Shifting itineraries of asylum hospitality: Towards a process geographical approach of guest-host relations

Hospitality as a notion has emerged as a critical philosophical category in human geography for addressing various issues around asylum migration and citizenship. In this paper, we identify two major limitations of empirical studies focusing on hospitality in this context. First, empirical studies tend to investigate relations between pre-known guests (“migrants”) and pre-defined hosts (states, local organizations, activist movements, churches), thereby overlooking shifting dynamics of social relations. Second, although critical geographers have emphasized a relational sense of place in their empirical discussions on hospitality (in the context of asylum migration), observations are mostly place-based and focus on how different cities or organizations provide hospitality (or not). To re-think hospitality, we instead start from negotiating our own practices as researchers in relation with actors in the field of refugee support, actively forging and navigating shifts in these relations, thereby creating action research processes under the title of ‘Asylum University’. In so doing, we re-position Derrida’s concept of ‘cities of refuge’ in the in-between spaces of shifting roles, (un)certain (im)mobilities, border-crossings and tensed emotional geometries that intertwine in an entangled web of hospitality, in ways that are yet-to-be-known. In other words, we challenge researchers that investigate hospitality in the context of asylum migration to apply a process geographical approach that actively follows guest-host relations (including the ones they become entangled with) instead of freezing them in time and space. This allows for an approach that is more self-critical and sensitive to what we call “asylumscapes” - the dynamic processes of refugee hospitality.