Claiming the Couch: Recognition, Space, and Boundary Perception in College Hangouts

How do students come to experience some campus spaces as places of belonging, while others remain unfamiliar or uncomfortable? Drawing on nine months of ethnographic fieldwork and an online questionnaire completed by eighty undergraduates at an American Midwest university, this study examines how belonging develops through being a part of college hangouts. The findings identify four interrelated dimensions of this process: reading the social character of a place, experiencing comfort, perceiving social ownership and unwritten expectations, and becoming a regular. Through recurring interaction, students learned local routines, recognized familiar faces and gradually became recognizable to others, transforming lounges, cafeterias, student centers and coffee shops into meaningful places. I introduce boundary perception to explain how students assess the social accessibility of places before deciding whether and how to participate. Boundary perception identifies the interpretive work preceding participation, while recognition explains how repeated interaction transforms uncertainty into familiarity and belonging. Linking symbolic interactionism, the sociology of place and higher education research, this study conceptualizes belonging as an ongoing interactional accomplishment rather than a static psychological state or institutional outcome.