Reading hospitality mutually

Abstract

This article addresses debates in geography regarding the nature and significance of hospitality. Despite increasingly inhospitable policy landscapes across the Global North, grassroots hospitality initiatives stubbornly persist, including various global travel-based initiatives and networks. Drawing from research with these travel networks, we argue that hospitality is fundamentally based on a pervasive, mutualistic sociality in a multitude of forms. Such initiatives, and hospitality more generally, can be better understood in terms of their relationship to these wider mutualities. we the efo e use Pete K opotki s a a histgeographic concept of mutual aidin conversation with Jacques Derrida and other thinkers-to ei agi e hospitalit as utual hospita le ess ; s ste i , spatio-temporally expansive, and underpinned by a conception of self that is constituted through, and gains its vitality from, intertwinement with the other.

From its drifter past to nomadic futures: future directions in backpacking research and practice

“…As the countercultural imagination gave birth to backpacking, researchers should also explore other practices that emphasise individual freedom, as a means for individual liberation and for rediscovering the lost potentialities of the self (Fairfield, 1972; Yablonsky, 1968). New forms of desire and ways of escape associated with the countercultural imagination include the resurgence of ecovillages, intentional communities, new age travellers (Kuhling, 2007), the Rainbow Family (González and Dans, 2019), WOOFING (Ince and Bryant, 2019), nomad houses, transformational festivals (John, 2001), hospitality exchange (Ince and Bryant, 2019), hitchhiking (O’Regan, 2014), wild camping (Caldicott, 2020), global nomads/neo-nomads (D’Andrea 2007), off grid living and vanlifers (Schelly, 2015).…”

Inviting the stranger in: Intimacy, digital technology and new geographies of encounter

“…Successful host/guest exchanges make both parties more attractive to others when seeking out future stays. Ethnographic research has highlighted how users are afforded an array of opportunities for meeting new people, personal growth and shared experiences, saving money and having unique and pleasant travels (Bialski, 2011(Bialski, , 2012Ince and Bryant, 2018;Schuckert et al, 2018). Yet the encounters facilitated are not always altruistic.…”

“…They are frequently premised on acts of ‘lighter touch sociality’ (Thrift, 2005) that characterise convivial forms of urban togetherness. They also involve forms of care and mutually beneficial exchange (Ince and Bryant, 2018) that align with aspirations for the ‘hospitable city’ to be forged through interactions between hosts and guests (Bell, 2007). While arguments about the generative possibilities of stranger sharing could easily be conflated with techno-utopian framings of the sharing economy, emerging critical scholarship has outlined the need for rigorous inquiry into the impacts of these new practices and their differences across space and time (Hall and Ince, 2018; Richardson, 2015).…”

Fragments of an anti‐fascist geography: Interrogating racism, nationalism, and state power

“…In the remainder of this article, I propose that the nascent field of anarchist geographies can help us to begin addressing these tasks. The field of anarchist geographies has become increasingly well‐known, with scholars recognising the indebtedness of the discipline to early anarchists such as Reclus, Perron, and Kropotkin (e.g., Ferretti, , ; Ince and Bryant, ), while also forging new directions (e.g., Springer, ). Anarchist geographies broadly unite two interconnected components: First, a critique of all forms of authority and their socio‐spatial dynamics and, second, a reading for and nurturing of forms of mutual aid and other libertarian‐egalitarian practices.…”