The end(s) of inclusion: ungrounding globalization and ‘the migrant’ in dialogue with hospitality

ABSTRACT

This article reassesses globalization in light of research, policy, and reforms directed towards ‘the migrant’ during times of crisis. In dialogue with Derrida's discussion of hospitality, the article questions the grounds that figure ‘the migrant’ as a metonym for globalization's dangers – as excess mobility menacing the foundational sovereignty of nation-states. With Sweden as a point of reference, the article interrelates three seemingly distinct techniques for evaluating notions of arrival – data visualizations comparing ‘the migrant’ against those ‘without immigrant background’, curriculum and pedagogy seeking to integrate and include according to psychologized norms and values, and critical qualitative research representing migrant voice. At issue in each is how the gesture of hospitality seeks to render arrival calculable, establishing the authority and beneficence of the host and leaving ‘the migrant’ indefinitely at the threshold of (non)belonging. Efforts to represent the migrant through notions of experience and ‘voice’ risk naturalizing hospitality's asymmetries and exclusions, while impeding reflexivity toward the conditions upon which hospitality remains tenuously granted.

KEYWORDS:

• Education reform
• globalization
• hospitality
• migrant and refugee education
• migration

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Throughout this article, I set common sense terms such as ‘migrant’ and ‘voice’ in scare quotes to disrupt perceptions in research, policy, and reforms that presume subjectivity as the basis of representation. Instead, I examine how these phenomena are formed through social scientific practices that, I argue, are themselves conditioned by and conditions of what Derrida terms the gesture of hospitality.

2 Derrida (Derrida & Dufurmantelle, 2000) notes that hospitality is etymologically related to hostility; ‘pit’ connotes potis, potentiality, and the power of the sovereign to enact violence, exclude, and banish.

3 In the French, Derrida uses the term l’arrivant to indicate the indeterminacy of the ‘arriving’ and ‘whoever arrives’. Where this double nuance is implied, I italicize arrival.

4 My use of ‘primordial’ differs from Appadurai’s (1996) historically specific usage of the term. For Appadurai, primordialism refers to modernist theories of the nation-state in which kinship comprised the base unit of affinity and extends in larger and larger units in a developmental evolution (p. 14), I suggest, following Derrida, to consider how arrival locates the nation-state in a spatial and temporal space that precedes arriving; thus the declaration of arrival grants authority to the host to evaluate risks and specify conditions of welcome.

5 During a 3-year period, the EU's Erasmus+ Programme funded the development of a Refugees and Migrants Inclusion Toolkit (REMINT) for use among EU member states, bringing together five EU member states, including Italy, Spain, UK, Greece, and Sweden, with partner organizations chosen on the basis of their expertise with ‘creation of educational/training courses, knowledge on experiential methods approach [sic], asylum seekers, refugees and migrants’ inclusion, languages teaching, cross-cultural activities’ (REMINT, 2017, p. 5).

6 While the focus has been on Sweden, the reforms discussed here resemble problematizations of Otherness familiar to liberal democratic nation-states since the turn of the twentieth century. US educational reforms, for instance, have drawn upon racialized taxonomies to identify so-called backwards subpopulations, whose beliefs, attitudes, and dispositions allegedly made them dangerous to the future of the republic. The early social sciences sought to provide natural laws for ‘assimilation’ that premised civilization as a racial achievement and at risk of being lost due to externalized forces threatening the pastoral, republican ideal (e.g., industrialization, immigration, capitalism) (see Ross, 1992; in education, see C. Kirchgasler, 2018). Populations identified as ‘backwards’ (e.g., African Americans in the US South, Native Americans, and immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, China, and Mexico) were targets of projects promoting ‘Americanization’ (see, e.g., Claxton, 1918).