Entering into domestic hospitality for refugees: a critical inquiry through a multi-scalar view of home

ABSTRACT

Grassroots refugee hospitality is an innovative, if still little investigated field of practices, which illuminates and reshapes the native/immigrant divide. It also sheds light on ‘domestic humanitarianism’, as a range of everyday modes of helping that take place even in the domestic space. Drawing on a case study in Northern Italy, this article develops a framework on the societal implications of refugee hospitality, based on a multi-scalar view of home . From the inside, the lived experience of hospitality involves profound re-definitions of domesticity and meaningful personal changes for hosts and guests alike. From the outside, the connective function of local actors is crucial in shaping the lived experience of domestic reception. From the bottom up, hosting refugees is tantamount to opening, hence questioning, the most intimate threshold of the ‘national we’. Overall, and despite its limitations, domestic hospitality enables refugees to enter ‘home’ on different scales, from the micro-literal to the macro-metaphorical, thereby providing a potential counter-narrative to anti-immigrant discourses, emotions and politics.

KEYWORDS:

• Refugees
• hospitality
• home
• humanitarianism
• domopolitics
• Italy

Acknowledgments

We would like to express our sincere thanks to all our field interlocutors, for sharing with us their thoughts and time.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. A first turning point in this respect was marked by the 2011 ‘Arab Spring’, which unsettled the pre-existent Euro-Mediterranean border control regime, causing a sudden increase of asylum seekers in Italy. However, the highest increase of asylum applications came along the so-called 2015 refugee crisis. According to UNHCR, the number of asylum claims received by Italy in 2015 (approximately 67,000) was four times the level of 2012 (17,350). After a spike in 2017 (around 130,000), asylum applications have sharply decreased over the last few years (39,000 in 2019). [www.unhcr.org/refugee-statistics/download/?url = E1ZxP4]

2. In this article we call ‘refugees’ all those who apply for international protection, irrespective of the different legal status that they finally obtain (or not).

Additional information

Funding

Research for this article was supported by ERC-StG HOMInG and by MIUR-FARE HOASI, both based at the University of Trento: H2020 European Research Council [678456]; Ministero dell’Istruzione, dell’Università e della Ricerca [FARE-HOASI].