Hospitality in a Time of Terror : Strangers at the Gate
- Submitting institution
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Coventry University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 38013012
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
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- Publisher
- Rowman and Littlefield
- ISBN
- 978-1611488487
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- November
- Year of publication
- 2017
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This monograph offers a reading of hospitality that suggests the encounter with strangers is at the core of contemporary culture at the beginning of the 21st Century. It utilizes works of public memorialization, film, art, and literature that show the breadth of hospitality’s influence across time, space, and disciplinary borders.
The purpose of this research therefore is to point out the diverse and devastating ways that hospitality appears to insist on our ethical responsibility to strangers. The central research question of this project was: what does the post-9/11 cultural archive suggest about the ways we engage or disengage in the lives of others? And, how might these texts and artefacts bring us closer to an understanding of both the possibilities and the dangers of hospitality now, twenty years later?
To address these questions, I performed close readings of select objects, paying attention to gaps, absences, exposures, and unintended effects; what I call strangers in the text. Broadly speaking, this book offers a discursive analysis of these objects – not of their intentions, but of their affect, letting the objects themselves direct my argument rather than shaping them to fit. Hospitality here is both content and method. The book reminds us that, if hospitality as we understand it is failing, it matters more than ever how we deploy it.
This project was funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in the United States. It was nominated for the 2018 Gustave O. Arit Award in the Humanities, an annual prize meant to "recognize a young scholar who has written a book that represents an outstanding contribution to scholarship in the humanities."
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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