Hospitable homes

This chapter unpacks the relationship between hospitality and home in contexts of humanitarian hosting. It explores the spatial and temporal dimensions of home and homemaking amidst displacement, showing how practices of hospitality are central to homemaking. Transforming a space into a home is an everyday and embodied practice of homemaking in places ranging from camps to ‘reception centres’ to private homes. This chapter examines the centrality of notions of home and hospitality to practices of humanitarian hosting, and explores the processes, relations, and constraints of hospitality and home(making) in the context of hosting-at-home. It challenges a strict binary understanding of ‘guest’ and ‘host’, insisting on the centrality of relationality, interdependence, reciprocity, and mutual vulnerability to the practices and experiences of humanitarian hospitality.