Join us for The Unwelcome: Inhospitality, Humanity and the Asylum Hotel, a webinar that brings together leading experts in the fields of hospitality, political and urban geography, asylum and refugee studies, humanitarian care, volunteerism and social responsibility to explore how spaces designed for refuge can become sites of exclusion, asking what inhospitality reveals about contemporary understandings of humanity and care.
Hospitality is usually presented as a language of welcome, dignity and human connection. It paints a positive picture of humanity’s ability to extend care and recognition to strangers, outsiders and those who are different. Yet in asylum hotels, detention-like accommodation, and other institutional settings, welcome can become conditional, bureaucratic or disappear altogether. These are spaces where care and control coexist uneasily, and where the promise of refuge may be shadowed by exclusion.
This webinar examines hospitality not as a simple service ideal, but as a contested social and ethical practice. It asks what happens when hospitality is placed under pressure and when vulnerable people are hosted by systems that may also manage, contain or marginalise them. It also asks what this may represent for the future of hospitality, tourism and care. Our speakers and panellists draw on global expertise in asylum politics, migration, detention, hospitality and humanitarian care.
Hotels, refuge, and the rise of carceral hospitality
Professor Jonathan Darling, Professor in the Department of Geography, Durham University
The global detention hotel
Dr Andrew Burridge, Senior lecturer, School of Communication, Society and Culture, Macquarie University
Humanitarian hospitality in times of crisis
Georges El Hajal, Senior lecturer and researcher, Hotel Management School Leeuwarden
From Hospitality to Hospitability: reclaiming dignity and reciprocity in Dutch asylum reception
Dr Geesje Duursma, Entrepreneur, Researcher and Adviser, De Pleats, Burgum
Chair
Dr Rodney Westerlaken, Senior lecturer and researcher, Hotel Management School Leeuwarden
Wednesday, May 27, 10:30 – 12:00 CET Online
Register here
