What We Miss When We Talk About Inclusion and belonging

Dr. Dana Segev

Publication date: 6 April 2026

How is a sense of belonging actually achieved? Through inclusive policies? Through promoting understanding and tolerance across society? Through shared values and formal commitments to equality and inclusion?

These are the questions policy makers and social scientists often contemplate. And while they are key to enhancing belonging, they point towards belonging as something large, structural, and abstract. Belonging does, indeed, exist on the structural level of society. Societies can either promote or hinder it for groups of people. However, a factor that is given less attention is: belonging is also felt and learned at the level of embodied interaction; in the subtle, repeatable cues through which people recognise one another, include one another, and find their place within a social environment.

While belonging is talked more in terms of diverse communities where all feel they belong, inclusive policies, shared values. The lived experience of belonging is much smaller, more immediate, and more embodied than that. Our bodies learn belonging through tiny, repeatable moments — through micro-rituals of a community.

These micro-rituals have a powerful influence since they are predictable and carry shared meaning of being invited to be included. When you recognise an action that signifies inclusion — an invitation, a welcoming smile — you know you can lean forward and interact with that environment. This is where belonging begins: as a felt sense of orientation within a community that welcomes you, and this is strongly communicated by micro-rituals of shared understandings.  

At Scopium, we are currently developing work on group dynamics and how belonging is produced, negotiated, and withheld, using the tango community as a case study. We look at how social recognition or dissonance (rejection) shapes social identities and sense of self. Understanding what fosters a sense of belonging within communities (as well as the shadow side of belonging) can offer broader insight into how to support well-being and strengthen inclusion within societies.