Wednesday 5 February 2025, 5.30pm. The Establishment, Dubbo. The first Taco’Bout of the year, and the question sitting under all the others: what does it actually take for someone to feel they belong?

The universal apprenticeship

At some point, every one of us has had to learn how to fit in. A new team. A new school. A new street. A new country town. The journey to belonging is universal — which is exactly why it makes such a good taco topic. Nobody in the room is exempt.

So we opened with a show of hands: who here has ever felt like an outsider? Every hand went up. Mine included.

But here’s the question that gave the night its edge. Is belonging the same thing as fitting in? Fitting in means changing who you are in order to be accepted. Belonging means being accepted as you already are. They are not the same thing, and most of us have spent years confusing them.

Different waters: Erifili’s film

We began with a short film by Erifili Davis, tracing her own belonging across three places and, more precisely, three bodies of water — the river at Dubbo, the beach at Wollongong, the sea in Greece.

Water turned out to be the right way in. It is the same substance in all three places and it is never the same experience: the slow brown patience of an inland river, the noise and salt of a surf beach, the particular blue of a sea you have family in. Same element. Three entirely different ways of standing in it.

Which is a fair description of belonging itself. Watching someone map their sense of place across continents does something useful to a room. It reminds everyone that belonging isn’t a fixed address. It’s something we carry, lose, rebuild and choose — sometimes more than once in a lifetime — and that you can be entirely at home in more than one water.

To understand belonging, understand its inverse

Belonging is an incredibly complex notion. To really get at it, you have to look at the other side of it — othering. Exclusion is not the absence of belonging; it’s the active shape that gives belonging its edges.

And belonging isn’t one thing. It operates on four levels at once:

• Individual — the personal, psychological feeling of being accepted
• Interpersonal — relationships and group dynamics
• Structural — citizenship, laws, policy, access to resources
• Cultural — shared values, traditions, language, the stories a place tells about itself

Which is why belonging shifts. What makes you feel entirely at home in one space can leave you feeling alien in another — without anything about you having changed.

The research: bonds and bridges

Our expert guest was Sophia Johnson, a Research Associate at the University of Sydney’s School of Business, specialising in refugee workforce integration — including studying the successes and failures of a migrant program inside a multinational organisation (which we won’t name).

The idea that stuck hardest was the distinction between social bonds and social bridges.

Bonds are the close-knit relationships we form inside a group — family, close friends, cultural community. They give emotional support, security, shared identity. We need them.

But over-reliance on bonds builds echo chambers. Groupthink. Social division. Eventually, exclusionary practice, where anyone outside the group reads as “other” or as a threat to the group’s identity.

Bridges are the connections that reach across groups, cultures and worldviews. They’re what makes inclusivity and social cohesion actually possible.

Why bridges matter

• Diverse perspectives drive innovation. Connecting outside your circle gives you access to ideas and ways of thinking you simply cannot generate inside it.
• Bridges break down stereotypes. Most bias comes from lack of exposure. Bridges humanise — and prejudice struggles to survive proximity.
• Bridges build resilience. Communities with connections beyond their immediate circles adapt better to change, in politics, education and business alike.

This is worth sitting with in a regional town, where everyone knows everyone. A place rich in bonds and poor in bridges feels wonderfully warm from the inside and completely sealed from the outside. Someone new can be surrounded by friendly people and still be standing outside the glass.

Social bonds give us belonging, but social bridges expand our world. If we only stick to our bonds, we risk becoming insular; if we only build bridges, we may lack deep emotional support. The key is to balance both.

Who gets to decide?

Belonging is deeply personal, but it is also political — shaped by history, identity, language and power.

There is the politics of deservingness: belonging is so often tied to who a society decides has “earned” their place. You see it in welfare policy, immigration debate, class mobility, refugee status.

There is the problem of language. We reach for the static vocabularies of identity — nationality, race, gender — to describe something fluid, and the words fail us.

Belonging is both abstract and fluid, properties that create difficulties when we attempt to articulate particular belongings, and as a result we often fall back on the flawed and static vocabularies of identity to describe these abstract feelings of relation.

Anna Tsalapatanis, Naming Belonging: When National Vocabularies Fail

And there is the paradox of counterpublics: the alternative spaces built by social movements give belonging to people excluded from the mainstream — and can then draw their own strict boundaries about who counts.

It is also a health issue

This is the part people underestimate. Loneliness and social exclusion have direct, measurable health consequences. A sense of belonging correlates with better mental and physical health. Which makes bridge-building less of a nicety and more of a public health strategy.

Digital belonging

Online spaces have genuinely redefined belonging. Real friendships form across borders; transcultural communities take shape; marginalised voices find a platform that physical geography never gave them.

And the same architecture produces new mechanisms of exclusion — echo chambers that harden in-group and out-group, algorithmic bias, digital harassment, and the particular modern ache of watching everyone else belong without you.

The questions we put to the room

• How can you step outside your comfort zone to create a more inclusive environment?
• Can you belong to multiple communities at once — and are there tensions in those belongings?
• Who gets to decide who belongs in a nation, a movement, a community?
• What happens when sport, religion, or other institutions that build belonging also become sites of exclusion?
• Does true belonging require social bridges, or can strong bonds be enough?

The thread that ran through the night

Belonging is not about fitting in — it’s about being seen, heard, and valued as you are.

And the practical conclusion, the one that turns a good conversation into something you can act on: belonging is built by the people already in the room at least as much as by the person arriving.

That makes it everyone’s job. It also makes it a skill — something a community can get better at with practice. Ours practises monthly, over tacos.

Go out and be a bridge for someone. A new colleague, a neighbour, someone sitting alone in a café.

Sharon Quill

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Since that night

Sophia’s research has gone on to be recognised internationally. A Multi-Stakeholder Perspective on Disadvantaged Jobseeker Recruitment: Refugee Integration — co-authored with Betina Szkudlarek, Eun Su Lee, Chris Brewster and Yijia Du — was named one of the top 10% of HR Division conference papers at the 86th Annual Academy of Management Conference in Philadelphia.

She also turns up elsewhere in this Journal: Sophia was one of the eight women who answered the Inspired by Her brief, with her textile work Wambuul: Echoes of the Turning Tide, inspired by Wiradjuri activist Pearl Gibbs. Researcher and maker, both.

Erifili Davis is a Dubbo-based writer, filmmaker and curator, and 2024 Dubbo Cultural Person of the Year. Her work appears often in these pages — she curated Inspired by Her and wrote Tin Town Tess.

Taco’Bout Wednesdays is more than a talk. It’s a chance to connect, share stories and perceptions, and challenge yourself to see something from another angle. The audience chimes in — or sits back and soaks it up. Both are fine.

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