Who is the Host? Interrogating Hosting from Refugee-Background Women’s Perspectives

Abstract

This paper explores refugee-background women’s concepts of hosts and hosting in resettlement. The refugee studies literature generally uses the term ‘host communities’ to describe a country’s citizens or established communities who interact with and may assist newcomers to build a new life. However, findings from our walking interviews project with a small group of refugee-background women in Sydney, Australia suggest that these women were actively contributing to hosting newly arrived families. They were in fact the hosts rather than the guests. They performed rituals of hosting for newcomers from similar backgrounds more so than the so-called host communities. The act of hosting involved an intra-group process that was integral to the women’s roles in their local communities. Conversely, inter-group relationships with so-called host communities were completely absent. We review how conceptualisations of hosting are used in forced migration studies. We outline how the findings on hosting challenged our own understanding of hosting in a resettlement context. Our discussion of refugee-background women’s agency as hosts for newcomers provides new understandings of an oft-forgotten aspect of women’s lived realities in resettlement, their strengths and resourcefulness, and the gendered nature of these rituals.