A Cultural Geopolitics of Hosting: Domesticity, Violence and Hospitality in the Home

This paper aims to enhance geopolitical understandings of hosting by exploring the practice of bringing guests – known or unknown – into a home. It starts with a recognition that whilst a growing body of geographical literature has explored the geopolitics of home, this has yet to be substantially brought into conversation with the practice of hosting. Grounded within our research on refugee hosting in the UK, and being hosted in Palestinian homestays we contend that an attention to a cultural geopolitics of hosting enriches geographical accounts of hosting. Our case studies muddy the cultural and political borders of both home and hosting and question the multiscalar and relational understandings of hospitality. A cultural geopolitics of hosting then, demonstrates how hosting intersects with dynamics of geopolitics and culture through and in the multiple spaces of home. This paper, shows how a braiding of literatures on home and hosting is productive for understandings of the geopolitics of home, and hospitality at the different scales of the political.