Clément Luccioni

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clement.luccioni@gmail.com

 

PhD candidate at Lab’urba (Paris-Est Créteil University). Member of the group "Justice, Space, Discriminations, Inequalities" (JEDI), LabEx Urban Future.

 

“Open your home to a refugee!”

Exploring local hosting initiatives to help question the conceptual relation between migration and hospitality

 

This paper is an attempt to cross theoretical debates and empirical analyses to question the conceptual problematisation of migration as a matter of hospitality. The starting point is the concomitance of two parallel phenomena of promotion of hospitality that followed the 2015 “Long summer of migration” in Western Europe. First, a metaphoric use of the concept of hospitality to denounce restrictive migration policies has been revived. Second, as a reaction to the increasing number of foreign people ending up homeless or unable to leave segregated accommodation facilities, private hospitality practices dramatically developed. Both phenomena have contributed to a growing validation of hospitality in the public debate. However, on the one hand, some researchers, such as Magali Bessone and Benjamin Boudou, have questioned the political relevance of the metaphor of hospitality, that tends to moralise migration issues and naturalise inequalities; on the other hand, empirical explorations of hosting initiatives reveal ambivalences and limits that contrast with an enthusiastic institutional communication presenting hospitality as a “springboard towards integration”. By jointly exploring the metaphor and the practice of hospitality, with France as a case study, I argue that, in time of increasingly external and internal borders, hospitality may remain a relevant concept and an effective practice but should be connected to justice (i.e. access to political and socio-economic rights) to challenge the current unequal and discriminatory order.