Students, community and belonging: an investigation of student experience across six European countries

ABSTRACT

Despite existing empirical work that explores the multiple ways in which students develop a sense of belonging in higher education, there is a dearth of comparative research about the extent to which the concepts of community and belonging are central to what it means to be a student and how students in different national contexts (beyond Anglophone countries) construct community and belonging. Drawing on qualitative data from students from six European countries, we provide an account of conceptualisations of community and belonging. Specifically, this paper extends discussions around community and belonging in higher education through comparative inquiry. Notwithstanding the individualised and consumerist framing of students accompanied by market reforms in higher education across Europe, it shows that the notion of community and/or belonging features prominently in students’ narratives. We also demonstrate how a sense of community and belonging is experienced on different levels. Crucially, the emphasis placed on community in students’ sense of belonging varies by the country, pointing towards the continued influence of distinctive national traditions, structures and norms of higher education. Our analysis contributes to wider debates about the development of a European Higher Education Area and its impact on European homogenisation.

KEYWORDS:

• Students
• community
• belonging
• higher education
• Europe

Introduction

The way in which belonging is understood by students has come to be seen as increasingly important in the context of higher education (HE) around the world, as it is now open to larger and more socially diverse populations not least due to massification, widening participation and/or the internationalisation of higher education. Whilst previous research provides useful insights into who belongs, how and to where/whom, the exploration has thus far been largely limited to a single institution, often located in Anglophone countries (Ahn & Davis, 2020a, 2020b; van Gijn-Grosvenor & Huisman, 2020; cf. Gopalan & Brady, 2020). Little is known about the extent to which the concepts of community and belonging are central to what it means to be a student and how students in different national contexts (beyond Anglophone nations) construct community and belonging. The issues of community and belonging are particularly significant in Europe where there are implicit (and sometimes explicit) assumptions about the homogenisation of higher education and understandings of higher education students as a result of specific policy initiatives, such as the Bologna Process and the European Higher Education Area.

This article contributes to extant literature on students’ belonging in higher education through examining the way in which the notions of community and belonging are constructed by higher education students in six European countries (Denmark, England, Germany, Ireland, Poland and Spain). For the purpose of this article, we draw on data from focus groups with students and plasticine models that participants were asked to make during the discussions. The paper begins by discussing existing scholarship on community and belonging in higher education, which provides an important background to our analysis. Following the description of our research methods, we focus on understandings of students as community members across the six nations. We then outline how a sense of community and/or belonging is experienced on different levels. This will be followed by explanations for the relative importance of community and/or belonging in what it means to be a student across and within six European countries. Through this discussion, we argue for the centrality of distinctive national traditions of higher education in students’ conceptualisations of community and belonging, despite the convergence of qualifications and systems manifest in the creation of a European Higher Education Area and its subsequent impacts on homogenisation of higher education across Europe (Slaughter & Cantwell, 2012).

Community and belonging in higher education

Students’ belonging in higher education has been a key concern of scholars across various disciplines, as it is considered to play a crucial role in academic performance, retention and well-being in the higher education context (Tinto, 1975, 1996, 2012). A focus on a wide range of academic and social factors that contribute to a sense of belonging (e.g., learning and teaching experiences, interactions between students and academic staff, and social relationships with friends and peers within the institution) has thus far been dominant in extant literature (Ahn & Davis, 2020a; Meehan & Howells, 2019; van Gijn-Grosvenor & Huisman, 2020). Related to a sense of belonging is the notion of community, which – despite the conceptual ambiguity and disagreements over its meaning – refers to a group of people who share values, a way of life, identify with the group and its practices, and recognise each other as members (Mason, 2000). It can also be of different kinds and operate on different levels. Within higher education literature, the concept of community is often employed to describe affiliation groups (e.g., the university/department community) (Cooper, 2009; Lefever, 2012; White & Nonnamaker, 2008) or common practices (e.g., learning community) (Quinn, 2010; ). Crucially, belonging has been readily associated with the idea of community, with the latter considered to have a significant bearing on students’ sense of belonging.

Scholars have problematised the notion of belonging and/or community in extant literature, which is commonly defined as feelings of being accepted and included by the individual higher education institution. For instance, previous research that employs a Bourdieusian framework has theorised belonging as a practice and product of the relations of power embedded in the field of higher education, constructed around a narrow student profile: young, full-time and residential (Ahn & Davis, 2020b; Finn & Holton, 2019; Reay et al., 2010). The spatial dimensions of students’ belonging are also articulated through Massey’s (2005) concepts of ‘space’ and ‘place’, constructing higher education as a hierarchical social space but also as diverse and unfixed (Hopkins, 2011; Hubbard, 2009). Feminist poststructuralist perspectives (e.g., Braidotti, 2019) view a sense of belonging as a process whereby ‘students both create and are created by embodied encounters with spatialised social practices and power geometries within human, non-human and ideological others’ (Guyotte et al., 2019, p. 556). A small number of studies have similarly indicated that what it means to be part of a community and/or belonging might be conceptualised differently across and within disciplinary or national cultures, although the existing empirical work is limited to a single higher education institution or nation state (Gregersen et al., 2021; Whyte, 2019). As Yuval-Davis (2006) suggests, belonging is not a neutral concept but a dynamic, multi-layered, social, spatial and political one.

Attending to such complexities, we suggest that there are multiple communities in which students may develop their sense of belonging, and, consequently, they may feel they belong to certain communities and not others. This paper builds on the existing body of work to contend that students’ sense of community and/or belonging, whilst embedded in social relations and inequalities as well as spatial and material arrangements and practices (Gravett & Ajjawi, 2021; Thomas, 2018), is shaped by the distinctive national traditions, structures and norms of higher education across different countries. Despite the exclusionary and restrictive role of a bounded sense of belonging in understanding students’ experiences, we nevertheless believe that it is still important to identify cross-national differences and similarities in how and where students draw the boundaries of ‘us’ and ‘them’. The politics of location is an acknowledgement of a ‘starting position of asymmetrical power differentials’ (Braidotti, 2006, p. 130). Our intention here is to provide comparative insights into students’ constructions of community and belonging. In doing so, this paper contributes to theoretical and empirical perspectives about the extent to which the concepts of community and belonging are central to what it means to be a student and how students in different national contexts construct community and belonging. This is the key focus of the paper and the research question informing this study.

Research methods

This paper draws on data collected as part of a six-year project on the ways in which higher education students are understood across Europe, which pays particular attention to similarities and differences between and within nation-states. Focus group discussions were held with 295 students during 2017–2019 in six European countries: Denmark, England, Germany, Ireland, Poland and Spain. These nations were chosen to provide diversity with respect to: welfare regime; relationship to the European Union; means of funding HE; and the extent of any financial support provided to students (see Table 1 for details). Fieldwork was conducted in three higher education institutions (HEIs) in each country (which we number HEI1-3 in the subsequent discussion, to preserve anonymity), selected to represent key elements of the diversity of the respective national HE sector.

Table 1. Characteristics of the countries involved in the research.

Country	Welfare regime	Accession to the EU	Tuition fees for full-time undergraduates (2017/18)	Student support for full-time undergraduates (2017/18) – with amounts per annum
Denmark	Social democratic	1973	No tuition fees	c.85% receive needs-based grants (of up to €9703); loans available to those entitled to state grant
England	Liberal	1973 (left in 2020)	High fees, typically £9250 per year	No grants; loans available to all
Germany	Corporatist	1952	No tuition fees; administrative fee of up to €300 per semester	c.25% of students receive need-based grants (up to €8820 – includes integrated loan)
Ireland	Catholic corporatist	1973	No tuition fees; ‘student contribution’ of €3000 per year	c.44% of students receive need-based grants (up to €5915); no loans available
Poland	Post-Communist	2004	No tuition fees; one-off administrative fee of c. €47 per year	c.16% of students receive need-based grants (€1244) and 8% merit-based grants (average €1113); loans available to those on lower incomes
Spain	Mediterranean/ sub-protective	1986	c.71% of students pay fees; average amount of €1213 per year	c.30% of students receive need-based grants (up to €6682); no loans available

Focus groups were conducted with domestic students (rather than those paying international fees), all of whom were enrolled on an undergraduate degree programme and had been at their HEI at least a year. We aimed to include students from a wide range of disciplines, to reflect the spread of subjects taught at the various institutions. We also aimed to include students with a variety of different social characteristics. About 39% of our participants were the first in their family to attend HE, and nearly 17% were from a working-class background (defined as manual and non-managerial/professional; we used parents’ occupation as a proxy for social class). More than half of the interviewees were female. The majority of research participants were below the age of 24 and non-minority ethnic (i.e., white). Ethical approval for the study was secured from the University of Surrey’s Ethics Committee.

The focus groups (each lasting, on average about 90 min and comprising, on average, 5–6 students from similar disciplinary backgrounds) were conducted in English in Denmark, England and Ireland (where it was either the national language or all students were able to speak it to a high level), and in the national language in Germany, Poland and Spain, and all were fully transcribed. Those not conducted in English were translated prior to analysis. Students were asked questions about a variety of topics such as their reasons for attending HE, what they considered to be the purpose of higher education, and what they thought it meant to be a student in their particular societal context. They were also asked to make plasticine models to represent how they thought about their own identity as a student and how they believed they were understood by other social actors. This activity was done at the start of each focus group; students were asked to describe to the group what they had made and why. It proved an effective means for making relatively abstract ideas tangible. The focus group transcripts were then analysed using both deductive and inductive approaches. Codes were developed based on previous work on conceptualisation of students (Brooks, 2018), the research questions informing the study, and ideas that emerged from the data collection.

Findings

Students as community members

It was striking that whilst students’ belonging and/or community was not the central focus of the research project, they were recurring themes in the focus groups and plasticine models. The models included boats, bowls, concentric circles and ponds. Implicit, and sometimes explicit, in these models was a view that students were members of the community, which was discussed with respect to its influence on their sense of belonging. The following models and quotations are indicative:

I just kind of like loads of different circles that all connect because I feel like here, it’s kind of like everything’s just a community, like you’ve got halls community and then you’ve got college and I just kind of, societies, like there’s so much going on that all connect but like I feel really whole, like I feel like I’ve changed a lot coming here, but like in a really good way. (Ireland, HEI 3)

As I passed through university, I have felt that with everything that surrounds me I am enriching myself, not just as a result of the lectures, but also as a result of the people I have surrounded myself with and the experiences I have had here, as though I’m growing. (Spain, HEI1)

In Germany, the notion of community is implicit in the special status of students and a range of benefits offered to them. Participants at HEI3 encapsulated the perspectives of those studying at the other case universities in Germany: ‘As a student, you’re treated in a certain way by society. Free travel, or you get discounts and reduced-price entry or whatever. You get this “special status”’. Overall, whilst the importance of community was described in various ways, understandings of students as community members across all six nations contrasted strongly with the dominant portrayal of students in academic and policy discourses who are often individualised and constructed in more instrumental terms as a result of the competition, marketisation, decentralisation and a focus on entrepreneurial activity that increasingly characterise higher education in many European countries (Molesworth et al., 2009; Williams, 2013).

The ‘university’ community

It appears that, for many students, the community was largely defined in relation to the university. Their understanding of community was based on comparisons they made between their university and others, although this did not mean that they can or need to belong to the ‘university’ community (discussed in the next section). For some students, this was articulated with respect to institutional status or prestige. This was particularly marked in countries with more pronounced vertical institutional differentiation, such as England and Ireland. The following narratives were illustrative of this:

I mean if you think, you look at like Oxbridge and stuff, they’re a different class of people. They are a different, you know socio-economic class, they’re very privileged, they’re a different type of people you know. (England, HEI1)

I feel like there’s a lot of … a ranked kind of thing like what college you’re going into. […] None of my friends in HEI3 ever get asked why they chose HEI3. I almost/always need to prove it to myself because it’s always like, ‘Oh you’re good at college, like you got good results in your leaving cert, why are you going to HEI2?’ And I go, ‘Well it’s the best course, it has the best like teaching, it has the best staff'. And we constantly need to prove ourselves. (Ireland, HEI2)

The sense amongst interviewees in these countries was that people who occupied the spaces within their particular university were different from those attending other more prestigious institutions. In England, these differences were described in terms of the socio-economic backgrounds of students. This can be explained by differentiated access to higher education institutions in the UK, with those from more privileged backgrounds more likely to attend ‘top-tier’ universities (Boliver, 2011, 2013). Status differences between individual institutions were also underlined in Ireland, with participants at HEI2 making explicit delineations between institutions. As shown in the above quotation, students were often frustrated by the fact that their choice of university was constantly being questioned and justified – unlike those attending HEI3, one of the most prestigious institutions in Ireland. Moreover, students at HEI2 engaged in alternative narratives of distinction to validate their choice of institution and sense of belonging with a focus on ‘the best teaching’ and ‘the best staff’.

However, it is interesting that this relational understanding of the university community was evident even in countries with ostensibly much flatter higher education systems, such as Denmark and Germany. Here, students distinguished individual institutions in terms of what was perceived to be their different ethos or types, as illustrated by the interviewee at HEI1:

I feel like there’s so few universities in Denmark that the stereotypes arise from which university you go to, if you go to HEI3 (agreement) you’re one type of … hippy! Then if you go to HEI1, you’re kind of in between that and C[openhagen] B[usiness] S[chool], which is the business (agreement) … hippy! Yeah, so it’s more based on which university you go to I feel, than if you’re a student in [this particular city] or not. (Denmark, HEI1)

In Germany, there was a clear contrast between universities of applied sciences and universities. This was closely associated with the practical orientations of the former that often involve a period of paid practical training. Unlike Denmark, however, the diversity of the institution was often highlighted to illustrate the perceived differences between universities with a vocational/technical focus and ‘traditional’ universities:

It’s [our university] different again compared to some of the massive unis because I think you have quite a colourful mix of people here, both in terms of age, but also gender diversity, non-white people, so non-German people or people who have lots of work experience and who haven’t done their Abitur [German school-leaving qualification]. […] Here where there are lots of people who decided to study quite a bit later on in life. (Germany, HEI1)

‘The colourful mix of people’ at HEI1 – a university of applied science – contrasted with ‘an incredibly homogenous white mass’ or ‘young people [white men and women] who come straight from their Abitur and are around eighteen’, which was believed to characterise universities more generally (Germany, HEI1). Similar sentiments were expressed, albeit to a varying extent, by focus group participants in Spain and Poland. The notable absence/presence of student diversity within the institution was often associated with the type of institution participants attended, which subsequently foregrounded participants’ perceptions and understandings of belonging. In Spain, students at private universities were often described by interviewees as exclusive or not as diverse as students from public universities. This perceived lack of social diversity within the student population at Spanish HEI3 [a private university] can be partly related to social differences, with more privileged students likely attending private rather than public universities (Brooks & Abrahams, 2021). Whilst the institutional differences were less salient in Poland, interviewees (particularly those attending the university in our sample) nevertheless demarcated students’ characteristics according to the type of institution: ‘Students of universities of technology or in general in technical fields of studies are perceived much better [than those studying at the university]’ (Poland, HEI2). Despite the lesser emphasis on institutional standing, interviewees in these countries nevertheless engaged in the comparative narratives of belonging, with students’ understanding of community always being defined in relation to the other ‘university’ community. This can perhaps be seen as evidence of what has been seen as the ‘drift’ towards greater segmentation of the higher education sector in many countries across the world (Cantwell et al., 2018).

The ‘within university’ community

In this section, we examine the ways in which students constructed the community within their institution, with a focus on differences in students’ belonging. It is important to note that a sense of being members of the community within the university was perceived and experienced differently. For some, it enabled exposure to diverse ideas and the learning that followed from that. This was particularly notable amongst those studying at institutions with what was perceived to be a more socially diverse student population. Take the example of a focus group participant at HEI3 in England who believed that being part of a wider and more diverse student community would be beneficial for her personal development:

I made a circle out of it and added some other colours because I think I view myself as part of a wider community rather than a separate person in that community. There’s different ways that it all connects together and there’s a lot of diversity within it, yeah. Like the school that I went to was so white (laughs) and it was … a bit ridiculous. I’ve learnt so much about different cultures after coming to uni, just from living with people, meeting people on my course and things like that. And yeah, LGBT community as well. (England, HEI3)

This chimes with Cooper’s research (2009) which investigates the influence of a diverse campus community on students’ sense of belonging. He argues that students can develop a sense of belonging by recognising the multiple cultures present on the university campus and identifying core values that both transcend and unify these diverse cultures. However, others spoke of feeling anonymous and lost in such a large community. For example, a focus group participant at HEI2 in Germany explained how the large number of students within the institution made her ‘feel very anonymous’, ‘one of many’ and ‘not stand[ing] out in any way’. The challenges of developing the close relationships with fellow students were also highlighted by another participant:

The bowl is me with my fellow students, who are all very mixed. We’re not aloof but we’re just all together in this bowl. You have the others here who I, or students in general, find it difficult to connect with because it’s sometimes difficult to establish a connection with the other people who surround me. (Germany, HEI1)

Here, we see reflected Brown and Kraftl’s (2019) observation that despite being thrown together in the same time and place, awareness of the differences between members of a cohort (in relation to their past and present forms of identity) made it difficult for their research participants to develop coherent ‘cohortness’. Notwithstanding the differences in students’ perceptions, these examples illustrate how the ‘within university’ community constituted an important part of their sense of belonging in higher education across the six countries.

In some cases, the experiences of (not) belonging were linked to particular social characteristics or identities. Unsurprisingly, feelings of ‘standing out’ were frequently mentioned by participants who would be considered ‘non-traditional’ students, that is, those who are often excluded from the spaces of higher education. For example, as a very large majority of those who enter higher education in Spain are typically under the age of 25 (Brooks et al., 2022), it was difficult for mature students like the interviewee at HEI2 to develop a sense of belonging in the institution: ‘There is a certain rejection of age as much by the students as by the lecturers. It require[s] a lot [of efforts] to be accepted’ (Spain, HEI2). In fact, a sense of not belonging was particularly evident amongst those who deviated significantly from the ‘typical’ university student. Take the example of the interviewee at HEI1 in England. She talked about how she was doubly excluded by her age (i.e., ‘being older’) and disabilities (i.e., ‘physical and mental issues’). This was exemplified in the following extract:

People [at the university] don’t want to interact with me because of being the old, being older. Because I have to use a cane, as I have physical and mental issues. […] Because I’m a slightly larger lady as well, they think it’s because I’m lazy, it isn’t, it’s because I physically can’t do as much as everybody else. (England, HEI1)

In addition, the experiences of (not) belonging were often affected by whether students had time and/or space to foster a sense of community. This was frequently highlighted by participants from low-income backgrounds who often had to work part-time during their studies:

I work at the same time as studying in order to be able to pay for the degree course. It means that my social life is restricted to attending class, to going home, to doing the things that they tell me to do in class, and then, at the weekends, to go to work to earn money to pay for my studies and all those things. I can’t go on any of those [social] things. (Spain, HEI2)

This indicates how the need to work part-time to support costs of living and studying compromised the time students spent on studying and/or socialising and, subsequently, affected their academic, social and cultural experiences. Furthermore, commuting students across the six countries were excluded by the lack of both time and space to establish a sense of belonging. Despite differences in the patterns of residential mobility or relocation for higher education across the six countries, there was a widespread view that commuting adversely affected a sense of belonging. Whilst mirroring research based in Anglophone countries (Bathmaker et al., 2016; Lehmann, 2014; O’Shea, 2014; Reay et al., 2010), these findings demonstrate that the exclusion of different groups of ‘non-traditional’ students in spaces of higher education is also evident across mainland Europe.

The relative importance of community

Despite the emphasis on the community in students’ narratives, our data suggest that there were some important variations in the extent to which being part of the community was seen as central to a sense of belonging, which – we argue – are often linked to what it means to be a student in each country. Students interviewed in England and Ireland tended to place more emphasis than their peers in other countries on the importance of the university or ‘within university’ community in their sense of belonging. To some extent, this can be related to the influence of a residential model of higher education in these countries, where students are expected to leave their parental home for their studies and live in dedicated student accommodation or shared private housing (Brooks et al., 2022; Whyte, 2019). For instance, one focus group participant at HEI2 in England highlighted how a collegiate structure of her institution (where students belong both to the university and to a college or hall) gave a double sense of community:

One of the things that I found here is making like a really close knit group of friends, so that’s kind of like a sort of community. And then your college … this bigger community. (England, HEI2)

Similar narratives were found in Ireland, especially amongst those studying at HEI3, which is based on a collegiate system akin to some universities in England. Studies have demonstrated that a strong sense of belonging to the university or ‘within the university’ community may also be explained by the tight boundaries around ‘university time’ in England and Ireland (Brooks et al., 2021). In these countries, in contrast to some of the others in our sample, students are expected to complete their degrees in a tightly prescribed period of time and thus have less opportunity to postpone their studies to engage in paid work and/or volunteering. As a result, they are more likely to spend their time with their HE peers than their counterparts in some other parts of Europe. Moreover, as Jones et al. (2016) have suggested, the emphasis on the community in England and Ireland may be related, in part at least, to the marketisation of higher education and hence the importance of creating ‘the student experience’ in these countries. Higher education institutions in these nations have invested significant resources in providing the physical and social infrastructure for community-building, as a perceived route to achieving higher levels of ‘student satisfaction’ – and, thus, in time, a higher number of applications.

On the other hand, the role of the university or ‘within university’ community in students’ sense of belonging was less salient in Denmark and Germany. As we have shown elsewhere (Brooks et al., 2021), this may closely articulate with the more weakly bounded notion of being a student in these countries, which derives from the historical tradition that underpins their higher education systems and the temporal boundaries around what constitutes students and student life in these countries. Denmark and Germany remain strongly influenced by the Humboldtian model of the university, which underlines the importance of ‘Lernfreiheit’ or the freedom to learn and the right to prioritise one’s own time (Sarauw & Madsen, 2020). The following focus group participant’s words encapsulated what it meant to be students in Germany where university time is often considered as the opportunity to engage in a wide variety of activities and follow one’s interests beyond formal learning: ‘We’re going to do another three semesters, work on the side and take some language courses because we’ll never have the opportunity again to learn a language and have so many opportunities that you can take advantage of’ (Germany, HEI1). Similarly, many participants in Denmark suggested that their social life was not bounded by spaces within the university: ‘I don’t define myself as a student. It [being a student] is just a small part of my life. I have a job as well. I do a lot of other things that don’t involve my student life at all. A normal student in Denmark, I think it’s just, mm, it’s a, like just a part of our lives’ (Denmark, HEI1). This had implications for the emphasis students place on the university or ‘within university’ community and its role in their sense of belonging more generally.

The influence of a student identity in experiences of belonging was also evident – albeit to a different extent – in Poland and Spain. Like Denmark and Germany, the need to be part of the university or ‘within university’ community did not always strongly feature in Polish students’ sense of belonging. This may be related to the prevalence of paid work alongside studies as well as the relative importance of work in the experience of being a student in these countries (Brooks et al., 2021; Brooks & Abrahams, 2021). In fact, there is a wider perception that a student identity is not considered to be prominent in Poland, with a high proportion (48.4%) of Polish students identifying themselves as a worker rather than a student (Eurostudent, n.d.; see also Kwiek, 2018). Similarly, the lesser emphasis of Spanish students on the university or ‘within university’ community can be explained by what it meant to be a student in Spain. Like their counterparts in England and Ireland, the temporal boundaries of being a student were defined narrowly (often attached to formal education). However, they differed from them with respect to longstanding traditions of living in the parental home throughout degree programmes and reliance on parents for their support while in transition to adulthood (Brooks et al., 2022; Chevalier, 2016). For this reason, being part of a university community may be considered by Spanish participants as both less important (if social support is being provided elsewhere) and less frequently experienced (if less time is spent within university spaces). Overall, these examples suggest that the contribution of the university or ‘within university’ community to students’ sense of belonging varied greatly by the distinctive traditions, structures and norms of higher education and, consequently, what it means to be a student across different countries.

Conclusion

In this paper, we have drawn on data from students across the six European countries to demonstrate the extent to which the concepts of community and belonging are central to what it means to be a student and how students in different national contexts (beyond Anglophone nations) construct community and belonging. We have provided a detailed account of how students’ sense of belonging, whilst relationally conceived and to some extent socio-materially constituted, is deeply embedded in national traditions of higher education. Specifically, the students define and understand community in terms of not just ‘the university’ as a whole but ‘within university’ groups, constructing and experiencing a sense of community and/or belonging at the institutional and individual level. Importantly, the level of emphasis students place on community in their feelings of belonging appears to be influenced by differences in what it means to be a student in each country, which is reflective of its cultures, structures and norms. In England and Ireland, there is a stronger sense of belonging to the university or ‘within university’ community than the other countries not least because of tight temporal and spatial boundaries around what constitutes students and student life (Brooks et al., 2021, 2022). Little recognition of this variation in extant literature points to the need to be more sensitive to the relative importance of the university or ‘within university’ community in a sense of belonging on multiple – national, institutional and individual – levels (see also Vytniorgu, 2022).

As the higher education sector continues to expand and diversify in Europe – as a result of massification, widening participation and/or internationalisation – we contend that it is important to understand in detail the multiple and complex ways in which a sense of community and/or belonging is experienced and valued by students from diverse backgrounds across different national and institutional settings (Gourlay, 2015; Raaper, 2021). This endeavour is particularly timely in the wake of Covid-19: a rapid move to online teaching meant that belonging is no longer taken-for-granted as uniform and located within fixed times and spaces (Gravett & Ajjawi, 2021). Importantly, as we have shown in this research, a sense of not belonging commonly found amongst ‘non-traditional’ students in all six countries rests on the Anglocentric construction of community as a specific HEI and hence the bounded sense of belonging (Archer & Hutchings, 2000; Reay et al., 2010). This necessitates a discussion of the relations of power embedded in the notion of community and belonging through comparative inquiry. Relatedly, a focus on the concept of 'mattering' alongside belonging can be potentially generative, in terms of recognising individual differences as resources and complementing context-specific experiences with what can be carried across contexts (Cook-Sather et al., 2023). Only then will it be possible to see different groups of students in terms other than lack, deficit and risk and better understand their experience of community and belonging within and beyond spaces of higher education.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all those who gave up their time to participate in a focus group. We are also grateful to Predrag Lazetic, Sara Gil, Jakub Krzeski, Maite Santiago-Garabieta and Alicia Garcia Fernandez for their contributions to this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by funding from the European Research Council (through a consolidator grant – EUROSTUDENTS_681018 – awarded to Rachel Brooks).