<p>We are living through a moment in which national belonging is being weaponised with renewed intensity, deployed to justify deportations, demand singular origins, and name some bodies as threats and others as defaults. I argue that such deployments do not begin at the policy level. They are prepared long before, in the ordinary encounters that school bodies into anticipation, endurance, and self-regulation. With this paper, I establish belonging as a psychosocial pedagogy of subject formation, a material and affective process through which subjects are inducted into national order before belonging is ever articulated as identity, migration, or law. I begin with the ordinary question “Where are you from?” and read it as a pedagogical device that teaches hesitation, self-editing, and compliance in real time. Returning to the Australian bush, whose colonial histories, climatic conditions, and labour regimes materially condition the form of endurance it teaches, I share how national imaginaries sediment through atmosphere, repetition, and relation. These atmospheres are not neutral; they function as active pedagogies that sort bodies into recognisability and exclusion within contemporary border regimes. Thinking with feminist new materialism and psychosocial theories of subject formation, I remake habitus as a remakeable material-affective process and propose care in motion as an infrastructural counter-pedagogy: a practice of withness that reorganises tempo, redistributes risk, and refuses endurance as the measure of worth. I argue that research methods are themselves pedagogical, and that to study belonging otherwise is to practice it otherwise. At a moment when research on belonging is increasingly cited in policy environments that narrow who can be seen and counted, this raises urgent questions of methodological accountability.</p>