BELONG: INTERSECTIONS OF DISPLACEMENT AND BELONGING

Scholars have long grappled with the concepts of place, self, and social networks in shaping belonging. Drawing on frameworks from phenomenology, feminist geography, and processoriented theories of homing, this article investigates how forced displacement transforms these relationships. Based on six years of ethnographic interviews with refugees in Tucson, Arizona, I analyze three life stories to show that legal liminality, migratory trajectories, and inherited memories produce attachments to places never lived in, places left behind, and places that remain foreign. Rather than securing identity through arrival, these individuals enact belonging as an ongoing negotiation of memory, imagination, and social relations. By reframing belonging under forced migration as a dynamic, affective practice, this article argues that beingintheworld need not coincide with beinginplace.