Keynote Speakers
Reflections on migration, hospitality, and love ethics
The 2015 refugee crisis in Europe heightened debates and discussions around migration which had long been problematic for the ‘Fortress Europe’ of the European Union. Consequently, concepts such as ‘welcome culture’ (Trauner & Turton, 2017) and ‘welcome management’ (Buckel, 2016) have been problematized in the literature. Today in 2022, we have witnessed continued migration to, and within Europe occasioned by increasing political, economic, and environmental turmoil primarily though not exclusively from countries of the Global South. Added to this has been the war in Ukraine which has led to the fastest growing refugee crisis within Europe since the Second World War. In this context, European and non-European migrants have been pitted against each other and questions of (in)hospitality and (un)welcome have gained currency. In this presentation I suggest that current debates about hospitality as welcome have neglected pertinent conversations about the role of love in this context.
Therefore, in this presentation I attempt to unpack the notion of hospitality and its relationship to an ethics of love. I interrogate whether love has a role to play in hospitality as welcome and in so doing I draw primarily on Derrida’s conceptualization of hospitality and the love ethics of key Black feminists, notably bell hooks and Audre Lorde. This synthesis between hospitality and love ethics is illustrated through an example of (in)hospitality as portrayed in the popular cultural medium of film. I seek to argue that discourses of hospitality which do not integrate an ethics of love are meaningless and cannot hope to advance social justice agendas.
References
Buckel, S. (2016). ‘Welcome Management: Making Sense of the “Summer of Migration”’ Near Futures Online 1 “Europe at a Crossroads” (March 2016): http://nearfuturesonline.org/welcome-management-making-sense-of-the-summer-of-migration
Trauner, F., & Turton, J. (2017). “Welcome culture”: The emergence and transformation of a public debate on migration. Österreichische Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft, 46(1), 33-42
Donna is currently Professor in Cultural Studies and Tourism at the University of Northumbria in Newcastle. Previously she was Professor and Convenor of a cross-Faculty interdisciplinary research network on Race, Class, and Ethnicity (RaCE) at the University of Sunderland. She is a critical scholar who is interested in how people and places are represented primarily through cultural and heritage tourism, the link between heritage and national identities, and postcolonial and decolonial epistemologies in research and teaching. Importantly, she is also interested in how women are represented in tourism through the lens of critical race theory and Black feminism.
She has been an Associate Editor of Annals of Tourism Research since 2013, a member of the Editorial Board and a Managing Editor of Leisure Studies since 2016 and 2019 respectively. She also serves on the editorial board of two other journals – Tourism Cases and Tourism Critiques: Practice and Theory. She is a reviewer for several journals including Tourism Geographies, Tourism Management, Tourist Studies, Journal of Sustainable Tourism, and Tourism Management Perspectives. She has published numerous journal articles, books, book chapters and delivered many keynote sessions at national and international conferences.
Dr Elena Genova
Dr Elisabetta Zontini
University of Nottingham
Watch Keynote
Live on 29/09/2022 at 2:30PM
‘It’s like when your lover, doesn’t love you back’: the emotional costs of migrant belonging at times of inhospitality
Migration has always been a thorny issue, featuring prominently in public and media debates alike. While the primary focus has been on how migratory flows should be best managed, discussions have taken a broad range of directions, often aiming to establish migrants’ rights and deservingness (Anderson 2013), solidifying the boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’ in the process. This has been particularly the case in the last few decades, as the broader neo-assimilationist climate sweeping across Europe has firmly established the politics of hostility and inhospitality not only directed at new arrivals but also at those who may have formed long-standing attachments to and relationships with the host country.
With this broad context in mind, in this paper we bring together insights from the sociology of emotions with some of the wider literature on belonging to illuminate the affective side of migrants’ subjective experiences in times of inhospitality. Drawing on empirical examples from our ongoing ethnographic research with EU migrant workers in the UK, we highlight the emotional costs of migrants’ efforts to fit in the host society. Ultimately, we argue that researching migrants’ lives in such a turbulent socio-political time of multiple and ongoing crises necessitates paying closer attention to the affective side of their subjective experiences.
About Dr Genova and Dr Zontini
Dr Elisabetta Zontini is an Associate Professor in Sociology at the University of Nottingham where she teaches migration and transnationalism, family studies and qualitative methods. She has published extensively on transnational families and the life course, including the books Transnational Families, Gender and Local Contexts: Moroccan and Filipino Women in Bologna and Barcelona (Berhghan) and Transnational Families: Ethnicities, Identities and Social Capital with Harry Goulbourne, Tracey Reynolds and John Solomos (Routledge). In her latest projects she has documented the processes of identification, home and belonging of European children in nationalist times and, with Elena Genova, the settlement of migrant workers in the Brexit context. She is currently finalising a knowledge exchange project on family migration in Covid and Brexit times.
Dr Elena Genova is an Assistant Professor in Sociology at University of Nottingham where she teaches qualitative methods, digital sociology and migration. Her research interests lie in intra-EU mobility, EU citizenship, identities and belonging, othering, integration and settlement. She is particularly interested in the experiences of Central and Eastern European migrants and has conducted extensive ethnographic research with Bulgarian migrants residing in various locations in the UK. She is currently the research lead for the Identities, Citizenship, Equalities and Migration Centre (ICEMiC). She is currently involved in several collaborative projects, including most recently, a project mapping community networks in a post-Covid urban regeneration context (with colleagues from UoN and London Met).
Prof Sundari Anitha
University of Lincoln
Dr Iwona Zielińska-Poćwiardowska
Akademia Pedagogiki Specjalnej im. Marii Grzegorzewskiej and University of Lincoln
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Live on 30/09/2022 at 10:00AM
Gendered violence and migration: Polish women’s experiences of domestic violence in the UK
This presentation draws upon Polish women’s life stories about their migration to and settlement in the UK, their working lives and their relationships to understand the nature and impact of the domestic violence they experienced in the UK and community/service responses to this violence. By widening our lens beyond family and relationships, to the opportunities and constraints posed by intersecting social relations of power and gendered geographies of power we can understand the ways in which the violence that occurs within intimate relationships is shaped by broader socio-structural factors at the national and transnational levels. This presentation explores the centrality of migration to Polish migrant women’s experiences of domestic violence.
About Prof. Anitha & Dr Zielinska-Pocwiardowska
Prof. Sundari Anitha is Professor of Gender, Violence and Work at the University of Lincoln. She has researched and published widely on the problem of violence against women and girls (VAWG); on gender and migration; and on gender, race and ethnicity in employment relations. Anitha has previously managed a Women’s Aid refuge and was a caseworker at a ‘by and for’ refuge for South Asian survivors of domestic abuse and has been involved in policy-making and activism to address VAWG for over two decades.
Dr Iwona Zielinska, is a sociologist, an Assistant Professor at the Maria Grzegorzewska University, Warsaw, Poland and a Visiting Fellow at the University of Lincoln. She specialises in researching gender inequality, sexuality, social vulnerability, social exclusion. She is an expert in moral panic theory. She has introduced the concept into Polish sociology by publishing first ever book on the topic in Polish (2015). In the last four years she has been working closely with researchers from the University of Lincoln exploring the issues of domestic violence and migration. She was a Principal Investigator in the EU funded project researching experiences of domestic violence among Polish migrant women living in the UK, to develop evidence-based for domestic abuse services in the UK and Europe.