Priscilla Solano’s International postdoc-project is called Re-conceiving Hospitality as a Humanitarian Act: Civil Society and International Actors Hosting Newly Arrived Migrants and Refugees (in Swedish Att ompröva gästfrihet som en humanitär handling: Civilsamhällets och internationella aktörers omhändertagande av nyanlända invandrare och flyktingar). Priscilla Solano will start working on her project in January 2019.
A short summary of the project:
The most visible responses of many EU governments to the refugee crisis were led by prejudice, fear and xenophobia, overshadowing the numerous actions by civil society to help refugees and migrants based on the values of human rights protection and humanitarian aid. Though the European Economic and Social Committee recognised the existence of bottom-up initiatives that are playing a decisive role in filling the protection gaps left by EU national policies, this second side to the refugee crisis has not received sufficient attention. For example, civil society organisations fulfilled refugees’ and migrants’ basic needs: food, a place to stay and legal assistance in their asylum/ migration claims.
The aim of this project is to explore various actors’ contributions and understandings, practices and social relationships under different moral frameworks of hospitality as a humanitarian and human rights endeavour. It builds on my sociology monograph and expands it in two directions.
First, it collects a unique empirical set of ethnographic data, with semi- and unstructured interviews with two civil society organisations and one international actor in Malmö.
Second, it fills a theoretical gap in the literature and centralises the role of hospitality by verifying the extent to which social relationships and what is gifted separately and in combination, shape hospitality and migrants’ and refugees’ experiences with their hosts—in this case, civil society and international actors.
Read more about the grant on www.vr.se
Priscilla Solano’s personal page here on the department’s website.
