Hospitality has become an increasingly important theme in the contemporary discourse of migration. Discourses and practices of hospitality produce varying contingencies of welcome between and within different local and national communities. Yet, despite growing academic interest in hospitality, empirical research on the subject is underdeveloped. The proposed research aims to investigate ideas about the political, philosophical and cultural aspects of hospitality through empirical research in Sweden, Great Britain and Turkey, in order to generate comparative data. The study focuses on civil society organisations which support asylum seekers and (un)documented migratory subjects and investigates a)how hospitality is practiced and understood by individuals in these organisations, b) How and in what ways volunteers’ class, ethnicity, age, gender, religiosity/secularism inform their volunteer work? and c) How do these practices of hospitality relate to broader national discourses, including those that inform government policies, media and popular culture.
The participatory and comparative nature of this project and the diverse research methodologies will generate new insights and nuanced understandings of the topic. The study will also provide an innovative empirical focus for understanding the everyday meanings and negotiations of national citizenship, inclusion and exclusion as well as having wider implications for public and policy debates on immigration, integration and multiculturalism.
