Appel à communications : Colloque “Care and hospitality in the city”, University of Cambridge (Royaume-Uni), 14/06/2014 — LIMITE : 14/03/2014

A one-day conference on Saturday, June 14 2014 on the theme of Care and Hospitality in Urban contexts at the University of Cambridge.

Care, hospitality and urban anthropology are burgeoning areas within anthropology, and this conference gives those students who are part of this movement a chance to refine their ideas alongside each other as well as those, who have helped set out the trail before them. We are hence looking forward to have John Borneman (Princeton) and Matei Candea (Cambridge) accompanying the conference and giving the key- and end-note address. The conference will consist of sets of three twenty-minute papers, each followed by a half-hour of discussion. Lunch will be provided and small travel bursaries are available for a limited number of those who are presenting. We are explicitly welcoming interdisciplinary papers and would like to invite you to submit abstracts of no more than 300 words to jfl37@cam.ac.uk, or fs388@cam.ac.uk, by Friday, March 14th.

By focusing on the intersection of hospitality, care and urban anthropology, we hope to take the maturing anthropology of the city, and bring it into closer dialogue with classical anthropological concerns that have not been fully explored in an urban context. In this case, we want to focus on hospitality and care, but this intersection also touches on work on kinship, sexuality, intimate space and affective experience. While contemporary anthropology has successfully challenged ideas of urban anonymity and revealed various dynamics of relatedness and belonging, it still remains a question as to how exactly care and hospitality take place within the city’s spaces of flux and alterity. Attention to such questions goes beyond simply tracing urban connection towards interrogating the processes and experiences that underlie experiences of urban connection.

Presentations might want to address some of the following questions and contemporary examples in the nexus of care, hospitality and urban life:

-Where and how are people able to step beyond urban anonymity, or to offer hospitality?
-How does the history and the physical and sensory environment of the city shape experiences of friendship, intimacy or other caring relationships?
-How does it feel to be cared for by a stranger and in what way might strangers become intimate? Where is the worker in this context; where is his autonomy and self in the self-sacrifice process of ‘taking care’?
-How do economic relations, or the presence of the state, shape personal experiences of care and hospitality? And what other institutions might play a role in urban care and how have these changed in the era of the decentralizing neo-liberal state? How do communities imagine and articular localized visions of care and hospitality within this context?
-What happens to those who need care but are excluded (or de-institutionalised) from familial, state and private institutions of care – where does care among the marginalized urban poor come from?
-Where do questions of care and hospitality figure in current debates of immigration (and xenophobia) across Europe? For example, how does David Cameron’s warning of Romanian and Bulgarian immigrants swamping London, or the violence linked to or Greece’s Golden Dawn figure in here?