NCAD has set, as a strategic priority, the objective of making the learning environment accessible to all students who gain entry though the institution’s application process. Against that background, the message from student surveys that levels of belongingness at the College are lower than desired is troubling. This is despite the fact students describe academic and support staff as very caring and supportive. Belonging, it seems, is not causally linked to gestures of care and concern. Students identified a connection between assessment processes and their experience of belonging or alienation, at NCAD, a link that is supported by published research. In particular, students report that confusion in the assessment context makes them wonder if they belong in the programme or the College. While belongingness is a multi-faceted concept, these narratives point to a subcategory that might be termed epistemic belonging, understood as the by-product of underlying social and cultural dynamics that position individuals, variously, as those who ‘know/act meaningfully’ or ‘do not know/act meaningfully,’ in the assessment context. This study has explored the components of assessment conversations and their impact on epistemic belonging. Framed by complex adaptive systems theory and the notion of epistemic justice, it employed narrative-based sense-making to ‘map’ the learning community that forms around assessment, as a system. The analysis of resulting patterns will allow us to develop small safe-to-try interventions, in collaboration with students and staff.