Do I Belong Here? How to Use Social Psychology to Build Belonging

This course will provide students with a theoretical and applied understanding of the challenges, barriers, and solutions for how to cultivate belonging in educational and professional contexts from a social psychological perspective. The course will pull from core findings in social psychology, sociology, and organizational behavior to scaffold the student's holistic understanding of belonging. We will then highlight research such as intergroup relations, attribution ambiguity, and mindsets that illustrates the antecedents and consequences of threats to belonging. Finally, the course will demonstrate how we can utilize 'wise interventions' in real-world settings to foster belonging by creating change at the individual, institutional, and policy level. The course, overall, will attempt to educate students about how people understand themselves, their situations, and how they understand themselves in those situations, and equip them with data-driven strategies to build and create more inclusive and diverse spaces.