Abstract:
There are currently 272 million people living outside the country that they were born in, with varying
levels of political and legal status, including new citizens, permanent residents, temporary
student/work residents and asylum seekers. This number is projected to continue increasing despite
the current global pandemic, particularly as a result of climate change. While these migrants may
have different cultural backgrounds and varying expectations within the new lands that they are
inhabiting, it might be assumed that a sense of belonging remains as a basic human need. This
presents questions as to how cultural activities, such as dance might, provide locations for enhancing
or disrupting a sense of belonging for new migrants.
My research therefore investigates the key question: How might migrants construct a sense of
belonging through dance learning? To explore this idea, my research engaged in a qualitative,
phenomenological study of the experiences of five adult Chinese migrants and their dance learning
experiences in Auckland, New Zealand. Through semi-structured interviews, I gathered their
narratives of acculturation and engaged in reflexive dialogues, to understand how they constructed
new meanings of dance learning, how these meanings supported their sense of belonging in a new
place, and how these meanings might have been influenced by their own cultured approaches to
learning.
Maintaining a constructivist philosophical paradigm, my research argues that a sense of belonging is
constructed and cannot rely upon essentialist notions of dance and community. Within this thesis, I
explore how this sense of belonging is constructed through the visceral and visual aspects of the dance
they are encountering, the processes of socialization they experience through the dance classes, and
their sense of progression as a dance learner. I further unpack how this sense of learning progression
can be influenced by their cultural expectations of what it is to be a learner. These emergent themes
reveal the ways in which dance learning can have a complex relationship with a sense of belonging.