Words: Sana Khalesi

Images: Sana Khalesi

Image caption: What We Carry as Home
[Dec 2022] Positano, Italy’s Amalfi Coast.

A mosaic by Mimmo Paladino, a leading figure of the Italian Transavanguardia - the movement that renewed expressive, figurative art in the 1980s. He said: “…per diventare internazionali dobbiamo appartenere a un Paese…”, meaning: “to become international, we must belong to a country…”

“Belonging changes what we feel able to do in a place: ask for help, offer an idea, admit that we do not understand something, or enter a conversation without rehearsing every sentence first. These are small freedoms, but they shape how much of ourselves we can bring into everyday life.”


Sana Khalesi

Recently, as my childhood home was being sold, I found my father’s journal in the basement. Its cover is full of flags: countries and the United Nations. Some of those flags have since changed. Some of the countries no longer exist. Inside are essays he wrote about fifty years ago, on borders, social justice, racism, uncertainty, and freedom, alongside writings about the poets Pablo Neruda and Alexander Pushkin. He asks what makes a community healthy, who is fortunate, and how equality differs from justice.




 

02.


Even Here, a Border
[Jun 2025] Ali Abad Village, Fars Province, Iran.

A village of around 1,400 people, 98 km from my hometown, Shiraz. On a sun-worn wall, a handwritten warning: “Entry into the tomato field opposite is strictly prohibited.” Beneath an open sky, a boundary written by hand.

    

These questions extend far beyond my family. According to the World Health Organization, approximately one in eight people worldwide are migrants or displaced persons (World Health Organization 2025). The circumstances of their movement differ enormously, but the scale makes it all the more important to ask how we build places where people can belong.

Modern cities are remarkably good at knowing where we are. They can register our address, authenticate our identity, process our residence permit, calculate the fastest route home, and send a notification when the bus is three minutes away. But there is one question our increasingly intelligent urban systems are much worse at answering:

Do you feel that you belong here?

For someone arriving in a new country, there is a peculiar moment when, administratively speaking, you have successfully arrived. You have an address. Perhaps a university card or an employment contract. A bank account. A local phone number. Google Maps knows where you live. The municipality knows you exist. And yet, nobody knows your name. This gap between living somewhere and becoming part of somewhere deserves more attention.

I have a rather extensive collection of clouds photographed from airplane windows. I have spent much of my life between cities and countries, and my photographs seem to have recorded the spaces in between. Looking through them, I find myself returning to the question: when does arriving somewhere become belonging there?

Belonging changes what we feel able to do in a place: ask for help, offer an idea, admit that we do not understand something, or enter a conversation without rehearsing every sentence first. These are small freedoms, but they shape how much of ourselves we can bring into everyday life.

Much of our migration infrastructure is understandably designed around access: housing, employment, education, healthcare, language learning, and public services. These are essential. But integration also has a social dimension: relationships, participation, recognition and eventually the feeling that we have a place among others.

Ager and Strang’s framework places social connection within a broader understanding of integration. Alongside employment, housing, education and health, it identifies social bonds within communities that share an identity, social bridges between communities, and social links with public institutions. Language and cultural knowledge, together with safety and stability, facilitate integration, while rights and citizenship provide its foundation (Ager and Strang 2008). This gives relationships a place within integration while recognizing the conditions that make participation possible. People may preserve, rediscover, or loosen their connections to their origins. For me, belonging needs to leave room for these different choices.

I experienced something of this at iMorticelli in Salerno, a nearly five-hundred-year-old church that has become a cultural hub (iMorticelli, n.d.). For a gathering of more than a hundred people, I cooked and brought Tahchin, a classic Persian rice dish, with a small Italian twist: I replaced the usual chicken with Bolognese-style meat and eggplant inspired by parmigiana. I brought something from my own culture, adapted with ingredients familiar to them. People noticed my contribution, welcomed me, and I connected with several older neighbors. Ager and Strang’s “social bridges” became tangible in that encounter. Making something to share gave me a way into the conversation - and gave people a way to get to know me.

Research increasingly supports this distinction. A study of recently arrived Syrian refugees in the Netherlands found that being active and developing social contacts were associated with stronger feelings of being at home (Damen, Dagevos and Huijnk 2024). Research among immigrants in Quebec similarly found that participation in associations and sports significantly improved their sense of belonging (Djogbenou, Adjiwanou and Lardoux 2025).

Shared activities can also become spaces for social and emotional learning. Organising something together means listening, negotiating different expectations, noticing another person’s frustration, and finding ways through disagreement. Participation offers opportunities to practice these skills. Whether people feel included also depends on how they are treated when they arrive.

Perhaps participation is not simply something people do after they have integrated. Perhaps it is one way integration happens. Joining a neighborhood initiative, volunteering, or sharing a skill can offer something access to services alone cannot: a role. One possible pathway towards belonging is:

connection → participation → contribution → recognition → belonging

Connection creates an opening, though we can have hundreds of digital connections and still feel alone. Participation means entering something shared. Contribution gives us a role within it: we have something to offer, as well as needs to be met. Contribution can deepen belonging, but people should not have to demonstrate their usefulness to deserve a place in a community.

Then comes recognition: someone notices. That step matters. Research on highly skilled migrants in Denmark places relationships of recognition at the heart of how belonging forms and is maintained (Schäfer and Maxwell 2025).

Seen this way, belonging is not simply a feeling that individuals either develop or fail to develop. Conditions make belonging more or less possible. Alongside asking how newcomers can integrate, we should ask: Have we created spaces where people from different backgrounds can participate, speak, and be heard?

Sharing a space does not mean we interpret it in the same way. Silence, humor, disagreement, and even an invitation can carry different meanings. Intercultural competencies help us notice our assumptions, ask questions, and listen before deciding what another person means. Established residents need these skills as much as newcomers do.

When I tell people I am from Iran, they sometimes assume that means I’m Arab. I find myself explaining the distinction, pointing out that the Persian alphabet has four letters that Arabic does not, or discussing why they may have heard both “Iran” and “Persia.” These can open the door to conversation. But sometimes, when I describe Nowruz, our new year at the beginning of spring, I feel there is little interest in hearing about our haft-sin table, with seven symbolic items whose Persian names begin with “s,” or how we celebrate. The conversation quickly shifts to their traditions, and I become the listener again. What I miss in those moments is reciprocal curiosity: room for my traditions to be heard and explored, too. Intercultural understanding requires us to notice how much space we take in a conversation, and whether we leave enough for someone else.

06.

Seven Ways to Begin Again
[March 2025] Shiraz, Iran

Nowruz, the Persian New Year at my parents', begins at the spring equinox. Haft-Sin gathers seven symbolic items whose Persian names begin with “S”. Sir (garlic): health and protection against illness. Sib (apple): beauty and health. Serkeh (vinegar): patience and maturity. Somagh (sumac): sunrise and new beginnings. Senjed (dried oleaster fruit): love. Sabzeh (green sprouts): rebirth and renewal. Sekkeh (coins): prosperity. The table is accompanied by colourful eggs, candles, a mirror and a book of Hafez’s poetry. A table set for life to begin again.

Global citizenship education brings a wider perspective to these everyday encounters. It asks us to understand how our lives are connected, listen across differences, and take responsibility for the communities we share (UNESCO n.d.). A neighborhood can be one place where we learn to practice that.

The missing social layer

These questions about listening and participation also belong in the digital spaces we build. Cities have become extraordinarily good at using digital infrastructure transactionally. We can use an app to buy a bus ticket, report a pothole, book an appointment, pay a bill, or navigate an unfamiliar street. We have built digital pathways to almost everything a resident needs to use a city. But what about pathways to becoming part of one?

What if digital infrastructure helped people discover not only what is available around them, but where they are needed? Digital spaces could lower the threshold for joining a neighborhood project, contributing a skill, helping someone nearby, or participating in decisions affecting their surroundings. The challenge is to help translate:

online discovery → offline participation → contribution → recognition

That is also a question of digital citizenship. Citizenship is not only knowledge of institutions, rights, and responsibilities. It is something practiced through our everyday relationships with people and places. For newcomers especially, the city itself can become a classroom for that practice. Finding a community online also means learning how to participate: recognizing misleading information, respecting privacy, responding to prejudice, and communicating across differences. Digital citizenship education can help people develop the judgment and care these encounters require.

Finland offers a useful example. Its national core curriculum integrates media literacy across subjects through multiliteracy and ICT competence, alongside broader goals of cultural understanding, self-expression and participation. Students learn to interpret information and express their own perspectives through different forms of media, including photographs and videos. Learning can also extend into museums, libraries and digital environments (Finnish National Agency for Education n.d.).

As someone who works with photographs, I'm interested in the connection between interpreting the world and having a voice within it. For cities, this suggests that digital inclusion should also create opportunities for people to express themselves, understand others, and participate in shared life.

07.

A Homeland, Thread by Thread
[July 2025] Shiraz, Iran

Weaving a Qashqai rug is like storytelling: a limited vocabulary of motifs, composed into a different story each time. From afar, it speaks of Shiraz and a shared Qashqai identity. Up close, each rug tells its own story, and that of its weaver.

References

World Health Organization (2025) ‘Leaving no one behind: a call to advance noncommunicable diseases and mental health equity for migrants and refugees at UNGA80’, 25 September. Available Online

Damen, R., Dagevos, J. and Huijnk, W. (2024) ‘Feeling at Home? A Dynamic Analysis of the Impact of Discrimination, Refugee-Specific, and Participation Characteristics on Recently Arrived Refugees’ Belonging’, Journal of International Migration and Integration, 25, pp. 1547–1569. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12134-024-01135-y.

Djogbenou, R., Adjiwanou, V. and Lardoux, S. (2025) ‘Immigrants’ sense of belonging in Quebec: The role of perceived discrimination and participation in associations and sports’, International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 108, 102209. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijintrel.2025.102209.

Schäfer, G. and Maxwell, C. (2025) ‘Figurations of belonging – How high-skilled migrants form relations of recognition’, Geoforum, 161, 104249. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104249.

Finnish National Agency for Education (n.d.) ‘Multiliteracy and Media Literacy’. Available at: https://www.oph.fi/en/education-and-qualifications/multiliteracy-and-media-literacy.

Ager, A. and Strang, A. (2008) ‘Understanding Integration: A Conceptual Framework’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 21(2), pp. 166–191. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/fen016.

iMorticelli (n.d.) ‘Chi siamo’. Available at: https://www.imorticelli.com/chi-siamo.

UNESCO (n.d.) ‘What you need to know about global citizenship education’. Available at: https://www.unesco.org/en/global-citizenship-peace-education/need-know.

Writer Bio

Sana Khalesi is an Iranian serial entrepreneur, human-centered designer, and poet working across product and social innovation. Over the past decade, she has built technology-driven ventures that connect people and support social change. Her current work explores belonging and the often-overlooked social infrastructure that helps people not only live in a place, but participate, contribute, and matter there.