Creating hospitable urban spaces: A multicultural city for refugees and asylum seekers

Abstract

Australia is one of a handful of countries offering permanent settlement to refugees. It also has some of the harshest border-controlling measures. Drawing on Derrida’s writing on hospitality, and related work on hospitality’s affective and spatial dimensions, we examine the micropolitics of hospitality towards forced migrants in an Australian city (Brisbane). Our interest is in the affordances of affective hospitality to interrupt practices of differential inclusion in the city. The first part of the paper examines practices of embedded activism in health and education encounters, while the second part explores affect’s influence on the protest sensibility in urban movements against mandatory detention. The paper furthers understandings of the embodied and affective dimensions of hospitality in social justice work performed in urban spaces.