Liccardo, Sabrina2019-03-142019-03-142018Liccardo, S. 2018, 'A symbol of infinite (be)longing : psychosocial rhythms of inclusion and exclusion at South African universities', South African Journal of Higher Education, vol. 32, no. 3, pp. 12-29.1011-3487 (print)1753-5913 (online)10.20853/32-3-2575http://hdl.handle.net/2263/68666Portions of this article were presented at a conference on Decolonising the University in Africa, 17–18 August 2016, University of South Africa (UNISA).This article argues that the life histories of Black South African women scientists provide a telling story of psychosocial transformations because they experience the world as outliers; paradoxically positioned within an interstitial space of (non)being between their dual sense of inclusion in and exclusion from marginal and dominant groups. Using a narrative method to enquire into the lives of fourteen scholarship students in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields at a historically white South African university (HWU), this article proposes an infinity model to illustrate how these young women locate their-selves in the field of higher education through recognition, dislocate their-selves from the field through misrecognition and infinitely recreate new subjectivities and epistemic communities at the intersecting space in between inclusion-exclusion.en© 2018 South African Journal of Higher Education. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.Cultural capitalCommunity cultural wealthSouth Africa (SA)Women scientistsInclusionExclusionSouth African universitiesKnowledge-thatKnowledge-howBlack women in ScienceArticle