‘Not in my name’: Empathy and intimacy in volunteer refugee hosting

Abstract

This article draws on narrative interviews with volunteers in an English charity, providing temporary accommodation to destitute migrants and refugees. The aim is to investigate the ethical and emotional complexities and ambivalence of the tensions between hospitality and hostility, and conditional and unconditional hospitality, with a focus on stories of empathy. The article engages Ken Plummer’s concept of ‘intimate citizenship’ within the context of what William Walters calls the assent of ‘domopolitics’. The latter refers to how immigration is narrativised as a threat to the domestic order of the nation. Hosting, in this regard, has the potential to invert the logic of domopolitics, where the aspiration to govern the state like a home is one that can encounter contingent socialities of care, generosity and hospitality.

From Vulnerability to Trust

“…More generally, the interviews confi rm that, as Ahmed (2000) argued, encounters are never detached from broader relationships of power, for example in terms of culture or gender (see also Humphris 2019;Lonergan 2018). In contrast with more activist groups based on "transver-sal solidarities" that aim to "counter" European domopolitics (Ataç, Rygiel, and Stierl 2021), the encounters we analyzed can, in fact, intensify the construction of domopolitics at the intimate level (Gunaratnam 2021). Th ey show how the discourses and policies on migration create a context that permeates the relationships between volunteers and refugees.…”

“…Rather, they create other forms of inequalities and exclusions. As we will develop below, these other forms of inequalities and exclusions refl ect broader (state-driven) bordering processes that are based on the move toward "domopolitics": a way to govern the state and manage its borders as if it were a home-a space of familiarity, intimacy, and trust (Walters 2004;Gunaratnam 2021;Humpris 2019). Th e development of "domopolitics, " through the diff usion of border controls across society and the inclusion of nonstate actors in the implementation of the "hostile environment" (Jones et al 2017), creates a context in which the principle of trust shapes the relationships between citizens and refugees.…”

“…Indeed, this logic of trust refl ects broader state-led conceptions of borders that have infl uenced British immigration and citizenship policies in recent decades. As shown by Walters (2004), these policies are increasingly guided by a form of domopolitics, whereby moral values and feelings of trust and closeness determine who can be included (Gunaratnam 2021). Th is implies that the state is governed "like a home, " "a safe, reassuring place, a place of intimacy, togetherness and even unity, trust and familiarity" (Walters 2004: 241).…”

COVID-19 Point Blank: Language, Migration, and the Pandemic as a Political Issue

“…The tension and oscillation between these two diametrical different positions and ethical complexities, between care and hostility, have been visible recently in many sectors of society, with the epitome of which being the health sector. In hospitals, there is a quite large proportion of carers from ethnic minority backgrounds who are putting themselves on the frontline to save lives (Gunaratnam 2020). This present circumstance makes the case for rethinking what it is meant by the premise of 'who is doing the care'.…”

Multicultural Voluntarism–The Second-Hand Shop in Bodø, Norway, as Arena for New Encounters

“…A broad movement of volunteers offered time and skills to support refugees across the European continent (Casati 2018;Doidge & Sandri 2019;Fleischmann & Steinhilper 2017;Jensen & Kirchner 2020), and a set of collective practices of solidarity and humanism were gradually coined in public discourse as a ' culture of welcome' (Hamann & Karakayali 2020). In this situation, the mobilisation of the civic society was experienced both as a necessary supplement to resolve humanitarian needs (Sandri 2018;Gunaratnam 2020) and a political protest against governmental policies (Steen Bygballe Jensen & Kircher 2020), where political projects and non-political voluntary aid seem to work in parallel (Parsanoglou 2020).…”