Shared campus spaces do not guarantee belonging

Updated Oct 27, 2026

Shared campus spaces could offer students a sense of community or leave them feeling outside established groups. In Studies in Higher Education, Camilla Sanna, Patric Wallin and Liselott Aarsand explore how students understand themselves through the communities around their courses.

What the researchers investigated

The study draws on 24 semi-structured interviews across four programmes at one Norwegian university: cybernetics and robotics engineering, informatics, teacher education, and pedagogy and education. Participants were at different stages of study. Recruitment through faculty contacts produced a largely self-selected sample.

The researchers used an approach inspired by reflexive thematic analysis to explore students' identities and developing sense of themselves as professionals. They examined experiences across peers, study programmes, campus spaces and life beyond university.

Key findings

Access to a space and feeling part of it were different experiences. An informatics student described the student organisation and its office as central to their identity. Another student on the same programme found a designated room difficult to join because peers sat in established groups. Providing a place did not ensure that everyone experienced it as welcoming.

Peers could offer reassurance and provoke self-doubt. A pedagogy student valued being alongside others navigating university, yet compared their reading habits unfavourably with a partner's. The authors interpret belonging as capable of providing recognition while also intensifying comparisons.

Professional identification did not follow a uniform timetable. Among new teacher education students, one already identified as a teacher in training while another still felt closer to a school pupil. Elsewhere, an engineering student connected an emerging professional identity with internships and a job offer. These accounts illustrate different ways of connecting study with an imagined future.

Campus identities involved both stereotypes and resistance to them. Students used contrasts between campuses to describe intelligence, effort, sociability and career orientation. They also challenged or qualified those contrasts. The authors analyse these contrasts as ways students positioned themselves within university life.

This exploratory study brings together accounts from different students and year groups at one institution. It does not track the same students over time.

References

[Paper Source]: Camilla Sanna, Patric Wallin and Liselott Aarsand. "Shapeshifting and patchworking: unpacking students’ identity constructions in the university ecology"

DOI: 10.1080/03075079.2026.2745642

Published online: 12 October 2026, Studies in Higher Education.