Hospitality & Society - Geographies of Welcome: Engagements with “Ordinary” Hospitality, Jun 2022

Geographers have begun to explore the concept of ‘immigrant welcome’ as a framework for understanding the tension between spontaneous social support for immigrants and refugees and their subsequent restriction and criminalization by states. Overlooked in the emerging discourse on immigrant welcome is the rich literature in feminist geography that views the everyday practices of endurance, care and social reproduction as essential to, but often hidden within, more traditional, political and economic analyses of power. By focusing on the everyday practices of welcome within sanctuary church activism, I argue for more attention to the energy-intense work that is often excluded from official media and academic accounts, yet which is essential to understanding what makes welcome function or fail. I draw upon one in-depth case study of a sanctuary church in Ohio, where a woman has been living for a year and a half in public defiance of her deportation order. In addition to contextualizing this specific case within the broader policy and immigrant rights landscape, I focus on the spatial, material and relational processes that participants implemented to construct a ‘welcoming’ environment as well as observe the ways in which welcome fails to live up to its imagined potential. The case study provides important grounded insights into the material, relational and emotional processes of enduring sanctuary as a form of resistance to the US deportation regime and enduring sanctuary itself as an intensive socio-spatial form of existence.

In the context of migration, hospitality is often analysed as a vertical power relation, in which hosts impose conditions and demands upon their guests. While acknowledging the drastically unequal structural power relations in which hospitality takes place, this article explores how these power relations can be mitigated and developed towards more reciprocal relationalities. To do so, it focuses on a specific form of hospitality: urban residents providing shelter to migrants who are illegalized¹ by the state. Drawing on in-depth interviews with residents affiliated with the Brussels-based Citizens Platform for Support of Refugees², I argue that their discourses and practices of hospitality – while being limited and imperfect – constitute alternative spaces of inclusion and affirmation, circumventing the Belgian State’s exclusionary stance. Combining Derridian hospitality framework with the feminist ethics of care lens, the article casts inquiry into the complexity and ambivalence of hospitality practices, seeing them not only as sites of power struggle but also as potential microcosms of social transformation. First of all, it illustrates how the feminist lens allows us to see hospitality acts as subjective practices, enabling a positive relationality towards the other. Secondly, it deliberates the potential for reciprocal exchange and resident hosts’ strategies to resist the verticality of hospitality relationships. Finally, it challenges the notion of regarding such practices as naïve by showcasing these practices’ political dimension.

Grounding on Derrida’s conceptual framing of hospitality as a continuous tension between its conditional and unconditional forms, this article examines the city as a space of welcome located halfway through the continuum explored in this Special Issue. Through an analysis of the institutional narratives fostered by Brighton and Bologna’s local governments, this piece reflects on the tension between narratives and practices of welcome. By unpacking the accounts of local government’s representatives in both cities, I demonstrate how the notion of ‘welcome’, apparently very wide-encompassing, emerges as rather selective. In addition, I reflect on the benefits that cities can achieve when employing such narratives.

In response to the large number of refugees and asylum seekers arriving in Europe in 2015, the devolved Welsh government committed that Wales should become the world’s first Nation of Sanctuary through building a ‘culture of welcome and hospitality’. This article compares the discursive responses of the sovereign British and devolved Welsh government to this summer of migration in 2015. It argues that such a comparison provides new theoretical ways of revisiting the metaphor of hospitality and its role in discursive framings of the phenomenon of migration. While the literature on migration and the sanctuary movement has explored the limits of hospitality as a frame and response to the exclusionary politics of asylum, this article argues that this new sanctuary discourse is also used to challenge the sovereign nation state on the expectations of what moral responsibilities it entails to be a ‘host’ to refugees and asylum seekers. Drawing on interview material and official documents from the Welsh and British administrations on the ‘Syrian Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Programme’, this article argues that while this challenge on moral expectations is still entangled with uneven relations to migrants, it creates a double othering. There, a subnational and devolved territorial unit constructs national self-imaginaries against the sovereign nation state, through a discursive politics of differentiation aimed at the exclusionary politics of asylum.