Mobilising Hospitality

MOBILISING HOSPITALITY:
the ethics of social relations in a mobile world: 26-27 September 2005
Lancaster University - Sponsored by:Centre for Mobilities Research & Institute for Advanced Studies
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fss/sociology/events/hospitality/mobhome.htm

This workshop aims to bring together researchers from across these disciplines to think about hospitality as a concept for theorising social relations in an increasingly mobile world. Whether engaged as a cultural, ethical, commercial or technological concept, scholars are using the notion of hospitality to think about such relations, from the politics of multiculturalism, migration and welcoming the stranger to the relationship between hosts and guests in tourism mobilities to cybernetic encounters with the other through virtual mobilities. The notion of hospitality holds particular potential for thinking through various kinds of mobilities, including complex contemporary configurations of 'dwelling in mobility' and 'mobilising dwelling'.

As well as exploring the power relations between mobile populations (hosts and guests) and attitudes (hospitality and hostility), this workshop also examines spaces of hospitality and mobility such as hotels, asylums, restaurants, camps, homes and homepages. However, just as the question of mobility has to be supplemented by the idea of immobility, the question of hospitality raises the spectre of hostility and the inhospitable. How are these relations marked by exclusion as well as inclusion, by violence as well as by kindness, as a way of promoting encounters, but also policing them?

Some of the themes we hope to explore are:

- hospitality as an ethics for a mobile world
- cosmopolitan hospitality
- multiculturalism and postcolonial hospitality
- tourism hospitality
- hospitality in cyberspace
- economies of hospitality
- spaces and landscapes of hospitality
- hospitality, hostility and the inhospitable
- intellectual hospitality within and across disciplines

Confirmed Speakers:
Prof Tim Cresswell, University of Wales, Aberystwyth
Dr Ghassan Hage, University of Sydney
Dr Tom O'Dell, Lund University, Sweden
Prof Judith Still, University of Nottingham
Prof John Urry, Lancaster University
Prof Soile Veijola, University of Lapland

Workshop Artist: Eleanor Clarke

For more information, please contact the workshop organisers:
Jennie Germann Molz j.germannmolz@lancaster.ac.uk
Sarah Gibson s.gibson@lancaster.ac.uk