Fataneh Farahani, Wallenberg Academy Fellow, Stockholm University (Web)

Venue: Stockholm University
Time: 25-26 April 2019
Proposals by: 14 January 2018

Environmental issues and immigration crises, without being necessarily exclusive issues, are undoubtedly among the most pertinent questions of our time. The conditions of hospitality and hostility of those who are displaced is definitely one of global and local communities‘ most significant challenges. Alongside the erosion of welfare and projected economic concerns about limited national resources to support the newcomers at a time of increased austerity, the „refugee crisis“ has put matters of multicultural living, discrimination, integration and hospitality more firmly onto the political agenda of all European states. Therefore, the terms „crises of migration“ 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 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 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 diverse meanings of hospitality and how it is being imagined and practiced. Focusing on intersecting discourses that shape the understanding and practices of hospitality and its dynamic and fragile 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. We welcome submissions that depart from traditional academic papers as well as interdisciplinary interactions and/or use performance. The possible themes include the following but are not limited to:

• (Un)conditionality of hospitality
• Hospitality and hostility
• The gendering labour of hospitality
• Faith-based and secular hospitalities
• Literary and artistic hospitality
• Whiteness and hospitality
• Postcolonial hospitality
• Refugee hospitality
• Governmental hospitality and hostility
• Hostile and hospitable media,
• Hospitable methods
• Rescue narratives
• Cripping hospitality- bodies and care
• Queer migration and hospitality

This two-day conference will be held as a part of the project Cartographies of Hospitality (funded by Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation) 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.

Abstracts (250 words) specifying your contribution as it relates to the themes of hospitality and migration should be sent to hospitalityconference2019@erg.su.se by 14 January 2018. Decisions will be communicated in the week beginning the 28 January 2019. Papers, presentations and performances submitted for the event will also be considered for inclusion in a proposal for a special issue to a peer reviewed academic journal and an edited anthology.

Confirmed keynote speakers are:

• Meyda Yegenoglu, Bilgi University, Istanbul, Sociology and Cultural studies. She 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) and
• Yasmin Gunaratnam is a Reader at the Sociology Department at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Some of her important publications include, Go Home? The Politics of Immigration Controversies (2017), Death and the Migrant (2013) and Researching Race and Ethnicity (2003).
• Ioana Szeman is a reader, 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.

For administrative inquires contact hospitalityconference2019@erg.su.se at this e-mail address:

For questions, contact Conference Chair, Associate professor Fataneh Farahani at this e-mail address: Fataneh.farahani@etnologi.su.se

Source: genus-request@listserv.gu.se