Taking others in: conceptualising hosting with feminist ethics of care and mutual aid

Overview

The practice of hosting or families taking in families displaced by conflict or disaster and providing them with shelter has a long history. Since the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which affected countries both in South-East and South Asia, humanitarian agencies and donors have been intentional in adding hosting to their repertoire of short-term accommodation strategies to shelter displaced families. Practitioners and donors often argue that hosting is an extension of a culture of hospitality. These actors then leverage an essentialised notion of hospitality to craft assistance packages to encourage hosting and defray some of its associated costs. However, this aligns with the neoliberal turn, as they ‘pass off’ shelter responsibilities from host country governments to individual families and communities, assuming displaced families and their hosts will adapt to one another’s presence until a permanent shelter solution emerges. In this article, I build on my previous work that explored hosting’s intra-household dynamics. This essay is an opportunity for me to ask new questions about my work on hosting practice and to reconsider hosting through the lens of feminist care ethics and within recent writings on mutual aid in post-disaster contexts. My intention is twofold. First, I hope to offer practice-based recommendations to agencies and donor institutions interested in promoting hosting in disaster response and recovery programming; recommendations that help them to be more intentional about how hosting might be enacted as a form of care and for supporting mutual aid strategies and building solidarity. Second, I contribute to emerging literature on the relationship between neoliberalism and resilience, as I consider hosting as part of the everyday of disaster recovery.