Extending Hospitality

How we deal with strangers is at once a question of profound ethical significance and of practical and political necessity. In the current revival of interest in the concept of hospitality, the reception of philosophical themes associated with Levinas, Derrida and others is increasingly taking place in a context of worldly demands arising out of new global mobilities and institutionalized practices aimed at controlling them. Much critical work, especially in the social sciences, assumes congruence between 'otherness' or 'estrangement' and the crossing of national borders and other concrete boundaries. But is there more at stake than this? Extending Hospitality brings together authors from philosophy, geography, literary and cultural studies, anthropology and sociology to explore the interface between ethical ideals and worldly demands.Across a range of historical and geographical contexts, this collection engages with the differing ways that people become 'estranged', the spacing and timing of the encounter between guests and hosts, the tensions between institutionalized and 'unconditional' welcoming, the relationship between human finitude and political abjection, and the gendered expectations of hospitality.

Mustafa Dikec is Lecturer in Human Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. His research interests include space and politics, histories of space and time, and hospitality. His current research focuses on policies and geographies of asylum in Europe. He is the author of Badlands of the Republic: Space, Politics and Urban Policy (Blackwell, 2007). Nigel Clark is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at The Open University. His research focuses on the ethical and political implications of inhabiting a physically turbulent planet, and he has recently published articles on natural catastrophes, inter-species encounters, climate change, complexity and cosmopolitanism. He is the co-editor of Material Geographies (Sage, 2008). Clive Barnett is Reader in Human Geography at The Open University. He is author of Culture and Democracy (Edinburgh University Press, 2003), and co-editor of Spaces of Democracy (Sage, 2004) and Geographies of Globalisation (Sage, 2008).