Hospitality, hostility and everything in between in an era of forced displacements


International Conference at Stockholm University, Sweden, 25-26 April 2019.

Environmental and immigration ‘crises’ are among the most pertinent and increasingly interrelated political issues of our time. Matters and conditions of hospitality and hostility, in relation to migration and displaced people, generate significant challenges for global and local communities. Alongside the erosion of welfare settlements and economic concerns about limited national resources to support newcomers at a time of increased austerity, the “refugee crisis” has put matters of multicultural living, racism, integration and hospitality more firmly onto the political agenda of all European states. The terms “migration crisis” and "refugee crisis" have come to denote a new constellation of European border politics, animated through a diverse range of ideologies, affects, and policies. At the same time, there has been a diverse and growing activist, artistic and academic interest in the rendering of hospitality to displaced people. This has included attention to racialized hostilities, the crisis of European identity, governmentality, economies of abandonment and securitization.

Drawing on discussions in the social sciences and humanities as well as activist and artistic practices, this conference aims to bring together leading international scholars, early career researchers, postgraduate students, artists and activists to explore and share perspectives on the meanings of hospitality and how it is being imagined and practiced. Focusing on intersecting discourses that shape the understanding and practicing of hospitality and its dynamic and close relation to hostility, we encourage contributions that explore how hospitality and hosting relationships are inflected by intersecting categories such as gender, race, faith, and sexuality. By exploring hospitality through different disciplines, methodologies and at varying scales, we aim to offer an interdisciplinary space, that can illuminate and interrogate how the interaniminations between migration, citizenship and geographies of welcome (and hostility) operate and are experienced in different national and local settings.

Keynote speakers

Contesting Islamophobic Hostility with Ethical Hospitality Professor Meyda Yeğenoğlu, Tampere University, Finland, Institute for Advanced Social Research. Professor Yeğenoğlu is currently visiting Professor at Duke University’s Programme on Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. She is the author of Islam, Migrancy, and Hospitality in Europe (2012) and Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (1998).

Weathering immigration politics: Hostile Environments and Hospitable Locales Dr Yasmin Gunaratnam is a Reader in Sociology, Goldsmiths (University of London). Her publications include, Go Home? The Politics of Immigration Controversies (2017), Death and the Migrant (2013), and Researching Race and Ethnicity (2003).

Roma Performance, from Exoticism to Cultural Citizenship: Reimagining Hospitality through Roma Counterpublics

Dr. Ioana Szeman is a performance studies scholar and an ethnographer at the Department of Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at University of Roehampton, London. Her book Staging Citizenship: Roma, Performance and Belonging in EU Romania (2018) is based on ethnographic fieldwork with urban Roma.

Conference panels:

Panel 1: Governmental hospitality and hostility

Panel 2: Hospitable stories, practices and principles

Panel 3: Gender and hospitality

Panel 4: Civil society and hospitality

Panel 5: Secular and faith-based hospitality

Registration:

Due to the generous financial support by our funders, there will be no conference fee involved. But it is still necessary for you to register. To register for the conference, please send an e-mail to hospitalityconference2019@erg.su.se . You register your attendance by confirming your presentation before March 25th.

Programme:

See a short version of the programme here or a detailed version in the PDF form here below.

This two-day conference will be held as a part of the project Cartographies of Hospitality (funded by Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, project leader Fataneh Farahani, Wallenberg fellow and Associate professor) located at the Department of Ethnology, History of Religions and Gender Studies, Stockholm University, Sweden. Riksbankens Jubileumsfond and the Department of Ethnology at Stockholm University support the conference.

När: 25 april 2019 09:00 - 25 april 2019 17:00

Var: William Olsson-salen, Geovetenskapens House Y, Stockholm University / Stockholm

Arrangör: Stockholm University

Mer information.