Navigating the Politics and Ethics of Hospitality: Inclusive Practice with Forced Migrants

Abstract

Abstract Globally, forced migration has displaced 70 million people, a number set to increase in light of the social distress from the current health pandemic and ongoing climate-related disasters. Although protected from large-scale land-based movements of forced migrants, successive governments in Australia have resorted to detention and marginalisation to ‘manage’ forced migration. This context presents many challenges for social workers: they are confronted with scarce resources in their work with disenfranchised groups, while facing ‘welfare chauvinism’—a logic that locates their primary responsibilities in the welfare rights of national citizens. The article interrogates the intersectional power dynamics that inform global conventions and national policies to manage the problem of forced migration. It contrasts ‘exhausted humanitarianism’, a politically expedient rationality with ‘hospitality’. To unsettle the hold of restrictive and inhospitable practices introduced in the name of the nation, the article calls for a re-scaling of the imagination and practice of social work. It introduces the discursive figure of the social worker as a boundary spanner to locate new possibilities for inclusive practices that uphold a human rights approach to the ‘refugee problem’ in place of an exhausted humanitarianism.