Unraveling the Belonging Audit: Who Gets to Belong Without Explanation and the Power of Opacity

What happens when your presence becomes a question you have to keep answering? In this episode of *The Modern Migrant*, Katrina explores the **Belonging Audit,** the repeated demand to explain where you come from and whether you really belong, often hidden inside a seemingly innocent question: *“So… where are you really from?”* Moving from lived experience to sociology, philosophy and decolonial thought, this episode explores: • **Why some people belong by default**, while others are repeatedly asked to account for their presence. • The difference between **curiosity and an audit**: curiosity can be satisfied; an audit can always be reopened. • What happens when someone can be born and raised in a country and still be read as foreign. • **Pierre Bourdieu’s ideas of doxa, habitus and symbolic violence** and how some forms of belonging become so normalised that they disappear from view. • **Scott & Lyman’s sociology of “accounts”** what happens when a person is required to explain themselves, and how an account can become both a story and a ledger. • **Édouard Glissant’s right to opacity;** the radical possibility that dignity does not require complete explanation, transparency or legibility. The Belonging Audit does not remain at the border. It can travel into workplaces, conversations, dinner parties and eventually into the self. You begin anticipating the question before it is asked. Rehearsing the answer. Deciding which version of yourself will require the least explanation. The way out is not to become better at passing the audit. It is to question **why the audit was yours to pass in the first place.** **Pierre Bourdieu: doxa, habitus, field, symbolic violence, misrecognition (méconnaissance)** • *Outline of a Theory of Practice* (Cambridge University Press, 1977); doxa and habitus • *Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste* (1979; English translation, Harvard University Press, 1984); distinction, cultural capital and social fields • *The Logic of Practice* (Stanford University Press, 1990); habitus and the “sense of one’s place” • *Language and Symbolic Power* (Harvard University Press, 1991); symbolic power, symbolic violence, misrecognition and linguistic legitimacy **Marvin B. Scott & Stanford M. Lyman;** the sociology of *accounts* • “Accounts,” *American Sociological Review*, Vol. 33, No. 1 (1968), pp. 46–62; excuses, justifications and the social work of explanation **Édouard Glissant: the right to opacity (le droit à l’opacité)** • *Poetics of Relation* (*Poétique de la Relation*, 1990; English translation by Betsy Wing, University of Michigan Press, 1997) • *Introduction to a Poetics of Diversity* (English translation, 2020) **Continue the conversation** Subscribe to the Modern Migrant on ⁠⁠⁠⁠Substack ⁠⁠for essays, reflections and conversations that continue beyond the podcast. Join **The Identity Gap Circle**, a free community for people shaped by migration and diaspora exploring identity, recognition and life between worlds. ⁠⁠Join The Identity Gap Circle →