PLACED: Accommodating refugees and asylum seekers and the spatial production of hospitality and otherness

Research Project, 2020 – 2023

The project will study how spatial strategies and ethical and political discourses influence the production of subjectivities and spaces in relation to accommodations for refugees and asylum seekers. Temporary refugee housing, detentions centres and refugee shelters are among the spatial realizations of how asylum-seekers and refugees according to their legal status are housed, but also more fundamentally how they are hosted. Such spaces can be understood as conceptual and material regulatory forms and practices over the space and time of refugees’ lives and their relations to the hosting society. Such spatial articulations indicate how the host define social cohesion, integration and stability spatially. Also, they configure what symbolic, performative and practical tasks to be carried by the figure of the other; the refugee or asylum seeker. Therefore, the project will investigate: a) how hospitality is imagined, produced and negotiated spatially and temporarily when such spaces are conceptualised, narrated, and realized and b) how these processes may lead to othering practices. The aim is to get a deepened understanding of how political and social values, materialized through different spatial forms, regulate the movement, residence and agency of refugees and asylum seekers in relation to social cohesion in society. It includes studying: a) Temporary accommodation for refugees in urban neighbourhoods, b) Emergency refugee shelters, and c) Detention and deportation centres.