FACULTY OF CULTURE AND SOCIETY | Seminar
Communal and multispecies care for displaced people

The vast international literature on the refugee homestay accommodation primarily focuses on domestic space as a basic unit of hospitality, implying merely host-guest relations. This paper expands our understanding of this well-known non-professional humanitarian practice by viewing the home as fundamentally public and communal. It is based on ethnographic research conducted in the Helsinki metropolitan area, Finland, between 2023 and 2024. Drawing on 27 in-depth interviews with hosts and other volunteers involved, I contextualise homestay accommodation within a wider social and nonhuman environment in which care is provided by multiple actors within and without the hosting households. I follow the discussion on cooperative forms of care, which denuclearises home and rescales it beyond the walls through the concepts of communal care (Hester & Srniceck 2023), promiscuous care (Hakim et al. 2020) or care in common (Dowling 2022). Employing this conceptual framework, I show how homestay accommodation is shaped and accompanied by caring activities of actors in social and territorial proximity to housing providers, including friends, relatives, colleagues, and neighbours. In addition, I adopt a more-than-human theorisation of care (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017) to encompass nonhuman actors such as the hosts’ and neighbours’ pets, the gardens on the property, and the surrounding forests and rivers, all of which quietly contribute to promiscuous care that extends beyond human capabilities. Conceptually, the chapter links these two perspectives and contributes to accounts of the interscalar interdependence of homemaking (Handel 2019) and the decentering of human caring agency. I argue that assembling multiscalar and multispecies care into homestay accommodation transcends the host-guest hierarchy and offers a wider range of possibilities for sustaining the lives of refugees.