Creating hospitable urban spaces: A multicultural city for refugees and asylum seekers

Introduction: For a fearless hospitality?

In 2015, boats carrying groups of Rohingyans fled the genocidal violence in Myanmar only to be turned away by authorities in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia. Defying instructions from Indonesian authorities, Achenese fishermen who set out to rescue the Rohingyans, explained their rationale:

We helped out of solidarity. If we find someone in the ocean, we have to help them no matter who they are. The police did not like us helping but we could not avoid it. Our sense of humanity was higher. So, we just helped with the limited resources that we had at the time. (Suryadi, fisherman quoted by McNevin and Missbach, 2018: 298)

During a night-time fishing expedition, Carlo Giarratano, a 36-year-old Sicilian, heard cries of help from 50 migrants aboard a dinghy taking on water. Reaching them, he offered all the food and drink he had and radioed for help:

I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t think I might end up in prison when I saw that dinghy in distress. But I knew in my heart that a dirty conscience would have been worse than prison. I would have been haunted until my death, and maybe even beyond, by those desperate cries for help. (Tondo, 2019)

These acts – extraordinarily courageous and yet banal – point to an imperative to demonstrate hospitality and solidarity towards forced migrants. In the examples above, people report coming to the aid of the Stranger because they see themselves in similar circumstances. Placing these vignettes at the head of our paper, our intention is to open a space to re-imagine how ‘ordinary’ actors in unremarkable spaces might demonstrate exemplary responses to forced migrants (McNevin and Missbach, 2018).

The focus of our paper is the multilayered complexities and possibilities for hospitality towards forced migrants in one Australian city, Brisbane. We sketch a picture of ‘differential inclusion’ in the migration and protection assemblage, following Mezzadra and Neilson’s (2012: 189–190) invitation to consider ‘processes of domination, subjection and exploitation’. Against this background, we examine the possibilities of micropolitical acts of hospitality at the urban scale. Our analysis is informed by the burgeoning literature on ‘affect and emotion’ (Ahmed, 2014; Zembylas, 2020), ‘urban hospitality’ (Bulley, 2013; Darling, 2011, 2013 ; Vrasti and Dayal, 2016), ‘urban citizenship’ (Idriss, 2022; Isin, 2004) and ‘sanctuary cities’ (Darling, 2010; Lambert and Swerts, 2019; Moffette and Ridgley, 2018).

Our paper is structured as follows. We begin with a brief description of the method underpinning the paper’s findings before introducing Derrida’s (2005) notion of hospitality, a key construct that throws some light on differential inclusion in cities. By supplementing Derridean hospitality with literatures on emotions and affect (Ahmed, 2004, 2014; Zembylas, 2018, 2020), we explore the manner in which affective atmospheres shape urban enactments of hospitality. Urban spaces are sites for producing welcoming affective atmospheres, where individuals and communities feel safe and connected. Urban settings also feature ‘atmospheric walls’– subtle and nuanced techniques for making space unwelcoming to some. We then move to ‘problematise’ the regulations, policies, knowledges, practices and emotions used to manage forced migration at global and national scales. The remainder of the paper examines micropolitical acts of hospitality in urban Brisbane, as articulated by volunteers working on behalf of a philanthropic foundation, youth workers in metropolitan schools and inner-city protest movements.

Method

The over-arching research question addressed by this paper concerns the affordances of mundane acts of urban hospitality to interrupt and loosen state-centric ‘technologies of power’. Three main data sources are called on to support our arguments: a practice-drawn health case study, an interview-based study of educational encounters ¹ and public discourses that focus on the needs and rights of forced migrants. ² We focus on the inner metropolitan area of Brisbane, which is the location of the health and educational partnerships and urban protests featured in our analysis. The inner city’s ambiguous identity as a spatiality of protest and a desired commodity by real estate capital (see Osborne, 2017) offers an attractive context from which to consider concrete practices of hospitality. A limitation of this study was that asylum seekers and people from a refugee background were not asked whether they had experienced acts of hospitality, although the health service conducted its evaluations of client perceptions of its services. For ethical reasons, the collection of information and stories from forced migrant youth was discounted because the research team was unsure how the research would benefit them directly and immediately (see Pittaway et al., 2010).

Hospitality and differential inclusion

Hospitality shapes all of human interaction; it boasts a wide geographical and historical sweep and is a practice familiar to all communities. Hospitality’s transition from a custom or natural law to a right under the law of nation-states has been marked by tensions and contradictions and is the source of much recent literature. We begin by discussing Jacques Derrida’s understandings of hospitality. Speaking at the International Parliament of Writers in 1996, Derrida called for cities to provide refuge to persecuted journalists, writers, intellectuals and the sans papier (Chamberlain, 2020: 62). In his treatise On Hospitality, Derrida (2005) proposed two kinds of hospitality. The first, expressed in the language of rights, the ‘laws of hospitality’ finds expression in regulations and legislations that provide the legitimating logics for differential inclusion, namely who deserves protection and the risks the guest or stranger might present to the host.

Derrida questions the norms of hospitality afforded by these classical laws of hospitality which presuppose and perpetuate national sovereignty. Such laws accord recognition to the guest, while containing and limiting rights and entitlements. An implicit violence frames these classical laws of hospitality. Derrida notes that even asking for hospitality, voicing one’s vulnerability in a foreign language and subjecting oneself to risk assessment – are experiences marked by deeply asymmetrical exercises of power (Derrida, 2005; also, Bulley, 2013).

In contrast, the second kind of hospitality – the ‘unconditional law of unlimited hospitality’– is utopian. It deems that one gives all that one has without question and without expectations of reciprocity and compensation: ‘a welcome without reserve and without calculation’ (Derrida, 2005: 6). Yet, Derrida also acknowledged the impossibility of the unconditional law of hospitality. He reasoned that to relinquish control over one’s home including the right to decide who is allowed to be a guest, or how many guests can be invited, is to lose the capacity to welcome without reserve. In short, hospitality might involve the loss of one’s sovereignty. Derrida conceded that this principle of absolute hospitality is an impossible enactment by the host, be it ‘a cultural or linguistic community, a family or a nation’. For sovereignty is necessary ‘to render the welcome effective, determined, concrete, to put hospitality into practice’ (p. 6).

Nonetheless, Derrida (2005) observed that there is value in holding onto this ideal of unconditional and unlimited hospitality –‘pure and hyperbolic hospitality’– as it allows us to imagine the best conditions, the most appropriate legislative limits rather than ‘pragmatism’ or ‘realism’ (p. 7). Derrida argued that starting from a position of unconditional hospitality would open spaces to re-imagine and transcend the normative. For example, by considering the guest not as a parasite or a burden but as ‘a liberator who offers the keys to escape the prison of the nation and the family’. The justness of conditional hospitality, he observed, rests in its approximation to unconditional hospitality.

By striving for unconditional hospitality, the host is in a better position to recognise the complex entanglements linking populations across space and time. These entanglements might mean acknowledging that ‘receiving societies are complicit in producing the conditions from which migrants are trying to escape, whether due to the effects of their foreign policy and their histories of empire, or through the contemporary transfer of wealth under global capitalism’ (Chamberlain, 2020: 59). Current global protection regimes for refugees do not acknowledge these spatial and temporal entanglements, a point raised by migration and decolonial researchers (see e.g. Castles, 2003 ). They point to the need to address the ‘colonial matrix of power’, the complex interlockings of economic practices, authority structures, knowledge systems and subject-making practices ³ which have shaped forced displacements and mobilities in the modern world (Bhambra, 2017; Quijano, 2007).

Derrida’s ideas about hospitality have not been without criticisms and while the paper’s scope limits us from an expanded discussion, we address these briefly. A recurring criticism concerns Derrida’s conceptualisation of ‘hospitality as ethics’ and the accompanying difficulties this presents in the practical translations of hospitality and their consequences (Bulley, 2015) . Derrida treats unconditional hospitality as ‘a categorical imperative’, a rule of conduct that is universal and following Levinas, implies ‘an ethic of infinite responsibility for the other’ (Chamberlain, 2020: 66). At the same time, he acknowledges that unconditional hospitality is ‘impossible’ to always achieve, observing that the host will need to exercise sovereignty by ‘choosing’, selecting, filtering’ and deciding on who to invite, on who has the right of visiting and staying to receive asylum (p. 66). But he offers no concrete advice as to how one might make such decisions in a just manner. Accordingly, infinite responsibility risks producing ‘a despondent apathy’ (59), or worse, lends itself to ‘neo-imperial doctrines’ of intervention such as the ‘responsibility to protect’‘vulnerable’ populations through ‘illegal’ wars (Chamberlain, 2020: 67). Derrida’s over-investment in state-based sovereign power has been criticised for reducing the imaginative possibilities for ethical and political action, including ignoring the agency exercised by forced migrants in re-making space (Bulley, 2015). An implicit Eurocentrism in Derrida’s treatment of hospitality manifests in a failure to acknowledge the significance of the Global South in hosting forced migrants (Bulley, 2015). For Glanville (2020), Derrida’s Eurocentrism prevents more radical options such as re-imagining ‘hospitality as restitution’. Taking aim at the rising xenophobic sentiments in western countries, he criticises the portrayal of hospitality as ‘… a discretionary act of charity or a gratuitous act of generosity [rather than] a matter of justice for wrongs done in the name of hospitality’.

Recent research on the spatial and affective aspects of hospitality has expanded Derrida’s work by broadening understandings of hospitality’s political and ethical possibilities. Thus, Bulley (2015) draws on Foucault’s expansive conceptualisation of power (sovereign, disciplinary and governmental) to investigate power’s spatial effects on practices of humanitarian hospitality. Hospitality, he argues, ‘works to delimit space, to tame it as a sphere of coexistence … it regulates, filters and channels the trajectories and contacts it allows’ (Bulley, 2015: 188). He adds, ‘[h]ospitality requires a spatial relation that it also disrupts and upsets but seeks to manage and contain, thereby constructing a highly particular, contingent and yet always contested space’ (p. 188).

In concluding, understandings of hospitality are enhanced by the resources offered by theories of emotion and affect. Zembylas (2020) examines the affective energies within educational settings to uncover hospitality’s political and ethical possibilities. He observes that hospitality in education can be invented anew by demolishing the ‘affective atmospheric walls’ that produce classed and raced social structures, legacies of which continue to shape schooling (Zembylas, 2020: 44). De-walling school atmospheres, he observes, involves the ‘task of tearing down the obstacles of access and making spaces for more unruly arrangements where teachers and students can shape their own conditions of being and becoming’ (p. 45). By way of example, de-walling might take the form of changing classroom seating arrangements that maintain borders and hierarchies between ‘us and them’. De-walling through curriculum practice challenges discourses that mark out forced migrants as threats to national security. By bridging the formal and informal curriculum and making connections to students’ everyday lives, educators can encourage young people to find domains of commonality.

Normalising differential inclusion at global and regional scales

By 2021, some 84 million people worldwide were considered to be forced migrants. Of these approximately 26.6 million were recognised as refugees according to the Refugee Convention of 1967, with children making up just over a half of the total number. If conventional geographies of Asia are taken up, 68% of refugees worldwide are from ‘Asia’ (UNHCR, 2022a). In the Asia-Pacific region, some 9.2 million people are listed as ‘being of concern’, meaning that they are either ‘convention’ refugees or asylum seekers (4.4 million), internally displaced persons (3.3 million), or those who are born or become stateless (2.3 million) (UNHCR, 2022b). Asia is both a refugee-producing and refugee-hosting region.

There is a broad consensus by legal scholars that the international refugee regime has been designed to function as a state-centric instrument. Although the original custodian of the 1951 Refugee Convention and a primary authority for refugee status determination, the UNHCR has been unable to prevent member states from embracing border rationalities and practices. The turn towards hard borders or securitisation has compromised the humanitarian brief of the UNHCR (Kneebone, 2014; Peterson, 2012). Similarly implicated is the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), an NGO whose original mandate to facilitate European migration has expanded to include border-consolidating and securitisation projects including the forced repatriation of ‘failed’ asylum seekers (Andrijasevic and Walters, 2010).

Countries in Asia are routinely criticised for their failure to endorse the 1967 Refugee Convention, the normative framework of protection for people seeking asylum and refuge, even though the burden of providing essential hospitality falls disproportionately on the poorer countries of the Global South (Bulley, 2015). Wealthier countries use superior bargaining powers to reduce and displace commitments to offer protection to forced migrants. A case in point is Australia’s Pacific Solution, which drew in Papua New Guinea (PNG) and Nauru, both non-signatories to the Refugee Convention, to detain and process ‘unauthorised maritime arrivals’ (Kneebone, 2014; Rajaram, 2003).

At the time of writing, refugee resettlement processes in Australia were slowly restarting after two years of border closures. Permanent settlement is expected to be offered to approximately 19,000 people. ⁴ Hospitality to forced migrants is governed by their mode of arrival. Those who apply offshore through the UNHCR’s status determination process, if approved for settlement, ultimately receive higher levels of rights and entitlements. Onshore applicants arriving by boat, on the other hand, have received harsh treatment. From 2014 onwards, all boat arrivals have been detained offshore in Nauru, and until its closure by the High Court of Papua New Guinea, Manus Island. From 2014 to 2022 boat arrivals were denied the right to ever settle in Australia even if confirmed by the UNHCR to be refugees. The recent election of a new government is expected to lead to some new policies to support permanent resettlement for people seeking asylum refugees (Refugee Council of Australia, 2022).

Policies of ‘securitisation’ such as mandatory detention, offshore processing and boat turn-backs have largely enjoyed electoral support (Hage, 2016; McKay et al., 2012; Peterie, 2017). A sustained body of research has investigated the uses of political and media discourses to justify Australia’s costly and punitive policies, currently estimated at around AUS$957 million (Kaldor Centre, 2022). Politicians are known to routinely promote Australians as exceptional humanitarians whose hospitality is being abused by opportunistic asylum seekers and putative criminals and terrorists. Detention is promoted as protecting the moral rights of ‘genuine’ refugees who are portrayed as displaced by ‘queue-jumping’ asylum seekers (Maley, 2003; Rajaram, 2003; Refugee Council of Australia, 2022). A second political rationality, dubbed the ‘humanitarian border’ defends detention on the dubious grounds of deterring asylum seekers from taking perilous maritime journeys at the hands of people smugglers. In this way, the state dispenses with the need to use calculative rationalities of assess risk and instead enlists affects of fear and anxiety –‘neuroses’, while legitimising a neurotic citizen-subjecthood (Isin, 2004). Affective borders are enabled by creating and mobilising fears and prejudices amongst migrant-backgrounded citizens. In both the 2016 and 2022 elections, Chinese-language speakers were warned on WeChat against voting for the Australian Labour Party (ALP) as their policies would reduce their chances of obtaining family reunification visas and destroy Chinese wealth (‘refugees will flood in taking your wealth away’) (Davies and Kuang, 2022).

In political discourse, some migrant groups are regarded as worthy, ‘model minorities’ in contrast to others. The Othering of the ethno-culturally different, argues Ratnam (2019), hearkens back to a persistent racialised governmentality experienced by Australia’s first nation people and later by ‘displaced persons’ from Europe (see Kunz, 1988). One of the first pieces of legislation to be debated by Australia’s parliament at federation was the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, colloquially referred to as the ‘white Australia’ policy regime. It established the basis of an assimilationist policy and the privileging of a white, British national identity. Post-war European migration, which included the settlement of displaced persons, unravelled the official desire for a British populace. In 1959, the Act was repealed and racially restrictive immigration practices relaxed. The formalisation in 1964 of a policy of integration extended nominal acceptance of difference; however, migrants’ differences were regarded as transitory points on a journey to full assimilation. (Ratnam, 2019: 1200–1201).

Multiculturalism made its first appearance in policy discourse in 1973. Its conceptualisation as a welfare, educational and settlement programme for immigrants meant that it had limited purchase in tackling the internal borders established by the legacies of race-based assimilationism and indigenous dispossession (Jupp, 2018: 110–112). Multiculturalism’s official arrival with bipartisan support coincided with a mass intake of refugees from Vietnam and Lebanon. By the 1980s, the bipartisan consensus around multiculturalism was unravelling. In a series of public debates concerned about the ‘Asianisation of Australia’ (‘Blainey Debates’), Asian-Australians were depicted as ‘difficult’ guests who threatened the goodwill of their embattled, generous (white) Australian hosts (see Dunn, 1998). Exemplifying ‘governing by affect’, these polarised debates reduced the prospects for an affective hospitality towards the cultural other (see Idriss, 2022; Ratnam, 2019). The furore about Asian, predominately Vietnamese, ‘economic migrants’, ‘bogus refugees’ and ‘criminals’ waxed and waned, reignited a decade later in a turn towards populism (‘Hansonism’) (Jakubowicz, 1997). By the start of the new millennium, ‘Muslims’ replaced Asians as objects of vilification, being constructed in political discourse as subjects of militant radicalisation. This turn brought multiculturalism into conversation with national security (Hage, 2016). The social contract underpinning the initial multicultural policy platform would be rendered fragile by a raft of policies that instituted temporary migration and their associated visa-related conditionalities (Koleth, 2017). The effects of these policies have been captured vividly in the embodiments of precarity, insecurity and alienation experienced by people seeking asylum and refuge (Ratnam, 2019: 1205). Tracing the relationalities between ‘then and now’, Jupp (2018) and Ratnam (2019) draw attention to the affective hold of settler colonial antagonisms in unsettling the progressive imaginaries of Australian multiculturalism.

We turn now to practices of hospitality at the scale of the city. Our focus is Brisbane (Australia), a city with a recently acquired cosmopolitan image. For activist migration researchers, the very act of giving analytical privilege to the national scale legitimises the restrictive nation-state, reducing the emotional space for emancipatory action. Attributing too much power to the national scale can also lead to neglect of everyday encounters of hospitality and generosity, potentially producing feelings of powerlessness and despondency (Dunn et al., 2001; Glick-Schiller and Cagler, 2016; Wise, 2010). Thus, while governments and policy bureaucrats see belonging and citizenship as normatively invested in the national scale, there is value in stepping outside of the national scale to capture the affective energies and solidarities constitutive of hospitality, as Darling (2017: 179) notes:

Politically, [the city offers] a path to contest the exclusions of the nation-state … Analytically, it offers insight into the dynamics of refugee experiences without automatic recourse to … sovereign authority or exceptional spaces of border control.

Reinforcing this view, Vrasti and Dayal (2016: 995) make the case for:

scaling down citizenship from membership in an imagined community of the nation anchored in sovereign law, to membership in a community of proximity or spatial presence [with the power to splinter the hegemony of the state and devolve some autonomy to others

Brisbane: Diversity and differential inclusion

The urban has long been a fertile setting for exploring the possibilities and limits of social, racial and economic justice. For example, critical urbanists have interrogated the means by which cities function as ‘economic machines’ to reproduce capitalist relations (Harvey, 2012). Indigenous, decolonial and postcolonial researchers have highlighted the relations between capitalist urbanisations, land-grabbing and differential valuing of racial bodies (Dorries et al., 2022; Moreton-Robinson, 2015). From street names to landmarks, the city embodies formal and informal exclusions. At the same time, the city is also a productive site for a different kind of urban politics where the thrown togetherness of diverse communities and individuals fosters formal and informal encounters, a ‘politics of presence’ with the potential to interrupt normalised bordering techniques (Darling, 2011, 2013, 2017; Massey, 2004).

Urban geographer Doreen Massey (2004) has been particularly influential in highlighting the radical possibilities for political and ethical action offered by a relational account of space. For Massey, the city is ‘internally multiple’; a product of its relations with other spaces and other times, relations that can be mobilised through affective energies to create new networks, relations and identities that complicate who can be hosts and who can be guests (see also Bulley, 2015; Darling, 2013). In a similar vein, in writing about the possibilities of ‘Cityzenship’, Vrasti and Dayal (2016) acknowledge that access to the urban commons – the right to public services, places of culture and education, cafes and street corners – is also a matter of breaking down what Ahmed (2014) refers to as ‘atmospheric walls’– gatekeeping devices and techniques for making spaces (un)available and inhospitable to the Other.

‘Sanctuary cities’ have gained prominence in this discursive space as municipalities have sought to limit their cooperation with the machineries of national governments seeking to enforce various borders. Darling’s (2010: 129-130) study of hospitality in, and by, the city of Sheffield sketches the expansive potentialities for a hospitable spatial politics. Visual markers of Welcome in the cityscape and facilitated interactions between residents and forced migrants set the scene for atmospheric walls and borders to be reconfigured. A caucus of committed institutions - businesses, universities, trade unions, and community organisations is formed and mobilizes to advocate for the material and social wellbeing of forced migrants in the city. At the same time, it is important not to overstate or romanticise urban potential. Socially-induced precarity through state-sponsored austerity policies can produce fear, anxiety and fatigue, steering urban citizens away from acts of hospitality. The mere presence of migrant populations in urban centres will not produce hospitality if citizens and former migrants are themselves drawn into building affective ‘atmospheric walls’ through fear of people seeking asylum and refuge (Cheshire and Zappia, 2016; Darling, 2010). When city spaces are conceived and perceived as dangerously volatile because of migrant presence, affective energies can be directed towards ‘cruel (re)attachments’ to the humanitarian border’ (Holzberg, 2021 : 744).

Brisbane’s attempts to construct the city as hospitable and supportive of refugees and asylum seekers came to prominence at two key moments of national divisiveness – the storming of the vessel Tampa, and what came to be known as the Children Overboard Affair. ⁵ Opposing the affective borders established by the federal government, Brisbane was declared a Refugee Welcome Zone by the then-Lord Mayor. A Working with Refugees Strategy (see Brisbane City Council [BCC], 2002) set the course for practical measures to assist the settlement of forced migrants, such as public transport subsidies, computers for neighbourhood-run literacy and homework clubs, free computer literacy training and mentor schemes linking aspiring entrepreneurs with small businesses. Making Brisbane a Welcome City was a modest step towards recalibrating the emotions of urban residents, to shift affective energies away from exclusionary state narratives. Other actors – neighbourhood associations, NGOs, labour unions, education institutions, students, local anarchist groups, faith-based bodies, professional associations and chambers of commerce – were enlisted to welcome forced migrants. The municipality’s Welcome strategy also resonated with various inner city solidarity groups that have consistently organised for ‘A right to the City’ whether through affordable housing, access to public spaces or the end of mandatory detention for people seeking asylum (Osborne, 2017).

The relational (re)making of Brisbane as a place of welcome for refugees and asylum seekers is simultaneously contested by other activities, actors, relations networks, most notably, the string of Brisbane-based businesses that have benefited from government policies aimed at constructing ‘humanitarian’ borders (Doherty and Butler, 2021). The border within the city has been the source of several critical studies investigating the legal and spatial constraints experienced by forced migrants. Asylum seekers are subjected to inhospitality with controls inserted on where they reside, the kinds of employment they can undertake, and restrictions on their ability to study and acquire training that improves prospects for employability (Ratnam, 2019; Worsoe, 2021).

Over the years, Greater Brisbane’s identity has been shaped by a number of populist politicians virulently opposed to multiculturalism and migration (Jakubowicz, 1997; Marks, 2017). To counter these emerging place-identities, a suite of policies and programmes to address social cohesion have been introduced by the Queensland government (e.g. ‘Community Action for Multicultural Societies’). Framed in the language of improving the social capital and economic prospects of migrants, these initiatives stand to consolidate normative perceptions of security, leaving the structural violences of differential inclusion unaddressed.

Researchers have also flagged the importance of scrutinising urban performances of ‘competitive cosmopolitanism’ where cities strategically govern ‘difference’ and cultural diversity (Bulley, 2013; Dunn et al., 2001). Brisbane is no different and draws on a multi-faceted regime of representation, using discursive and visual marketing strategies to make the city attractive to investors, residents and visitors. In sharp contrast to its entrenched historic Anglo-Australian identity, the city actively represents itself as a multicultural ‘World City’ (‘One Brisbane, Many Cultures’) as it seeks to build an innovative, futurist profile through ‘new economy’ industries (Brisbane City Council [BCC], 2022). Urban festivals are utilised to legitimise a particular urban order where the consumption of a ‘safe’ and non-threatening diversity is done through spectacles of food and fun while maintaining the cultural and institutional fabric of the nation-state (Bulley, 2013; Lambert and Swerts, 2019).

Mobilising urban actors 1:Care-full embedded activism

As demonstrated in the preceding sections, the political context of immigration is one that is polarised. The spectre of performing to the scripts of conditional hospitality is ever present for citizens who are culturally and linguistically ‘different’. As ‘good’ guests, they are required to embrace assimilation, learn English rapidly and become self-sufficient. Problematic guests are those who are ‘unlawful’, welfare-dependent, uphold tribalism and insist on melancholy. In an emerging context of populist hostility, people embodying migrant difference must prove their deservingness to be in Australia. Migrant communities are increasingly encouraged by their community leaders to perform citizenship through acts of volunteering and philanthropy, such as food relief for homeless people, material and practical assistance for bush fire ravaged communities, and donations to medical charities (Watt, 2018). Although touched by power asymmetries, these informal people-to-people interactions increase the likelihoods of both enduring and fleeting moments of sociality and intimacy (Glick-Schiller and Cagler, 2016; Wise, 2010).

In Brisbane, several Asian-Australian organisations have stepped in to plug the gaps created by the underfunding of support services for asylum seekers and international students affected by the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our particular focus is on a global health humanitarian actor, the Tzu Chi Foundation, which is associated with a Taiwanese-Buddhist order. For two decades, the Foundation has been at the forefront of providing pro bono oral health services, a vitally important but under-resourced settlement service for forced migrants. The Foundation’s partnership with the state health bureaucracy has enabled every refugee and asylum seeker to receive dental care within 12 months of their arrival in Brisbane. The Tzu Chi order has partnered with other faith-based entities such as the Romero Centre to provide material assistance to asylum seekers.

Tzu Chi is a relatively new religious movement embraced by Chinese heritage communities worldwide. Founded as a grassroots charitable women’s group in Taiwan by a Buddhist nun, the Venerable Cheng Yen, a follower of the Mahayana variant of Buddhism in the 1960s, the Foundation is now recognised as an international, secular, humanitarian NGO with branches around the world. It emphasises service to others and responsibility to act to address injustices and need. In this it differs from Buddhist movements emphasising self-cultivation by meditative practice. Its global membership is dominated by women (70%), and an earlier study of the movement pointed to a leadership style embodied by a highly effective ‘gendered charisma’ (Huang, 2009 ), inspiring its followers to address and arrest suffering. The Foundation runs hospitals, medical schools and recycling programmes in Taiwan. It has been operational in China since 1991 – itself an indicator of its embrace of a nuanced type of embedded activism involving cooperation with existing institutions including those outside of democratic spaces (Huang, 2009).

In Brisbane, the Tzu Chi Foundation functions as an apolitical, philanthropic intermediary affording its (largely) Chinese heritage Australian members opportunities to engage in care-based, embedded activism. Its work in oral health provision is carefully situated within the parameters set by the state and its bureaucracies. Members draw on formal and informal ties to initiate dialogue, build cooperation and establish mutually beneficial goals. In these endeavours, personal relations matter enormously, and in keeping with its apolitical and non-confrontational stance, criticisms of government policies are cautiously evaded. Offering hospitality through oral health care provision allows the Foundation to retain its humanitarian identity in a heavily politicised context where they are subject to the unwritten, unsaid ‘rules’ of bureaucracies. Taken cumulatively, working with forced migrants opens a space for practical enactments of hospitality by creating affective atmospheres that push back against the neglect, marginalisation and demonisation of forced migrants. Through patient and persistent networking, the Tzu Chi’s partnerships facilitate access to important social goods for people located outside of national citizenship regimes.

It is entirely possible that the affective energies informing practices of hospitality by the Tzu Chi order are simply scripted responses to spiritual directions embraced by individual members who are seeking to cultivate moral virtue. Regardless of motivations, these volunteering activities produce contextual affordances that stand to disrupt affective borders. Forced migrants are routinely subjected to anger, stigma, shame, anxiety and fear. Volunteers like the Tzu Chi are well positioned to in break down these atmospheric walls through practical expressions of care and other-recognition. Further, through their volunteering, members of the order have an opportunity to question their own subjections to a variety of disciplinary regimes, potentially freeing themselves from a narrow range of political subjectivities demanded of Asian-Australians. Here, we refer to the hold of the model minority imaginary, which is favoured by the dominant social order. We argue that this over-arching identity of model minority-ness has been responsible for flattening the variance and disparity within Asian-Australian communities, narrowing the parameters for security and belonging. Their right to belong has rested on deservingness; only those who can demonstrate achievements have a right to belong. Affective hospitality, we suggest, is formative in opening spaces for affirmative engagements with their intersectional identities.

A second example of embedded activism lies in the negotiated practices undertaken by youth workers to support forced migrant youth to exercise some measure of self-determination over their future. Youth workers provide outreach services to schools, run homework clubs off-site with the aid of volunteers, and offer extracurricular activities such as leadership camps and school holiday activities. Youth who are recognised as ‘legitimate’ Convention refugees have access to a suite of settlement services not available to asylum seekers, but they still face formidable challenges:

It’s very hard, they have to deal with English, the trauma of leaving and other things that have happened. There is really no choice and it leaves them with not necessarily resentment but that [area] of feelings. (Ben, youth worker in youth-based advocacy service)

The dilemmas of managing displacement and emplacement are amplified for unaccompanied minors as they confront new care arrangements, and the emotional burdens associated with loss and separation from their natal families. Young people who have made the journey to Australia with their families are subjected to different pressures, most notably chronic insecurity. As their families can face deportation at any time, they can never feel sure that their aspirations for a future will materialise. Coping with liminality and losing connections to a familiar life extract a heavy emotional toll. Youth workers contribute to affective hospitality in schools by marrying rights-informed advocacy work with need-based approaches to address individual psychosocial adjustments.

Youth work also involves a careful balance between supporting the self-determination of young people and building relationships with family and with schools – institutions that are vested with statutory responsibilities to care for young people. Schools are border making sites. They are subjected to border practices of a kind through audit, surveillance and discipline. They are ranked by league tables; teachers suffer a low regard in the eyes of governments, and public schools are chronically under-funded which limits their capacities to support the aspirations of young people with interrupted educational trajectories. Youth workers were all too aware of the borders and ‘walls’ that educators had to scale:

The expectations of the system cannot be met and this puts incredible pressure on the teachers, who start feeling that they are not achieving and doing well. It becomes a vicious circle. They get frustrated [and] experience withdrawal or over-commitment … (Simona, manager, community organisation)

Administered as putatively race-neutral spaces, schools are rarely acknowledged to be political spaces for assembling the raced, classed and gendered heteronormative citizen-subject (Idriss, 2022; Zembylas, 2020). The school calendar reveals several ritual celebrations of patriotism that consolidate and legitimise Australia’s settler colonial genealogy and its special relationship with Anglo-American empire-making projects. Against this background, school-based practices of hospitality can become captive to liberal norms, which are reaffirmed subtly through affective atmospheres (Vrasti and Dayal, 2016). In one school, youth workers spoke of mediating conflict when students from a refugee background refused to participate in Anzac Day commemorations, which they associated with unjust wars. Affective tensions, if left unresolved, can close off paedagogical opportunities for re-making educational encounters and spaces hospitable and transformative:

Sometimes things have to be falling apart before schools accept offers of help. Animosity starts to develop – between [the school and] students, and then the work outside organisations have to do is harder. (Marta, youth worker, settlement agency)

Certain schools were identified as places that were ‘… not welcoming. We [youth workers] can feel the difference … students [also] feel unwelcome. [They] leave which is what the school probably wants!’ (Alyssa, youth worker at refugee supporting agency).

In two faith-based schools, strong leadership enabled a whole-of-school approach to de-wall the hostile atmospheres created by political figures. Affective hospitality ensured that young people ‘are accepted, feel wanted’. Youth workers spoke of developing peace and human rights educational projects with young people to build awareness and shift perceptions in the broader school community.

Schools are hierarchical by institutional design. Youth workers were all too aware of asymmetrical powers that they were subject to when confronting racialised atmospheric walls:

There was an incident where the [school] Principal made [racial] comments that weren’t appropriate. [He was called out] and the relationship between the agency and the school crumbled. [It’s] only now that he has been more receptive and that’s only because there have been issues in the school … (Ben, youth worker in youth-based advocacy)

The paedagogical spaces within schools are sites for ‘difficult knowledges’– those knowledges that contradict valued self-images including that which has been kept outside the bounds of the thinkable (Bryan, 2016 ). However, these encounters are also an opportunity for educators and learners to cross normative spatial and affective borders (Zembylas, 2018, 2020). Youth workers seized on opportunities to push discursive boundaries in their human rights and peace education activities in schools. Where a needs-based discourse might portray young people as subjects of precarity, trauma and educational vulnerability, the introduction of a rights-based discourse situates the ‘damaged’ forced migrant subject in human rights violations. The scene is thus set to re-consider the locus of responsibility for forced migration (Nelson et al., 2017; Taylor and Sidhu, 2012).

Mobilising urban actors 2: Urban protests

In this final section, we explore the protest sensibility as performed by the city’s residents against mandatory detention. These cases speak to collective actions to make ethical demands with and on behalf of people seeking asylum. They can be read as examples of ‘de-walling the urban commons’ by generating affective energies to push back against the legal and spatial borders instituted by the state. The first example concerns the case of ‘Baby Asha’. In 2015, in an act of civil disobedience, doctors at the Children’s Hospital refused to discharge a 12-month-old baby girl admitted from a detention centre in Nauru for treatment for burns. Following medical intervention, ‘Asha’ was deemed well enough to be discharged and returned to detention in Nauru. However, the doctors and nurses responsible for her care refused to release her to the Department of Homeland Security because they believed that to do so would expose her to the risk of further serious harm given that her ‘home’ was an offshore immigration detention facility. Release into the community was deemed to be the more humane option; however, the federal Minister for Immigration and Home Affairs, himself a resident of Greater Brisbane, refused to agree.

A vigorous campaign, ‘Let Them Stay’, ensued with round-the-clock vigils by protestors outside the Hospital demanding the child’s and family’s right to urban inhabitance. Hundreds of local people including young mothers with their babies, and school students in uniforms, gathered in a 24 hour vigil in front of the hospital. After an intense 10-day stand-off the Minister for Immigration/Home Affairs agreed to allow the child and her family to stay on the mainland instead of returning them to detention in Nauru (Essex and Isaacs, 2018; Tonkiss, 2021).

Our final example concerns the detention in a Brisbane hotel of 120 men who, like Baby Asha, were transferred to Brisbane for medical treatment unavailable in Manus Island and Nauru because of sustained advocacy by a coalition of independent parliamentarians. Having crossed one spatial barrier – the international border – they were confronted with spatial and temporal barriers, confined to the space of a single room for over eight years as they waited for applications for protection to be processed. Protestors from across the city including leaders from multi-faith communities gathered for much of 2020 in front of the re-purposed hotel apartments housing asylum seekers in the suburb of Kangaroo Point to protest. A peaceful, family-friendly atmosphere was purposefully created with children holding up hand-made signs calling for justice (Readfearn, 2020). Local bands entertained protestors and detainees while volunteers distributed free food. The protests drew ecumenical support, leaders from different faith communities converged at the protest site to pray for justice (Lewis, 2020). Atmospheric walls constructed by politicians and policymakers to keep out the stranger were torn down through protests like these against mandatory detention. Differently situated people in the city came together by design and happenstance to establish coalitions and networks to challenge the state-centric powers that subject asylum seekers to cruel punishment. With their affective energies directed against border rationalities, urban residents were encouraged to reject feelings of neuroses encouraged by the state.

Concluding comments

No one is illegal on stolen land. (placard at Kangaroo Point protest)

To enact cityzenship, would mean to dismantle both glass ceilings and affective ones so that those who usually have no part can not only access but also co-produce the urban commons. (Vrasti and Dayal, 2016: 995)

Differential inclusion, within which we locate race privilege and other intersectional disadvantages, has survived and arguably thrived despite a slew of Australian (sub)national policies committing to human rights, protection for refugees and multiculturalism. Our paper explored the manner in which disparate urban actors found themselves united in a mission to refuse the ‘revanchist’ agenda against forced migrants by exercising affective hospitality. We examined both nuanced and assertive modes of embedded activism in the health and education sectors, supplementing our findings with an analysis of the affective energies emerging from a protest sensibility. Feelings of anger, frustration, joy and happiness were mobilised through protest to build a caucus of solidarity and critique. Affective energies, we argue, are crucial for loosening the hold of state-sponsored technologies of power that seek to align citizens to the state’s (ir)rationalities and (il)logics. A focus on affective registers is instructive in making visible the manifold ways through which atmospheric walls are erected, scaled and de-walled in urban encounters including service provision. If hospitality is indeed the sum of capacities `to affect and to be affected’, then the task of acknowledging and tackling the sociohistoric persistence of differential inclusion through unity and justice alliances cannot proceed without close attention to affect (Zemblyas 2020).

Before concluding, a few caveats are in order. A limitation of our paper is that we did not formally investigate whether forced migrants experienced and felt the hospitality arising from practices and activities of professionals, protestors, volunteers and urban residents. Nor did our study explore how hospitable encounters might reverse the roles of host and guest. As a settler colonial society, the question of who might rightfully claim the role of host and guest is one that awaits moral resolution.

We do not wish to romanticise the emancipatory potential of affective hospitality through different forms of activism in the city. The political character of Brisbane is constantly being contested and re-imagined. The task to institute a better form of hospitality is thus ongoing. Practices of hospitality ultimately have limited purchase in instituting transformation if seen as ends in themselves. That stated, if it is the case that ‘all great transformations must be affective in order to be effective’, then the first step is to build emotional solidarities with forced migrants to resist the many expressions of differential inclusions that inform their management and containment (Mazarella, 2009: 299, cited by Muehlebach, 2011 ).