. And sometimes they overlap. But the social belonging is when we experience people that we, whom we recognize, but we may not know very well, right? It helps us develop our sense of identity and sense of who we are.

Tony Chambers: And social belongings, we often self-select ourself. We put ourselves in there by selection. We’re not chosen sometimes. We self-select into these belonging relationships with those with whom we have personal or even intimate belonging. So, it could overlap with the intimate as well as the personal belonging category.

Tony Chambers: Then there’s this public belonging, which most of us associate with being members of a city, being members of an institution that has a mascot. For example, I am a Badger. That is my public belonging or my need for public belonging. I am a Madisonian, right? This is public belonging. We associate and connect ourselves with people in a broader sense. We don’t know ’em well, but we have this external commonality, right?

Tony Chambers: So, most of the conversation and most of the work that’s been done is around the public and the social concept of belonging.

Tony Chambers: Okay, real quick. These are some of the potential impacts of related concepts or related experience: isolation, loneliness, as well as the concept of not belonging. Right? We know that you all, as well as the students with whom you work with, if they feel isolated or if they feel lonely or feel like they don’t belong, their performance, their persistence, as well as their level of engagement with the important things that contribute to their academic success are impacted, right?

Tony Chambers: If they don’t experience belonging in the places that are important, in these institutions, then their performance, their very existence, their success is impacted negatively.

Tony Chambers: Now, this one I found really interesting, is that, as far as the neuroscience of it all, when you have a sense of belonging or not a sense of belonging, it elicits within your neurotransmitters the same kind of cravings that are strong when it comes to hunger and thirst.

Tony Chambers: So, we know that there are parts of your brain that are triggered when you’re hungry and thirsty. And those transmitters and that experience is quite the same thing as when you’re isolated and lonely.

Tony Chambers: In fact, much of what we understand is that the pain receptors in your body, the things that elicit pain, that tell you you’re hurting physically, are the same kind of things that you experience when you feel isolated and lonely.

Tony Chambers: So, isolation, loneliness, not belonging, your brain can’t distinguish between that and the physical pain that we go through. So imagine your students, right, when they feel like they don’t belong or they don’t belong. They’re experiencing the same kind of experience as if you punched them in the face.

Tony Chambers: Right, or if they were punched in the face. Not that you punched them in the face. [all laughing] So please don’t go out here thinking you’re gonna do an experiment, punch ’em in the face. Leave ’em alone, okay? Not the same thing.

Tony Chambers: We also know that for those who feel lonely and not like they belong, is that they make, they’re a little bit more pessimistic. They don’t see the glass half full. They see the glass not only half empty, but almost totally empty. We know this to be true.

Tony Chambers: They’re less trusting of other people, right? And they contribute, and this lack of belonging contributes to some of the cognitive difficulties they may not have. They may not have as strong a memory, or we may not have as strong a memories. Right?

Tony Chambers: We may not be able to process information quite the same way as it’s being delivered. We know that sometimes information goes in. It’s misinterpreted in ways that would not normally be that way if we belonged or if we didn’t feel like we were isolated or if loneliness wasn’t the central characteristic of our being, we’d be able to receive information, process information, make meaning of it, and apply it in the lives that we live in more positive ways than we would otherwise.

Tony Chambers: So, belonging and loneliness and isolation are not only these subjective feelings that we have. They actually impact how we live a life, a flourishing life, a full life, a life at all. And we know that it can impact mental, physical, and emotional well-being.

Tony Chambers: Now, the Surgeon General’s– and these are some of the research projects that some of my colleagues have been involved in, as well as some of the projects that we’re trying to explore right now relative to the effects of isolation and loneliness and belonging.

Tony Chambers: Central to this is Vivek Murthy, the Surgeon General’s report that was issued back in 2023 that outlines some of the effects of this epidemic of loneliness that he talks about, which is, again, related to belonging or not belonging. Right?

Tony Chambers: And what he tells us is the population that’s most at risk for loneliness is older people, seniors. Right? Second are young women, school-age, college-age women and younger. Right? The third population that’s most at risk for loneliness are college-age students, generally, from the 18 to the 26.

Tony Chambers: Now, it probably applies even beyond that, for sure, but those are the populations that many of us engage who, or many of us are. Right? So, we know that this epidemic of loneliness is not only concentrated amongst people who have physical, mental, and psychological and emotional challenges, which is true, but it has an impact on almost every one of our lives.

Tony Chambers: And if we ourselves aren’t experiencing this, we know somebody who is experiencing this epidemic of loneliness, not belonging, or isolation. And it has serious ramifications on themselves as well as those of us who care about ’em.

Tony Chambers: As far as the health, how social disconnection or social connection works, and this is a graphic from the Surgeon General’s report. And this is basically a road map as to how social connection or a lack of social connection impacts our health outcomes.

Tony Chambers: Social connection or lack of social connection impacts our biology in terms of our stress hormones and inflammation, which is, some would argue, the center of most of our physical maladies, right? Our psychology, which is our attempt to find meaning and purpose in the world we live in.

Tony Chambers: Stress, which, again, much like inflammation, is at the center of most of our challenges. Or use stress, or what we call good stress versus distress, which is the kind of stress that’s long term and has a deeper impact on almost every part of our well-being.

Tony Chambers: And our behavior, our physical activities, the choices we make, our sleeping pattern, the kind of activities we engage in that are self-harmful. I guess one could say it that way.

Tony Chambers: So, the lack of social connection or the existence of social connection impacts our bodies and our minds in all kinds of ways, which lead to all kinds of social outcomes. And I will say, and it’s not in here, but I will say there are certain populations that are affected much more by this dynamic than other populations.

Tony Chambers: We know for a fact, and of course, the Surgeon General identified this, but we know this to be true anyway, that women, people of color, folks in the LGBTQ+ community, those with certain types of disabilities, some folks from specific international places, struggle more with concepts of isolation, loneliness, and the lack of belonging, much more so than other populations, right?

Tony Chambers: And the data for disproportionate health outcomes or disparate health outcomes reflect that. And for those of you all in the health care professions, you could probably verify this in all kinds of ways, right? These populations are experiencing outrageous impacts on their health and well-being. And what exposed this whole thing was, you know, what happened during the pandemic across the board. And it continues on.

Tony Chambers: So, let me shift gears for a quick second. What are some of the dimensions? Well, first of all, let me ask, how many of you ever had an experience of belonging? Hands raised. Do that again. Okay, how many of you ever experienced not belonging?

Tony Chambers: How many of you have ever had experience of belonging and you didn’t wanna belong? I know that’s confusing. How about, have you ever had an experience of not belonging when you actually did wanna belong? Can you do that last one again? Not belonging and you really wanted to belong? Okay, there are a few of you who never had that experience. That’s telling, I’m impressed.

Tony Chambers: So, what does all that mean, right? When we talk about belonging, and much of the research that exposes us to belonging, we tend to think of it in subjective terms. It’s a feeling, it’s a sense. In fact, we use language like “a sense of belonging.”

Tony Chambers: I did this review of how belonging is referred to in much of the literature, as well as in post-secondary education or higher education environments, and almost all of the language says “sense of learning.” It says this emotion, this feeling of learning, this feeling like somebody cares about you, that somebody’s got your back, this feeling like you’re in a place that makes you feel or makes others feel like you belong there. You feel it.

Tony Chambers: Then there are these other things that happen in these spaces that we don’t like to talk about, but are really critical when we talk about building cultures of belonging, these objective events and outcomes. And we’ll get to that in a minute.

Tony Chambers: But essentially what we mean by that is that there needs to be policies, practices, symbols, people, resources that need to be in place to undergird the feelings, the subjective experiences of belonging, right? If we don’t have these objective experiences or objective outcomes, then the opportunity to belong, versus just having a feeling of belonging, won’t be achieved.

Tony Chambers: And they’re very temporal. The feeling of belonging is a very temporal experience. It goes, right? Feelings come, feelings go. However, to belong, to have experience of belonging, it’s a sustained process.

Tony Chambers: The other thing that we’ll talk about is agency. And agency simply means, at least in this context, simply means those who want to belong have to have some control over how and when they belong. They have to have a say in the process. They have to have skin in the game.

Tony Chambers: It’s not enough for us to just tell people, “You belong.” If they don’t have agency or skin in the game, real control, not just this, you know, “You could come to the table and say what you want, but it doesn’t matter,” kind of control, you have to have some control.

Tony Chambers: Can you imagine giving control to our students to have a say and to how, when, where, and what allows them to experience belonging? It’s not about us, it’s about them.

Tony Chambers: And then the last thing I’ll say is about strength of social networks. And that’s gonna be quite interesting because it all revolves around a hypothesis that we’re trying to study. Okay?

Tony Chambers: So, anybody familiar with this guy john powell? That’s what I’m talking about. He directs a center at UC Berkeley called the Center for Belonging and Othering at UC Berkeley. If you get a chance, go on YouTube or anything online and just take a look at some of his presentations. Take a look at the center’s website because I think you’ll find it quite interesting.

Tony Chambers: What powell, what john tells us is that belonging describes more than a feeling of inclusion or welcome, more than just a subjective experience, and that it’s a very political process and it means a shift in power, right, a shift in agency.

Tony Chambers: In order for belonging to exist for anybody, they have to have a say. We have to be willing to shift the distribution of power in any relationship: educational, families. Some of us don’t even feel like we belong in our families or in our households, current households.

Tony Chambers: Some of our children and offspring don’t feel like they belong or don’t have an experience of belonging. Many of us know this to be true. So john is telling us it’s about a shift in power. It’s not just about a feeling, it’s about agency. It’s about creating systems and resources to support those subjective experiences.

Tony Chambers: And what happens sometimes when we don’t shift the power, when we don’t provide agency for people to have some control, are two things, this thing he calls– or, actually, Claude Steele, the psychologist at Stanford, calls belonging uncertainty.

Tony Chambers: And it means exactly what it says. You think you belong, you have a sense of belonging, and something happens that causes uncertainty about the sense that you once had.

Tony Chambers: For example, I went to the University of– I came to the University of Wisconsin 2016. And everything around me suggested that I belonged. The language suggested that. Some of the symbols and the people suggested that. And then there’s a thing that happens.

Tony Chambers: And that thing could be very subliminal. It could be something like somebody looks at you the wrong way or an issue that might have come up that you found to be deep to your, deep to your own personal sense of being is ignored. Or you say something in a meeting and nobody pays attention to you, and somebody else says the same thing and they pay attention to them.

Tony Chambers: It causes you to question, “Is it because they’re telling me that I actually don’t belong here?” So, the uncertainty comes up. Our students, and each one of us have experienced that to some degree. And depending on who you are in this room and what environments you go into, you may experience it more than other people, right?

Tony Chambers: There’s behavioral or belonging uncertainty, which leads to this other condition that Claude Steele talks about, attributional ambiguity, which is essentially, you start to question the source of these signals about belonging.

Tony Chambers: “I wonder if that had something to do with my race.” “I wonder if the message that I’m receiving from my dean, “who actually tells me I belong, if it had something to do with my race.” “Or it had something to do with the fact that I’m much more handsome than he is.” [all laughing] He wouldn’t argue that point, by the way. [all laughing]

Tony Chambers: So, you have this ambiguity that rises up in you. Right? And sometimes, we treat this ambiguity or our students treat this ambiguity as what Claude Steele calls stereotype threat. In other words, we try to act out, right?

Tony Chambers: We think that folks have a stereotype of us, so we act in ways that we affirm the stereotype. We act in ways that we affirm the stereotype, which takes us further away from ourself and disconnects us from any sense of agency and any sense of true belonging.

Tony Chambers: But we develop a sense of belonging because we’re trying to fit in. And the distinction between fitting in and belonging, according to Bren Brown, fitting in is when you size up a situation, and if I’m speaking to y’all and y’all understand what I’m saying, when you size up a situation and you do whatever you need to do in order to be accepted.

Tony Chambers: You wear the mask. You change your behavior, you change your flow. Right? In essence, you change who you are in order to fit in. Now, is that belonging? I would say not.

Tony Chambers: Sometimes we ask those around us to fit in, and what we’re asking them to do, and they know this to be true, what we’re asking them to do is to size up the situation, see what you need to do in order to be accepted.

Tony Chambers: Am I saying something that folks could understand? Size it up. We’re very good at that. We look at an audience or a classroom or a relationship. Sometimes it’s down to the micro level when we look at somebody we want to be in an intimate relationship with and we size the thing up and we say, “Okay, I’ma wear something different. “I’ma speak different. I’m gonna engage them in a very different way.”

Tony Chambers: We’re trying to fit in, which is very temporal, because at some point, at some point, resentment is gonna set in. At some point, it’s gonna impact your identity formation, and it’s just gonna blow the thing to death. Things are gonna fall apart.

Tony Chambers: To belong, as my good friend Parker Palmer used to say, it’s a form of hospitality. When you belong, it’s a form of hospitality, which essentially means you enter into a space on your own terms and you’re received for who you are.

Tony Chambers: You enter a space on your own terms. You don’t have to be somebody else. You don’t have to negotiate your identity. You don’t have to explain your value structure. You enter in a space of hospitality.

Tony Chambers: Objective. We mentioned these, the other dimensions, the objectives, objective efforts and outcomes. Symbols, practices, resources, physical structures. If you look around the campus, notice what students are looking at. Notice what you’re looking at, whose information, whose value is privileged just by the symbols.

Tony Chambers: If it’s pictures of your board, if it’s pictures of teachers that receive teaching awards, if it’s pictures of outstanding students. Now, I would say Madison College is very different than the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I’ll just put that right there. Right?

Tony Chambers: The symbols that are reflected here are much more accepting and much more expressive of who belongs and who does not belong. At least, that’s the internalization that I have. Spaces like the University of Wisconsin-Madison, though we’re trying, I still think we’re at a point where much of what we tell people through our symbols, through our practices, through some of the behaviors that we engage in, many people receive that as “You don’t belong here,” because I don’t see myself.

Tony Chambers: There’s no way that you’re saying that people like me belong in places like this.

Tony Chambers: Agency. Gotta give up the control. Or at least you have to share some of the control. We have to share some of the power. We have to invite people into a hospitable space on their own terms and who they are.

Tony Chambers: These are what the students at Mount Horeb taught me. These are the students at Shabazz. Those are the ones that taught me that, give up the power. Can you do that, right? These are the students at West High– East. These are the young people that told us, “We have no agency. “And we act like it. “We give people fodder to not give us agency. “We act like we don’t deserve agency because they won’t give us agency.”

Tony Chambers: In order for belonging to occur, particularly amongst young people, they have to have a sense of agency, and we have to release it, or at least share it, both in a classroom and outside of a classroom. In our families. Hard thing to do, I have three boys. I don’t like giving up my power to ’em. I do not like it.

Tony Chambers: And when I do, they reflect it in ways that I wish I hadn’t given up the power. [all laughing] Some of y’all know what I’m talking about. [all laughing]

Tony Chambers: Okay, there’s this thing called the strength of social networks. And we do network analysis, social network analysis. And in a social network, what we’re trying to say is that those around you actually influence and the networks of which you are part of influences your experience of belonging, okay?

Tony Chambers: But some of the key characteristics in that relationship are what we call frequency of contact with those in the network, quality of contact with those in the network, and what I’m calling alignment of contact with those in the network.

Tony Chambers: The first two are self-explanatory. The last one, alignment, is when you think you’re a friend with somebody, but they don’t think they’re a friend of yours. That’s a misalignment.

Tony Chambers: I think I’m friends with my dean. And I’m so confused by this because he never considers me a friend. So when I go and ask him for something, I think I’m asking for something from a friend. That is not the way it works. He’s the dean. We have a chancellor. I think she’s, you know, she’s part of my social network. [chuckling] Not! [all laughing]

Tony Chambers: So, here’s the theory, here’s the hypothesis. Okay, so, you have this strength of social networks. You have belonging on the left axis, and then you have what I’m calling relationships on the bottom, or strengths of relationships.

Tony Chambers: And just for sake of argument, we have on the bottom, there are people you engage with and that our students engage with that have titles: dean, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, faculty, president of X organization. Then you have these acquaintances. An acquaintance could be more than a title, but it’s somebody you know, but you don’t know ’em well, right? You don’t know ’em well. You may have coffee with ’em once.

Tony Chambers: Think about your networks. There are people that you have acquaintances with, there’s people that have titles, and then you have this thing called a friend, which is a high social network, a high position in a social network. And these people, you have intimate, trusting relationships with, right?

Tony Chambers: So you have title, you have acquaintances, you have friends. Now the hypothesis is, the further up this relationship continuum you go, in other words, from title to friend, the closer you get to friendship, the greater your sense of belonging, right?

Tony Chambers: The more you have in your network people who you consider to be friends or high acquaintances, the greater your sense of belonging. It looks like that.

Tony Chambers: Now, what does that mean for us and our students? Right? What essentially it means is that we, if we’re concerned about creating spaces of belonging, we need to create opportunities for us and our students to engage with people who actually can make a difference in our lives. Friends.

Tony Chambers: We need to find ways in which to create opportunities for people to get closer to other people, not just to be close to people with titles or closer in proximity to different people.

Tony Chambers: That’s why DEI does not, is not belonging. Because you’re in contact with people who look different than you and that you could have conversations with them does not lead you to a stronger sense of belonging or an experience of belonging.

Tony Chambers: Find ways in order to create in our environment for people that we care about opportunities to actually engage with people, to develop strong friendships, personal friendships, connections with people who have different strengths in the social network.

Tony Chambers: Because if we continue to stay, like most of us who are first-generation students, if we continue to expose students to people who are like them, first-generation students, the chances of developing those strong friendships, i.e., people who can actually make decisions and help you get what you want to get, if we don’t expose people to that, the chances of developing a strong sense of belonging are very slim.

Tony Chambers: We need to flip the script and stop talking about quantity and start talking about quality of relationships.

Tony Chambers: Okay, I should stop right there, but I’m gonna leave this up here because I think it’s important to know that there are some downsides to belonging. Sometimes for us to belong, that means somebody else can’t belong.

Tony Chambers: I’m in a fraternity, I’m sad to say. The choice I made to be in the fraternity was not just because I wanted to be connected, but I didn’t want other people connected. It’s like families, it’s like churches, it’s like barbershops. Same thing.

Tony Chambers: The myth of superiority. There’s a value. Belonging is not a value-neutral experience. Belonging to certain things gives you high status. It gives you value.

Tony Chambers: And sometimes the thing to which we want to belong becomes us. I am the thing that I belong to. When people introduce themself at parties, they go, “Oh, what do you do? Tell me about yourself.” “Well, I’m a psychologist.” That doesn’t say anything. The thing to which I want to belong actually defines me. It’s my identity. Who am I?

Tony Chambers: I talk about the thing that I belong to, and that is not belonging. That is one of the paradoxes that we deal with when we talk about belonging. Even if we ask our students, “Tell me about yourself.” “Well, I’m in engineering.” Or, “I’m in nursing.” That’s not a description of themselves. That’s who they belong to and with.

Tony Chambers: And these are examples. An example that I give my students is that when you think about a family, right, when you think about a family and belonging, are we connected? Are those intimate and personal relationships? Or are they social and public? Right?

Tony Chambers: If you think about the downside to belonging, there are people who have associated themselves with fascism, Nazism, and other type of very socially harmful gangs. Because they have a strong need to belong or they’ve been conditioned to have a need to belong.

Tony Chambers: Black barbershops. Anybody ever been to a Black barbershop? Come on, talk to me. It’s an anthropological experience. [chuckling] If you haven’t been to a Black barbershop, go in for no other reason than to get an understanding about anthropology.

Tony Chambers: My fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Incorporated, my guys, I was conditioned to be a part of that. Is it an intimate and personal belonging experience? I’m not sure.

Tony Chambers: Churches, religions, or even, some people call this a religion, the Wisconsin Badgers. [audience laughing] Or the Green Bay Packers. [chuckling] Can’t say that I bought into that one just yet, but that’s…

Tony Chambers: So, these are the downsides or at least the nuanced sides of belonging. It’s not always a positive thing. Sometimes we do things and we internalize the concept and experience of belonging in ways that are harmful or not really authentic and don’t reinforce our self of self, self of identity.

Tony Chambers: And that’s true for our students as well, so be mindful that when we tell them they should belong and when we talk about belonging for them, it’s not always value-neutral. Or it’s never value-neutral, actually. And sometimes it can be harmful. So be mindful of that.

Tony Chambers: Okay, I’m gonna leave it at that, leave this up there, and then we’re gonna do Q&A. But first of all, I want to thank you all for at least indulging me with all of my ramblings. And I wanna give a shout-out to all the organizations and communities that have taught me things, the Brodhead community in Wisconsin, Black Earth.

Tony Chambers: Spent a lot of time with heating and cooling companies talking about belonging in Black Earth. Shabazz, East, West High School, Mount Horeb Schools, and several other schools around the state. The University of Oregon has been very instrumental in helping us understand this concept of belonging. University of Missouri, Penn State, Ohio State, and UVA, University of Virginia.

Tony Chambers: So, with that, thank you all very much. Appreciate you.

[audience applauding]