Accommodating Strangers? Home, Belonging and
the Politics of (In)Hospitality
RHUL @ The Boardroom, Bedford Square, 2 Gower Street, WC1E 6DP
15 December 2011
09.15: Arrival and coffee
09.45: Introduction (Katherine Brickell)
10.00: Panel 1: Home, (in)hospitality and asylum
Constructing urban refuge: Interrogating claims to hospitality in
Sheffield.
Jonathan Darling
The city of Sheffield was the UK’s first ‘City of Sanctuary’, a political
identification which suggested that the city would act to welcome asylum
seekers and refugees through the promotion of a ‘culture of hospitality’. This
paper seeks to interrogate such claims to hospitality, and asks how
welcoming a city can be within a national framework which actively restricts
the rights of refugee claimants. In doing so, the paper seeks to contribute a
focus upon the challenges of negotiating varied demands for refuge at an
urban level to the field of immigration and asylum research that has more
often examined state-centred responses and narratives of belonging.
Focusing upon the city it is argued, not only highlights the complexities of
practicing a sense of ‘welcome’, but also illustrates how notions of hospitality
and marginality are being actively created and embodied through urban
political practices, decisions and discourses. The paper thus traces the
narrative construction of Sheffield as a place with a ‘welcoming tradition’
through a series of high profile events of refuge. This account is then
contested through demonstrating how these moments of welcome are
themselves conditioned by logics of acceptability and control imposed both
from beyond and within the city. In drawing these two accounts together within
the city, the paper argues that any response of welcome represents an
interwoven mosaic of hospitable and less-than-hospitable impulses, policies
and actions.
Leave to remain? Transitions into foster care for young people seeking
asylum in the UK.
Ala Sirriyeh
This paper explores findings from a recently completed mixed-methods Big
Lottery funded study exploring the fostering experiences of unaccompanied
asylum-seeking young people and their foster carers in four local authorities
across the UK. Asylum-seeking young people, like all young people entering
foster care, face change, adjustments and new experiences as they settle into
a new household and family. However, in contrast to the experiences of most
young people entering foster care, asylum-seeking young people’s
experiences of transition and settlement into these placements are also
intertwined with a wider process of arrival and settlement in a new country.
Many of the young people in this study had entered their first foster placement
within days, or even hours, of their arrival in the UK. Therefore, their
experiences of transitions into foster care need to be considered within a
wider experience of transition which encapsulate, but also extend beyond the
domains of household and family. ‘Leave to remain’ and home-making in
foster families and in the UK, can both be characterised by precariousness
and conditionality. Using theory on doing and displaying family (Morgan 1996;
Finch 2007) this paper explores how family practices affected young people’s
sense of home and belonging within foster families in the context of seeking
asylum in the UK.
11.00: Coffee
11.15: Panel 2: Politics and Palestinian homes
Extending families and distancing neighbours: making a home in
Ramallah?
Chris Harker
This paper examines the role home plays in the lives of migrants who have
recently moved to the rapidly expanding city of Ramallah, Palestine. I draw on
participant observation and interviews with recently migrated men who own or
rent apartments in the neighbourhood of Umm al-Shara’et, to examine how
home continues to be located outside Ramallah in both time and space. I
argue such understandings can be considered home-making practices. I trace
some of the consequences of these practices, which include efforts to stretch
familial relations across the West Bank, while remaining social distant from
physically co-present neighbours; the creation of a particular urban
atmosphere in Ramallah – freedom; and the reconceptualisation of the city
itself through particular geographies of connection.
Strangers in the house.
Terry Meade
"Imagine it - you are sitting in your living room which you know so well; this is
the room where the family watches television together after the evening
meal…And suddenly that wall disappears with a deafening roar, the room fills
with dust and debris, and through the wall pours one soldier after another
screaming orders…”
Sune Segal "What Lies beneath, Excerpts from an Invasion, "Palestine Mirror,
November 2002. Quoted in "Lethal Theory" by Eyal Weizman, published in
Log, Winter/Spring 2006.
“The arbitrariness of an external force that violently invades the life of one
person, one soul, preoccupies me in almost all my books.” Writing in the Dark
by Israeli author David Grossman.
Soldiers walking in, taking over a house, occupying it, living in close proximity
with the owners, settles over time into an uneasy and troubled and intimacy
between occupier and occupied. This is not an unusual situation in many
conflict zones. People living under occupation must exist within two cultures; a
second, usually alien culture is spread over the existing one. Confronting each
other, the two cultures inhabit the same spaces in different ways. For the
occupied, daily routines and activity are curtailed, moulded and adapted to the
changed environment. For the occupier, vast amounts of energy and
resources are expended on enforcing rules and regulations and maintaining a
protective skin. Using the Israel/Palestine, conflict as a case study, this paper
will explore the inhabitation of domestic space against a background of
unease, threat and insecurity. It will focus on the reconfiguration of private
spaces caused by an alien occupation and the challenges involved in
maintaining a viable domestic environment within a complex and rapidly
changing situation.
In the Middle East, links between daily life and macro-political issues are both
important and poignant. This paper is part of a wider research project situated
in the ‘Occupied Palestinian Territories’, which examines the ways in which
‘the house’ is central to the occupation of Palestinian land. This is evident in
disputes over territory, settlement building and the creation facts on the
ground. Equally it may be seen in the variety of punitive measures against
the house – house demolitions, house sealing, appropriation of houses and
territory. The project investigates the way the house may stand as a model for
the wider occupation as it has a similar ability to act as a backdrop to life.
Relative strangers: domestic intimacy and home in diasporic families.
Joanna Long
Migration has the capacity to make strangers out of family and family out of
strangers. Considerable effort may therefore be put into family relationships
by those in diasporic contexts, while at the same time opening up the
possibility for new kinds of kin-like relationships to be formed. This paper
considers the intersections between domesticity and social processes of
family in the cultivation of home among strangers. Specifically, it explores
how feelings and practices of family figure in senses of home among diasporic
Palestinians. Through examples of diasporic visiting and kin-like friendships,
the paper explores how notions of family relatedness turn on certain kinds of
domestic intimacy and the practices through which such intimacy is forged by
those in diasporic contexts. By engaging with the ideals and (sometimes
ambivalent) experiences of diasporic family, the paper raises questions about
the intimate politics of domestic hospitality in the making of relatives and
strangers.
12.45: Lunch
13.45: Panel 3: Losing and preserving home, belonging and identity
The politics of belonging: (Re)-imagining post-disaster return decisions.
Stephanie Morrice
Disaster displacement is, unquestionably, an emotional experience. Migrant
stories are often linked with the experiences of adjustment, nostalgia, a
shattered sense of belonging, renewal, loss, discrimination, abrupt endings
and new beginnings - all strong sources of emotion. This paper begins to
explore how an emotional sense of belonging motivates return migration
decisions of displaced disaster victims. Literature suggests that migrants who
have been forced to seek refuge in new communities can be treated as
strangers or non-members of their host society, with conditions that attend
‘otherness’. Through qualitative fieldwork in both New Orleans (USA) and
Brisbane (Australia), I draw from debates within emotional geography, to
demonstrate the politics of belonging that are present in the fragmented postdisaster environment. By tapping into concepts of ‘home’, difference and
identity, stressing that return decisions are complex and individually unique, I
recognize the emotional impact of being involuntarily separated from familiar
surroundings, routines and practices. Acknowledging the struggles of being
forced into a strange and potentially inhospitable environment, and
understanding that evacuees are influenced by an emotional yearning ‘to
belong’, this paper stresses the need for research that will continue to explore
the complexity of post-disaster return decisions.
Negotiating home in exile: Patterns of belonging for Cypriot refugees in
London.
Helen Taylor
The concept of home is central to the notion of exile: a refugee is defined by
the fact that they have lost their home and need to find a new home.
However, the public nature of the search for sanctuary and the hostile
discourses that dominate the exclusionary strategies of potential host states,
have led to a structural understanding of home for the refugee. Home is
reduced to a ‘here’ or ‘there’ dichotomy, focused on the granting or
withholding of rights of residency or citizenship, or the success or failure of
settlement in a new environment. What this picture neglects, however, is an
exploration of the patterns of belonging which emerge from the ongoing
negotiation of the meaning of home, instigated by the experience of forced
migration. Making reference to narrative research with Cypriot refugees living
in protracted exile in London, this paper proposes a more complex
understanding of home, which consists of spatial, temporal, relational and
material elements. Mobilising these aspects of their lost and found homes,
these refugees find ways of belonging in a potentially inhospitable context.
Making home: exploring Somali women’s narratives of racism and
religious identity in Bristol.
Imogen Wallace
This paper explores the importance of ‘home’ as a site of religious identity for
Somali women living in Bristol. It is drawn from my broader PhD research
which examines some of the impact of the ‘War on Terror’ and the 7/7 London
bombings on notions of home, identity and belonging for Muslim women. I
outline how my Somali participants prioritised the preservation of their Muslim
identity and examine how the production of the home as a religious space is
central to my participants’ construction and performance of their Muslim
identity. I discuss my participants’ experiences of racism arguing that the
home represented a safe space in which to be Muslim. It was the site in which
experiences of racism and hostility were worked through and resisted. Integral
to these arguments is an assertion that the home simultaneously represents a
bounded and unbounded space, whereby the centrality of the home as a site
of religious identity impacts upon my participants’ negotiations of the
everyday, which permeate far beyond the material home. Throughout this
paper I emphasise the complexity of my participants’ narratives of belonging
and non-belonging as embedded within the practices through which they
attempt to make home.
15.15: Coffee
15.30: Panel 4: Material cultures of (in)hospitality
Anxieties, identities and spatialities: Ambivalent geographies of
encounter in the fortified houses of Cape Town.
Nick Schuermans
Drawing on in-depth interviews with more than 50 middle class White South
Africans in two neighborhoods of Cape Town, this paper looks at the
motivations to secure South African houses with perimeter walls, security
gates, burglar bars and alarm systems and at the seemingly paradoxical
social consequences of it. By analyzing the discourses around the presence
of burglars, homeless people, builders and domestic workers in and around
these houses, it will be demonstrated that seemingly banal actions to secure
the residential environment are dependent upon the socio-spatial exclusion of
people with a different race or class background. At the same time, the safe
and secure capsule of the house often provides one of the rare places where
people interact across racial boundaries and class lines precisely because of
the perceived absence of a crime threat. Attention for the ambivalent
geographies of encounter in and around the fortified houses of the White
middle class in Cape Town will, thus, reveal how central the notion of the
home is in the emotional geographies of the post-apartheid era.
“Häuserkämpfe in Berlin: Domiciliary politics, emotional labour and the
everyday geographies of squatting in Berlin (1971 - )
Alex Vasudevan
In this paper I trace the development of the German Hausbesetzerbewegung
(squatter movement) in West Berlin from the early 1970s to the present. I
concentrate, in particular, on the complex constellation of affects, emotions,
and feelings and the decisive role that they have come to play in the
assembling of an alternative habitus. The main aim of this paper is to reexamine the micro-practices of squatting as a form of emotional labour
through which the boundaries of “activism,” “the political,” and “the home”
were constantly (and quite literally) made, unmade, and remade. Drawing on
extensive archival and ethnographic fieldwork, I explore how squatting
became the basis for the composition of a radical domiciliary politics where
principles and practices of cooperative living intersected with juggled political
commitments, emotional attachments, and the mundane materialisms of
domesticity, occupation, and renovation. If the paper pays particular attention
to the quotidian and the everyday, it also seeks to conjoin these registers with
wider debates about the place of the home within a post-capitalist politics. An
inquiry into the emotional geography and history of squatting thus serves as
one possible point of departure for the elaboration of a critical urbanism. More
specifically it builds on extends recent debates surrounding the generative
potential of a radical urban commons to sites that challenge the divide
between the private and the public.
16.30: Concluding discussion (Discussant: TBC)
17.00: Close (followed by pub and early meal for those that can stay)