Geoforum 42 (2011) 408–417

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Geoforum

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Giving space: Care, generosity and belonging in a UK asylum drop-in centre

Jonathan DarlingGeography, School of Environment and Development, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, United Kingdom

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history:Received 12 October 2010Received in revised form 31 January 2011Available online 19 April 2011

Keywords:CareGenerosityAsylum seekersEthicsEthnography

0016-7185/$ - see front matter � 2011 Elsevier Ltd. Adoi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2011.02.004

E-mail address: jonathan.darling@manchester.ac.u

This paper examines the political negotiations which underpin the performance of charitable spaces. Inparticular, the paper draws upon a period of ethnographic research at a UK drop-in centre for asylumseekers to consider how notions of charity, generosity and the right to give are structured within the dailyaccomplishment of an environment of care. Through considering the accounts of both asylum seekers andvolunteers within this site, the paper outlines how the interactions and relations brought forth in thedrop-in centre served to produce a space associated with ideas of welcome and generosity. The politicalnature of such a space is brought to the fore when considering how practices of care and generositywithin the drop-in relied upon, and actively reinscribed, normalised visions of charity, belonging and cit-izenship. Through highlighting moments of transgression in which positions of giving and receiving arequestioned, the paper suggests that the relations of the drop-in centre may reproduce a politically passiveand marginalised vision of the asylum seeker within the UK. This reading of an environment of care forthose seeking sanctuary has implications for how we understand the spatial experience of asylum itself,and for how we might envision more politically attentive and ethically responsive spaces of sanctuary.

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‘[C]are is more than simply a social relation with moral or

ethical dimensions; it can also be the basis for an alternativeethical standpoint, with implications for how we view tradi-tional notions of citizenship and politics’ (Popke, 2006, p. 507).

‘[C]are is political precisely because it embodies issues typical ofpolitics in a democracy; questions over the allocation of publicresources as well as agonistic relations wherein equity, justice,obligation, and rights are lived’ (Brown, 2003, p. 835).

1. Introduction

Within recent geographical research there has been a resurgentinterest in ideas and spaces of care (see Conradson, 2003a; Johnsenet al., 2005a,b; Parr, 2003; Milligan et al., 2007; Silk, 2000). Notablyboth Conradson (2003b,c) and Parr (1998, 2000) have examineddrop-in centres as spaces within which particular forms of identityand subjectivity are made possible. For them they represent stagesonto which alternative spatial and social performances may bebrought to life, or given ‘license’ as Parr (2000) terms it. Followingthese concerns, Cloke et al. (2005, 2007) have studied the motiva-tions behind spaces of care for homeless people, again displayingan interest in how practices of care are ‘implicated in the produc-tion of particular social spaces’ (Conradson, 2003c, p. 451). Thesewriters have been careful to avoid a romantic affirmation of caring

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environments as spaces of ethical commitment and engagement.Rather, Parr (2000, p. 229) considers how social processes of exclu-sion, transgression and boundary formation mark drop-in spaces,as a range of embedded expectations, hierarchies of belongingand modes of bodily acceptance are performed.

In this paper I want to take forward such concerns in order toexamine how modes of expectation and boundary formation pat-tern and condition the lived accomplishment of a drop-in centrefor asylum seekers in Sheffield. In doing so this paper offers a firstengagement with the everyday geographies of asylum livedthrough practices of giving and receiving in the sociality of drop-in environments. While spaces of care and drop-in environmentshave been considered previously I argue that the specific, andhighly politicised, nature of relations that arise through a spaceof concern for asylum seekers establishes the asylum drop-in asa site of multiple negotiations and contingent positions not fullyelaborated in other spaces of care. As Parr (2000, p. 229) argues,to focus upon the drop-in centre is ‘to trace. . .wider societalinscriptions into the partial ‘text’ of behaviours, interactions andbodies of the people who attend and live there’. It is this act of‘tracing’ that I hope to accomplish by examining how the politicalpositioning of asylum seekers within the UK serves to highlight thelimitations and tensions of accounts of drop-in space centred on anethics of care and generosity. To this end, I argue that the place ofasylum seekers as ‘bare life’ within the UK – as individuals outsidethe bounds of citizenship and belonging and worthy only of char-itable responses (Agamben, 1998; Darling, 2009) – casts light uponthe tensions and challenges posed in offering care to others

J. Darling / Geoforum 42 (2011) 408–417 409

through drop-in spaces. The paper draws upon recent discussionswithin geography over the nature, and spatiality, of caring activi-ties (see Evans, 2010; Fyfe and Milligan, 2003; Milligan, 2000,2003), along with normative discussions of care as a virtue whichmay emerge through interpersonal relations (see Gleeson andKearns, 2001; Lawson, 2009; Popke, 2006; Sevenhuijsen, 1998,2000; Smith, 1998, 2000, 2005; Tronto, 1993). Drawing on thiswork, the paper challenges the uncritical affirmation of care andgenerosity as a response to asylum, to argue that while these formsof ethical practice are important, they need to be married to anappreciation of the political potential currently implicit in suchdrop-in environments. To develop such potential is, I argue, tofocus on extending relations of mutuality through which thoseseeking sanctuary become rightfully present within spaces andengagements of care, not as passive recipients but as active andvisible partners within drop-in space.

The paper proceeds in the following manner; I begin with anintroduction to the drop-in centre, which I refer to as The TalkingShop, and the nature of my engagement with it. I then move toconsider how The Talking Shop was constructed in the accountsof both volunteers and asylum seekers as a space of care, welcomeand generosity. These discourses of generosity are then interro-gated to show how the assertion of sovereign control is often im-plicit within gestures of care. Such moments of control are madeapparent through points of contest over the resources and spacesof the drop-in centre, such as the assertion of a right to providecups of tea, which, although seemingly trivial, can have significantconsequences for the relationships which construct drop-in space.It is here, I argue, that unwritten assumptions of position and char-ity are enforced as an overriding response of compassion acts toposition some as generous ‘good’ citizens, and others as the passiverecipients of such compassion. In conclusion I focus on how wemight harness the political potentiality of The Talking Shop as ameans to challenge the limits of compassionate care. I beginthough, with Sheffield and The Talking Shop.

2. The Talking Shop

This paper draws upon a 10 month period of ethnographic re-search which comprised one facet of a larger study into the variedways in which Sheffield performed a sense of ‘welcome’ towardsasylum seekers from September 2006 to August 2007. During thistime, Sheffield held an important position within the national pol-itics of dispersal as the second key city within the Yorkshire andHumberside dispersal zone. At the end of the research period, Shef-field was home to 1050 asylum seekers supported through the Na-tional Asylum Support Service, while by September 2010 thisnumber had fallen to 385, mirroring national trends (Home Office,2008, 2010). At the time, Sheffield was seen to possess a ‘long tra-dition of offering a welcome to refugees’ (Wainwright, 2003), withthe city’s contribution to the ‘Kosovan Humanitarian EvacuationProgramme’ in 1999 being seen as a particularly proud exampleof such a tradition. More recently, Sheffield was the first UK cityto join the Gateway Protection Programme, a United Nations HighCommissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) resettlement scheme and thefirst UK city to gain ‘City of Sanctuary’ status as a place committedto promoting ideals of hospitality and welcome (see Darling,2010a; Squire, 2011). Within this context, Sheffield boasts a coun-cil led ‘Asylum Seeker Team’, a range of asylum charities focusedon language provision, advice services and short term assistanceto those rendered destitute, and a total of seven drop-in centresacross the city. It was two such centres which comprised the studysite for this paper.

The Talking Shop comprised two linked drop-in centres forasylum seekers and refugees in the centre of Sheffield. The firstof these ran on a Wednesday for 2 h and was housed in a church

hall, while the second was on a Friday for 3 h, also housed in achurch hall. Both of these centres were run solely by volunteersand were partially self-funded through fundraising and partiallythrough a regional refugee charity. At both centres, ‘service users’– as the asylum seekers who utilised such spaces were termed –were welcome to come and go as they pleased, as were volunteers.Both sites provided a kitchen in which tea, coffee and biscuits wereprovided free of charge, spread out across a counter which con-nected the kitchen space to that of the halls themselves. The hallswere arranged around a series of small tables, normally with fouror five chairs designed to facilitate small group discussions. Thoughnumbers varied each week, both centres normally attracted be-tween 30 and 40 ‘service users’ and around 10–15 volunteers.

I attended the drop-in centre as a volunteer and a researcherhaving initially been invited by one of the group’s founders. Myrole as a researcher was highlighted to those who attended TheTalking Shop from the outset through my introduction to asylumseekers and volunteers by the drop-in centre’s founders. However,though I openly discussed my research throughout my time at thedrop-in centre, there were inevitably points at which my identityas a researcher slipped from view and I became readily associatedwith other volunteers. The presence of other students enabled aprocess of ‘blending in’ to occur, through which my clothing,speech, age and appearance mirrored that of other volunteers(see Parr, 1998). Thus while I attempted to be clear about the roleand purpose of my presence, as both a volunteer concerned withasylum issues and a researcher seeking to examine the relation-ships of The Talking Shop, there were points at which reinstatingthis position felt uncomfortable, points at which breaking out ofa conversation to clarify one’s position would have undone theaffective and emotional work of care in these interactions. My po-sition within the drop-in centre shifted over time as my role as aresearcher was complicated by the series of friendships and con-nections that developed (see Conradson, 2003a). Throughout mymonths at The Talking Shop I kept a research diary which docu-mented these varied relational shifts, alongside the many events,informal conversations and exchanges which helped to sustainand constitute this space of care. Alongside this ethnographic writ-ing, I conducted a series of interviews with four of the centre’s vol-unteers, one of its founders and 12 of the asylum seekers whoregularly visited the centre. It is from these resources that this pa-per is drawn.

3. Giving space

In order to detail the relations and ethos which orientated TheTalking Shop we must first briefly consider the interconnected nat-ure of care and generosity. Raffel (2001, p. 120), promotes generos-ity as a ‘necessary and desirable ethic’ which is centrally concernedwith ‘the area of self-other relations’ (Raffel, 2001, p. 125; Mauss,1990). It is this focus on relationality, and on ‘giving’ to othersthrough those relations, which enables generosity to be linked toan ethic of care, as an ethical disposition which foregrounds theinterdependent nature of human relations. As Barnett and Land(2007, p. 1070) argue, generosity represents a ‘practice throughwhich ‘‘the living together of people’’ is routinely sustained overtime and space’. Generosity in this sense might be cast as a virtuefor engaging with others and here we can begin to trace a connec-tion between ideas of care, generosity and an account of responsi-bility which arises through intersubjectivity. In discussing theethical contours of recent geographical research, Popke (2006)notes the way in which Levinas views responsibility as ‘the essen-tial, primary and fundamental structure of subjectivity’ (Levinas,1985, p. 95, cited in Popke, 2006, p. 508), such that care andgenerosity come to be viewed as fundamental elements of‘being-human’ and of relating to others. As Levinas (1985, p. 50)

410 J. Darling / Geoforum 42 (2011) 408–417

thus argues, an ‘orientation toward the Other can lose the avidityproper to the gaze only by turning into generosity, incapable ofapproaching the Other with empty hands’, for to ‘recognise theOther is to give’ (Levinas, 1985, p. 75). For Levinas we have aresponsibility to the Other which is irreducible and inescapable,a responsibility before subjectivity, and one means of respondingto such responsibility is through a commitment to generousengagement with the Other (see Levinas, 2006).

If we consider generosity in this way, as a mode of ethical re-sponse which arises precisely through our relations, then thismight be brought into conversation with a feminist ethic of careas Beasley and Bacchi (2005) suggest. Such an ethic is foundedupon the notion of interdependence and relationality, wherebythe ‘guiding thought of the ethic of care is that people need eachother in order to lead a good life and that they can only exist asindividuals through and via caring relationships with others’(Sevenhuijsen, 2003, p. 183). Care ethics thus seeks to valoriseand affirm the central role that caring practices and relations of‘dependency, frailty, grief and love’ play in shaping ‘the ways wereason and act in the world’ (Lawson, 2009, p. 210). To this end,Fisher and Tronto (1990) suggest that attentiveness, responsibility,competence and responsiveness comprise the core elements of anethic of care, as care represents a ‘practice and a disposition thattakes the concerns and needs of others as a basis for action’ (Milli-gan, 2003, p. 457; Tronto, 1993, 2001). An ethic of care is thereforeone of responding to the needs of others, with generosity framingone mode of such a response.

The Talking Shop was a space in which these two interwovenconcerns came to the fore. It was precisely these images of a caring,giving, space that the drop-in centre was predicated upon as a siteof responding to the needs of asylum seekers with, as Fisher andTronto (1990) suggest, attentiveness and responsiveness. The Talk-ing Shop was a space structured around the expectation of re-sponse and of a careful consideration of demands for a listeningear, a conversation, a smile or a cup of tea (see Darling, 2010b). Thisform of responsive, embodied and relational care, achievedthrough a twice weekly drop-in space, was highlighted by Lynn,one of the founders of The Talking Shop when discussing the‘ethos’ of the space;

It’s about a sort of warmth of feeling, if all sorts of different peo-ple with their different problems come in and somehow theymanage to be absorbed so that they can actually feel comfort-able. I can think of quite a few people who have come in feelingshattered and needing so much support and they couldn’t get itanywhere else, they needed something like this warmth (Lynninterview, 2007).

While similarly Zada, a Syrian asylum seeker, suggested that;

Maybe there you find somebody who listens to you, there youcan chat about your problems. There are people who will careabout you there (Zada interview, 2007).

The Talking Shop was thus structured as a place of caring for oth-ers, of responding to the needs of asylum seekers, whether that befor the translation of a Home Office letter, a conversation or simplya place to meet other people. The very establishment of a space ofconversation for asylum seekers in the city, and the on-going pres-ence of volunteers at this site, might be thought of as an act of care.The importance of having a (temporary) space to (co)exist shouldnot be underestimated, for as Conradson (2003b, p. 521) notes,within spaces of care there are ‘few which seek to provide a placefor people to relate to others and simply be’. Indeed, whilst Sheffieldoffered other spaces of engagement for asylum seekers, in the formof English classes, religious groups and a small number of

volunteering opportunities, it was the freedom and openness ofThe Talking Shop which set it apart, as Adil, a refugee who first vis-ited The Talking Shop as an asylum seeker, suggests;

Jonathan: Do you think [The Talking Shop] is different to otherplaces in Sheffield?Adil: I think it’s very different, you know if you think about asy-lum seekers the places they go, if you think about English clas-ses they just go and just concentrate about their lessons andthere’s no time for them to just get involved with other thingsand make friends. But at [The Talking Shop] you can come here,sit at any table and just start chatting and you don’t need to talkabout a specific thing (Adil interview, 2007).

In the freedom of interaction offered The Talking Shop became agenerous, and extraordinary, gesture. A sense of caring generositywas notable in the way that the giving and receiving of carethrough everyday tasks in the drop-in centre constructed a narra-tive of a ‘welcoming’ space by volunteers. Space was not simply ‘gi-ven’ for asylum seekers to meet, but this space was alsoconstructed around an ethic of care in the activities and relationsundertaken and in the feelings which resonated from The TalkingShop.

4. Giving hospitality, constructing welcome

A sense of ‘welcome’ was articulated and constructed when dis-cussing The Talking Shop by both ‘service users’ and volunteers.Naveed, an asylum seeker, discussed The Talking Shop as a siteof ‘hospitality’ in the following conversation;

Jonathan: So do you think [The Talking Shop] is a welcomingplace?Naveed: A hundred percent yes otherwise I wouldn’t go there somuch.Jonathan: How do you think it achieves that?Naveed: Because the word hospitality it makes sense in there,because they help you from whatever way they can, if you goto a place and you feel that people around you are helpingyou in whatever way that they can therefore you feel that it’slike a home, sometimes I just wait for the day that it comesand I just go to [The Talking Shop] because my best friendsare there.Jonathan: So what’s the best thing about it?Naveed: For instance when we speak with people there is a feel-ing of easiness and comfort, I can easily say whatever I want tosay and it is a safe place (Naveed interview, 2007).

For Naveed the hospitality felt through the friendships of TheTalking Shop presented a key reason to attend this space twice aweek, one structured around certain attributes. Hospitality is hereabout people helping in ‘whatever way they can’, and in this wayan ethos of care might be seen to create a feeling of being welcome,such that a notion of hospitality and a feeling of being ‘like a home’become entangled in relational webs of friendship, advice and help.It is from this sense of hospitality that Naveed presents The TalkingShop as a space of comfort, of safety and ‘easiness’. Through theattributes of listening and being open to conversation, relationshipsare developed and friendships grow, which Naveed argues perpet-uate his involvement in this space. Crucially these friendships aresustained through routines of proximity at the drop-in centre,and these intangible elements of careful contact feed back into sus-taining that sense of this environment as feeling ‘like a home’.

Naveed’s view of The Talking Shop as a space of hospitality isevident in the terms used by Rebecca a volunteer, to explain therole the space plays within Sheffield;

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I’d say it’s like a place for them [asylum seekers] to come wherethey’re welcomed, because most of the time they’re kind ofinvisible, they just walk around and people just, just peopleare just really horrible about them and if they go there theyknow that there’s people that don’t mind them being here,and want to have them here (Rebecca interview, 2007).

For Rebecca, The Talking Shop is about providing for people, it isagain presented as a space of safety and is counterposed to the‘outside’. Rebecca argues that the drop-in centre presents a caringwelcome through its representation as distinct from the ‘horrible’reactions asylum seekers may receive beyond this seemingly safehaven. The Talking Shop thus ‘gives’ service users a place to goand ‘something to do’, it provides a site through which thosefriendships which Naveed spoke of are able to be developed, andfor Rebecca it ‘gives’ a space which is welcoming by contrast tothe city as a whole.

In these presentations of The Talking Shop the spaces and rela-tions which construct this centre are defined as moments of hospi-tality, welcome and the momentary affectivity of a ‘homely’feeling. It is though notable that Naveed narrates such experiencesthrough a language of hospitality while Rebecca describes such anenvironment through a discussion of welcome and welcoming. Thedistinctions here may be subtle but are of great significance, for alanguage of hospitality implies a series of positions of host andguest, right and privilege which may be imposed to maintain pos-session over a given space (Barnett, 2005; Derrida, 2005). In thissense, Naveed’s discussion of The Talking Shop from a perspectiveof hospitality highlights a view of the drop-in centre as a space inwhich one may be a guest, while Rebecca’s concern with the prac-tices of welcome that orientate such a site is concerned with the‘giving’ of space to welcome those otherwise marginalised withinthe city. Despite these different emphases however, both accountsfocus in part on The Talking Shop as a space for simply allowingothers to be. These are the welcoming gestures which combine tomake this space one of ‘easiness and comfort’ as Naveed finds it,and these are, centrally, gifts which are given to service users.The space of the drop-in centre itself is given, ears are placed to lis-ten to others, time is taken to consider and respond to questions, totranslate Home Office letters and newspapers and to teach basiclanguage skills. Whilst the space of the drop-in is given twice aweek, so too are a series of gifts of presence, of people coming to-gether and giving their time. My listening ear and responsive ges-tures became gifts to others, and their words, thoughts andwillingness to talk, a gift to me.

However, there is inevitably a danger here of both over statingthe careful construction of this space, and of suggesting that theforms of purposeful encounter created through the drop-in centrelead to a virtuous means of responding to difference (see Valentine,2008). Whilst I believe that there is much value in the careful lis-tening and attentive generosity of The Talking Shop, I want tosound a note of caution by considering the political relations onwhich such gestures of care are founded, to argue that they areconditioned by an asymmetrical relation of ‘giving’ which may,in fact, replace care with charity. I want to thus re-approach therelations of The Talking Shop through an account of reciprocityand of what volunteers were seen to gain through their acts of care.

5. Reciprocity

Reciprocity was key to the success of The Talking Shop in creat-ing an environment of comfort for asylum seekers and volunteers.As Cloke et al. (2007) have found in considering the motivations ofvolunteers, processes of giving and receiving are almost alwaysinseparable. It is moments of giving and receiving which act tofurther communal senses of connection and engagement, thus

Eckstein (2001, p. 830) comments that such reciprocal momentsproduce a ‘societal ‘‘glue’’’, through which ‘gift-giving helps unifygroups’. The Talking Shop was held together by these sustainingbonds of giving and receiving. This sense of reciprocity, and indeedof gratitude to those who were willing to give in response, was evi-dent in the narratives of many of the volunteers at The TalkingShop. For example Anna stated that;

Anna: I love going [to The Talking Shop] it’s one of my highlightsof the week because I learn so much every time I go, even themost everyday details about people’s lives before they left theircountries they’re fascinating and it totally disseminates all theridiculous stuff you read in the press about asylum seekers.Jonathan: Do you think it’s changed you as a person?Anna: Oh definitely (Anna interview, 2007).

While similarly, Rebecca comments;

Jonathan: So do you think it changes you as well?Rebecca: Yeah like a reciprocal relationship really.Jonathan: What do you get out of that then?Rebecca: Well if I’m saying it from a selfish point of view it givesme experience for what I want to do, but I like doing it and I likemeeting different people and helping them (Rebecca interview,2007).

Reciprocity is considered here as a transformative process, onethrough which individuals emerge from the drop-in centre alteredin some way. Knowledge, experience and a sense of individuals,everyday lives are given in return for the opportunity to be listenedto. Hollands (2001) argues that such proximity to asylum seekersand refugees allows volunteers to enhance their self-knowledge,as individuals become ‘more aware of their own limitations as wellas their qualities’ (Hollands, 2001, p. 309). Extending this line ofthought, Conradson (2003b, p. 521) suggests that such a momentof self-awareness is tied into the continual construction of drop-in space, as ‘a shift in subjectivity emerges because the relationswhich constitute the drop-in space have, in some way, been pro-ductively folded into those of the evolving self’.

Many volunteers were students who either wanted experiencein a charitable field for job applications, or who were seeking tostudy asylum and this was highlighted in my interview with Adil;

Jonathan: What do you think draws all these different peopletogether at [The Talking Shop]?Adil: I think the most important for these people is firstly it’s afriendly place and secondly I’ve seen many English people com-ing here they find it very easy to learn about other countrieshere, if there’s something on the news about other countriesand you can then talk to people in real life who are coming fromthese countries, see how they talk, how they treat you. . . I seemany people who are students who come here for a whileand they find something beneficial here (Adil interview, 2007).

Adil’s words reflect the ways in which the asylum seekers whovisited The Talking Shop appreciated the reciprocal nature of ‘giv-ing’ on offer, through acknowledging that they too had somethingto give in terms of their knowledge, experiences and narratives.Adil’s account of reciprocity as a process of giving and gaining alsoserves to highlight my own position as a researcher, as someoneengaged in these chains of exchange, economy and gratitude.While I attempted to act like those volunteers who I shared thisspace with, offering careful responses to varying situations (seeDarling, 2010b), I undoubtedly gained from such exchanges in away which may have mirrored that of other volunteers, but whichmay also have been heightened through my position as an individ-ual working within, caring for, and at the same time researching,this space of engagement.

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Considering my own reciprocity it remains clear that a certainpower relation, of my role as a researcher making fieldwork deci-sions and editorial choices, was at play here (Routledge, 2002). Igave to people, in terms of time, listening, attention, translationand care, and received in return their attention, their care, but alsothe stories they constructed with me. Throughout these exchangesit was I who held the greater ability to direct such stories, to ques-tion these narratives and to draw the paths through which ourrelationships progressed, a position partly reliant upon my privi-leged status as a researcher concerned with the needs of myresearch and partly reliant upon my privileged status as a Britishcitizen in this environment.1 The process of researching The TalkingShop, and these varied relations, was therefore one fraught withnegotiations of position and the need to remain attentive to theexpectations of performance placed on volunteers within this space.Through volunteering I not only entered into these circuits of careand generosity, but was also expected to practice them in a particu-lar way, a manner which served to assert particular ways of giving. Itis to these modes of giving that I now turn.

6. The (political) limits of care

The acts of giving which have thus far defined The Talking Shopwere often presented as self-evident, unconscious and equitableaffairs. They were, as earlier interview accounts have suggested,what constituted care in this environment. It is important thoughto consider how reciprocity itself acts to undermine giving and in-sert in its place a series of political negotiations over space, rightand possession. Thus as asylum seekers spoke, giving me theirthoughts, knowledge and experiences, I was obliged to listen, to re-spond and to return this offer of contact. For Rebecca, as she at-tends The Talking Shop she concurrently benefits from suchpresence, through experience, knowledge and skills. In momentsof caring and giving volunteers may receive a great many thingsand this was not lost on many of those ‘service users’ who attendedThe Talking Shop, as the following exchange with Faheemsuggests;

Jonathan: What do you think motivates people to come to [TheTalking Shop]?

Faheem: They want to get experience, they didn’t come to helpasylum seekers for the sake of help, their help is not for the sakeof help but that doesn’t devalue the help (Faheem interview,2007).

Faheem thus recognises the reciprocal nature of the care andgenerosity, yet he is quick to note that the gains to be made by vol-unteers do not devalue that which they offer. Similarly, in discuss-ing the limits and power relations of such acts, I do not intend to‘devalue the help’, but rather to highlight its politics and itspotential.

The politics of such ‘help’ might be witnessed in the way gener-osity can establish relations of reciprocal exchange, obligation andrightfulness, such that in the act of giving ‘a donor transforms hisor her status in the relationship from the dominant to the gener-ous’ (Hattori, 2001, p. 640). Gifts are thus dependent upon a notionof property, ‘of the possession by a sovereign subject of its own selfand of other objects’ (Barnett and Land, 2007, p. 1072), and as suchgenerosity can represent ‘a means of reproducing inequality anddependence’ (Barnett and Land, 2007), for its performance creates

1 This is not to deny the agency of those with whom I worked, but rather to suggestthat my capacity to attune these moments of reciprocal research production wasgreater due to both my position in directing the research, making decisions on thequestions posed, the frames of reference drawn upon and so on, alongside mycapacity as a ‘national spatial manager’ (Hage, 1998), one whose right to ‘be here’ isnot consistently placed in question.

and sustains the right of some individuals and groups to give someproperties (space, time, attention) to others. The responses of thoseasylum seekers who attended this centre were indicative of such alogic of exchange, many of them spoke of their gratitude for thosewho had set up this space, describing how they wished to contrib-ute to the city as a means to pay back this perceived ‘debt’. Forexample, Mustafa stated that;

Mustafa: Through [The Talking Shop] I do some voluntary job,some gardening job and I think that is a small thing to makeSheffield better.

Jonathan: Is that important, to help like that?

Mustafa: Yeah, because you know, for example if you have got ahome you like your house to be a good house. Sheffield is likehouse, places like this make you feel like it is house, everyonewe are living in the city and you have to do something to makeyour city better (Mustafa interview, 2007).

The political contours of generosity and reciprocal exchangenoted in those patterns of care which structured the drop-in cen-tre, might also be extended to reflect the power relations whichhave been argued to infuse an ethic of care itself. Thus Beasleyand Bacchi (2007, p. 284) argue that;

‘establishing benevolence, compassion, gift giving, altruism orgenerosity as an ethical starting point typically involves thepromotion of care as a desirable moral quality or dispositionheld by individual citizens. . .and neglects or understates poten-tial connections between care and power’.

The relationship of care and power asserted here, Beasley andBacchi (2007, p. 284) suggest, is one which mirrors that of the gift,as an ‘asymmetrical relationship’ between ‘those needing care andthose delivering care’, akin to the ‘donor’ and ‘recipient’ of the gift,is established. Here care itself ‘presupposes relations of depen-dence and vulnerability’ (Beasley and Bacchi, 2007). To care then,just as to be generous, becomes the act of those who assert a posi-tion which enables care to occur, for as Barnett and Land (2007, p.1067) state the ‘capacity to care-about comes prior to actual prac-tices of caring’.

Here, practices of care, generosity and giving become caught ina series of power relations of position, property and privilege. Beas-ley and Bacchi (2007, pp. 284–285, original emphasis) thus suggestthat a reliance on care in this way maintains an image of the auton-omous, sovereign, citizen, for here;

‘Those designated as individuals are deemed capable of inde-pendent thought and action and hence afforded full citizenshipstatus and minimal government oversight/intervention. Theyare defined against those deemed less capable and thereforerequiring governance/protection’.

The failings of an ethic of care might thus be seen in the affirma-tion of relations of dependence and vulnerability – of casting someas in need of care and others as charitable care givers. In The Talk-ing Shop I want to argue that moments of positioning and orderingarose at precisely the point where these normalised relations ofcare were brought into question. I want to now examine one suchmoment.

7. Performing the host

Moments of banal political negotiation were common at TheTalking Shop, as claims to possession were continually being per-formed through a series of prosaic acts of care. These acts did notsimply involve the performance of a giving or caring self, ratherthey implicated that self as a sovereign, authoritative subject. In

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The Talking Shop a central place where such practices occurredwas the kitchen.

The kitchen presented a walled off sub-section of the main hallin both drop-in centres, connected through a serving hatch andcounter. Its position as slightly separate from the main hall whereconversations and exchanges largely took place allowed it to be aplace of escape for some individuals; for volunteers who neededa break and for asylum seekers who were less comfortable withthe hectic atmosphere of the main hall. In this respect The TalkingShop differs from other drop-in centres studied by Cloke et al.(2005), Conradson (2003b) and Parr (2000), who all note that thekitchen was a site of refuge for staff as it was designated as ‘staffonly’. No such formal divisions of space existed here and thiswas described to me at a volunteer training meeting as a meansto allow equality among group members. Within this ideal every-one should have access to the resources of the kitchen and bothvolunteers and asylum seekers should offer to make drinks forothers.

It was notable though that some individuals did indeed take onthe role of tea making. One asylum seeker in particular, Akan, wasusually seen busying himself behind the counter, tidying up andlaying out plates of biscuits. When I asked him why he did thiseach week, he told me that he wanted to do this, that this was‘his role’ and he liked ‘to feel useful’. Akan’s desire to be ‘useful’points to two motivations, firstly, a desire to keep busy, to havesomething, anything, to do. Within a life lived in limbo and withno right to work, boredom naturally became a factor in the livesof many asylum seekers. This then fed into the second motivation,a desire to contribute. For Akan the simple act of making the teabecame a matter of pride, the one thing he felt he could contributeto this space. Through making tea, and contributing to the drop-incentre in this way, Akan asserted a right to be here, a right to thekitchen as a space temporarily made his own. By occupying thisspace and by offering tea and coffee, Akan performed the host;he performed a subject who was at home, albeit temporarily.

While Akan’s right to the kitchen was temporally bound withinthe time slots of the drop-in, it was also constrained by alternativeand competing claims to the kitchen;

I’m at the Wednesday drop-in and after putting my bag down Igo over to the kitchen to get a cup of tea. After a brief chat withIlya and Shariq I reach the counter to see not Akan, but twoelderly ladies stationed there. They ask me politely if I wanttea or coffee, and saying tea they promptly pour me a cup. I turnto look around the room for Akan and note that he’s sat talkingwith a few other men at a round table, none of them have adrink (Research diary, 27th April, 2007).

Following this incident I attended The Talking Shop on Friday,where Akan was back to his usual routine, and his usual place.While he arranged some saucers I asked him why he was not doingthe teas on Wednesday, he told me that the two ladies were therewhen he arrived, that they were volunteers from the church andthat he did not feel that he could say anything about the tea mak-ing being his ‘role’. After this Akan stopped making the teas onWednesday as the two ladies became a regular fixture, and aftera while stopped attending on Wednesdays altogether, his rolehad been taken, his position of brief and fragile ownership hadshifted in the face of two volunteers who also wanted to ‘givesomething back’.

Through these practices the kitchen became a site of contestedand competing claims, not only of the right to be in a certain spaceat a certain time, but also the right to contribute to the drop-in cen-tre in a certain way. Faced with competing claims which Akanviewed as usurping his own, Akan relented. The political natureof giving is thus at its greatest when the right to give, as it washere, is placed in question by others. The temporary position of

hosting which Akan displayed will always be temporary, for inthe face of those seen as members of a ‘cultural aristocracy’ (Hage,1998, p. 62), these claims to hosting appear fleeting andill-founded, reliant upon the good-willed response of those whopossess the cultural capital of the nation. Viewed as such, Akanwas allowed to play the host, until those with a (seemingly) morevalid claim to giving, a claim based upon citizenship, nationality,and established notions of who gives and who receives in relationsof charity, made a more forceful counterclaim. As Tronto (2001, p.76) argues, acts of care are often founded ‘upon clearly understoodlines of power and obligation’, and the counterclaim presented toAkan’s attempts to give was one which sought to redress theselines of power and obligation.

What emerged in a number of accounts was a sense of shiftingpositions within The Talking Shop and the city, as asylum seekerssought to navigate an indistinct place between the host and theguest. Thus Omar (interview, 2007) commented that ‘sometimesI feel not like a guest, like a host, because you are joined to this pla-ce. . .it’s not that you are always a guest’. In this manner positionsof ‘hosting’ and of ‘giving’ were highly spatially and temporallyvariable. What emerged through the structures of giving whichpattern The Talking Shop are a series of hierarchies in which thosepositions of ‘hosting’ are placed, performed and understood. Akan’sgiving of tea, resources and access to the kitchen, was permitteduntil the point at which a more recognisable host, in this case aBritish charity volunteer, arrives and takes over this role. In doingso, whether intentionally or not, these volunteers assert a right togive which (re)imposes Akan’s role as a receiver of such generosity.The performance of care and generosity undertaken by volunteersproviding tea and coffee realigns the relations of the drop-in centrearound a series of accepted notions of reciprocity and position.These accepted notions of generosity and care also emerged in dis-tinctions over who cleared up at the end of a session, who held thekeys to the hall and who sat on the committee of The Talking Shop.In each of these cases the positioning of ‘service users’ as the sub-jects of care was reproduced through an assumption that this spaceshould be given by some to others. Yet as we have seen serviceusers may also give, through knowledge, care and attention, to vol-unteers cast as hosts. However, what they are able to offer isemblematic of the asymmetrical nature of reciprocity (Ahmed,2000; Young, 1997). Service users can only ever offer that whichthey possess, their attention, their thoughts, and experiences,while the ‘national host’ may offer these and those commoditieswhich are brought together through a secure sense of self-belong-ing. In this way we are returned to an image of generosity as ‘anattitude that can be sustained only in so far as it does not under-mine the dominant position of the one who ‘‘gives,’’ the one whohas something in excess to give, and only gives out of that excess’(Jenkins, 2002, p. 119).

It is however, important to note here that while the impact ofsuch a moment of shifting relations and positions within The Talk-ing Shop may have been significant for Akan, there is a need to beattentive to the expectations and past experiences of both volun-teers and service users in considering this negotiation of sharedspace. The Talking Shop was a challenging environment in whichto encounter others and as no prescribed roles for volunteers andtheir activities were offered, many volunteers found it hard tonegotiate what to do each week. For some, like me, this manifesteditself in moving between tables talking to different groups, for oth-ers it meant sitting in one place and offering to translate newspa-pers and letters. Yet within the apparent freedom and fluidity ofsuch a space there was an uncertainty over one’s role and with thisin mind it is perhaps not surprising that some volunteers soughtrefuge in practices which were felt to be comfortable, caring andconsiderate – the making of tea being one such practice. In part,this practice drew upon that set of normalised and conditioned

414 J. Darling / Geoforum 42 (2011) 408–417

understandings of care which critiques of care as an ethical con-cern highlight, yet this should not be read as an attempt to reclaimdrop-in space from the claims of other users and other modes ofcare. Rather, a more subtle process of discordant expectations, rela-tions and (mis)understandings is at play here. These volunteersbring with them their own expectations of what a caring environ-ment will look like, how it will be performed and, crucially, who‘gives’ what and when. While The Talking Shop was a space inwhich many of these boundaries of generosity were blurred, itwas also a space in which the desire of volunteers to ‘provide’ forthose seeking sanctuary could act, unintentionally in many cases,to produce relations of power which harbour expectations of asy-lum seekers as grateful recipients of care. Here, as Sennett (2003,p. 64) suggests, ‘the compassion which lies behind the desire togive back can be deformed by social conditions into pity’.

In a similar fashion, Akan’s response to this moment of shiftingrelations and social conditions also draws both upon ideas of careand rightful giving, and upon past experiences which constitutethe position of asylum seekers in the UK. Akan had the possibilityof highlighting his role as tea maker to these volunteers on thatfirst encounter yet chose not to do so, saying that he didn’t feelhe could. In this refusal to assert a role as a temporary ‘host’ wemight see Akan’s acceptance of a position as a ‘guest’ within sucha space. Again the assumption of such a position is understandablegiven the context of those seeking refuge in the UK. The provisionof temporary and highly regulated accommodation for asylumseekers, the denial of their right to work, the increasing restrictionson welfare and educational provision for asylum seekers and theirdemonisation within the press, all produce an image of asylumseekers as unwelcome guests to be accommodated with charitableprovision at best and as alien others to be removed at worst (seeTyler, 2006). Within this discursive framing it is not surprising thatAkan did not challenge the way in which he became a passive sub-ject of care, for this is the image of asylum which has so regularlybeen presented, performed and articulated through public policy,media discourses and popular narratives. In encounters such asthese over the right to the kitchen, power relations of care and gen-erosity are negotiated, shifted and occasionally reformed, yet oftensuch negotiations draw upon a series of past experiences, dis-courses and assumptions – of who does what, when and where –which are left unsaid (Connolly, 2002). The dispossession felt byAkan highlights not simply the ways in which perceived notionsof care and generosity can become ordered and normalised, butalso how small acts of apparent concern can have significant andunintended consequences. Impacts which are unpredictable anduncertain, reliant, in part, on the contingent ‘throwntogetherness’of relations that construct drop-in spaces (Massey, 2005). It is forthis reason that such points of tension are hard to avoid withinspaces of care. Yet this demands not an acceptance of such risks,but rather a need to be ever more attentive to the ways in whichactions, ideas and apparently natural assumptions of placement,position and order affect all those present in different ways.

8. (Re)producing the exclusions of care

What the caring relations of The Talking Shop indicate is theway in which an ethic of care and generosity may act to positionindividuals within an economy of rightful giving, caring andbelonging. While critiques of the ethic of care centre upon the will-ingness, and crucially the ability, to ‘give’ to others (see Beasley andBacchi, 2005; Chan, 2005; Derrida, 1992; Korf, 2007; Zizek, 2008),as an assertion of power and control, I would argue that therelations of The Talking Shop indicate a wider resonance for suchpositions. For normalising certain relations of care in The TalkingShop reproduces a vision of the UK’s relation to asylum and indoing so reproduces the exclusions and inequalities of that vision.

The Talking Shop was a well intended place in many ways, anddid indeed seek to offer a place to meet and interact with others forasylum seekers so often left socially isolated. My argument is notto dismiss those gifts which were offered here, as for many theywere central to finding a way to ‘go on’ with their lives, but it isto assert that the power relations which saturate such generositybe acknowledged. Here generosity and care were structured inrelationships which centred on a particular image of the asylumseeker – that of the vulnerable, dependent and rightless victim ofthe state. We may see this image if we return to Rebecca’s accountof The Talking Shop;

I’d say it’s like a place for them [asylum seekers] to come wherethey’re welcomed, because most of the time they’re kind ofinvisible, they just walk around and people just, just peopleare just really horrible about them and if they go there theyknow that there’s people that don’t mind them being here,and want to have them here (Rebecca interview, 2007).

Here, the asylum seeker is presented as a figure to be cared for,to be accommodated within a given space. Yet this is an image cen-trally constructed on an account of compassion, of feeling for oth-ers. Korf (2007) argues that such a reliance on compassion as amotivational force is indicative of caring approaches to others,yet it is also a means of asserting the asymmetrical nature of giv-ing. Thus for Korf (2007, p. 370, original emphasis);

‘Compassion creates asymmetric relations: it is born from a feel-ing of superiority. . .Compassion is also asymmetric, because thegiving self feels compassionate, is active, while the receivingother is pitied and thus passive’.

The danger of generosity then is that of reproducing relations ofpower and passivity. Within The Talking Shop attempts were madeto resist such dominant readings of position and belonging, suchthat the kitchen was presented as an open and accessible spaceto all. Yet the reality of the encounters and interactions which pat-terned this space were those of a less mutual equality of access,rather, distinctions of position, assumption and experience cameto dictate how both service users and volunteers interacted andhow they came to interpret the roles and positions of others. With-in these moments of interaction the possibility for a reorientationof positions of care was present, yet it was all too often lost asencounters fell back upon well-worn expectations and assump-tions of rightful positions of care and what it means to give. In suchmoments the possibility of presenting a different relation of care,one not so heavily wedded to ideas of status and possession, waslost as the anticipated performance of a compassionate, caring cit-izen came to the fore. In this move the right to care, and as impor-tantly the right to not care, was not contested. The mode of ethicalengagement that emerged through such expectations centred uponan image of compassion that is ‘not about making the powerful lessso, it is about inviting them not to exercise their power. It invitesthose who have been uncharitable to be charitable, but it doesnot remove from them the power to be uncharitable’ (Hage,1998, p. 95).

What such a politics of compassion achieves is the partial denialof agency for those presented as ‘in need’ of care, compassion andgenerosity. In The Talking Shop this manifested itself in encountersthat reproduced an image of the asylum seeker as the ‘victim’ ofthe ‘asylum system’, a bureaucratic machine through which deci-sions were made and lives decided upon with little capacity forcontestation. Through this system, asylum seekers were presentedas ‘bare life’ (Agamben, 1998) – as individuals capable of beingabandoned by the state and placed ‘beyond the law’. Here asylumseekers might be seen to inhabit a precarious position reliant uponthe ‘good will’ of the sovereign for survival as they are offered no

J. Darling / Geoforum 42 (2011) 408–417 415

recourse to political challenge, rather all that may be used is theirsurvival itself as a resource through which to seek a political voiceas Edkins and Pin-Fat (2005) suggest. Similarly, in The Talking Shopwe might note how those reciprocal ‘gifts’ offered by asylum seek-ers were often those of survival itself, of their own knowledge,thoughts and experiences as attributes accumulated through sur-vival and everyday life, rather than possessions accumulatedthrough any sovereign or property-inflected right. Asylum seekerswere only able to give that which they possessed – survival andembodiment, presence in its starkest form (Darling, 2009). Herewe might further note one of those ‘wider inscriptions’ of drop-inrelations which Parr (2000) considers, for when viewed throughsuch a lens, the place of drop-in centres such as The Talking Shopwithin a system of political and social marginality for asylum seek-ers takes on a highly contested form. In part such sites may offermoments of welcome, generosity and care as we have seen, butthey may also play a part in reproducing that very system of sov-ereign positioning, division and repression which maintains thefigure of the citizen through the biopolitical creation of ‘bare life’.The Talking Shop might thus be argued to occupy a conflicted posi-tion within a moral economy of ‘compassionate repression’ (Fassin,2005), through which the care afforded to some is provided at theexpense of reproducing a system of distinction and divisionthrough which the recipient of such care is constructed as a non-political subject of both compassion and repression at the same time(see Zizek, 2008, 1999). In this manner, the positioning of asylumseekers as individuals to be cared for thus acted to reproduce notonly a position of the volunteer as a generous ‘good citizen’, buta positioning of asylum seekers as victims to be accommodated,cared for and pitied. The active, caring citizen is constructed hereas one equally capable of being uncaring, ungenerous and evenhostile, while the figure of the asylum seeker as ‘bare life’ is main-tained as a passive recipient of either response – subject to thewhims of compassion.

9. Conclusion

In this paper I have examined the social production of TheTalking Shop not as a place of uncomplicated belonging or of aromanticised resurgence of community across boundaries of dif-ference and status, rather, I have consider how the drop-in centrewas produced as a site of complex relations through which ideasof care were performed and momentary feelings of welcomearticulated. In concluding this account of The Talking Shop I wishto highlight three central concerns that emerge from studying thepower relations, and spatial contours, of asylum and care. How-ever, first it is important to note the limited nature of this re-search, for while I believe that the relations of The TalkingShop might be usefully interrogated to examine the power rela-tions that condition moments of care and generosity as responsesto asylum within the UK, the specificities of The Talking Shopclearly play a major role in shaping such relations. The contingentnature of this spatial accomplishment must therefore be kept inmind when thinking through the wider resonances of suchencounters. The three lines of resonance I wish to draw from thissite must therefore be viewed as partial and situated reflectionsand do not seek to overlook the myriad of relations of solidarity,equality and politicisation that may be performed in other drop-in spaces.

The first point to make here is to recognise the central rolewhich spaces such as The Talking Shop may come to play in thelives of those seeking sanctuary in the UK. For individuals oftenwaiting for decisions on asylum status for months and even yearsin some cases, the structure offered by a twice weekly drop-incentre, together with the friendships developed here, proved

central in offering an informal support network and the strengthto carry on from day to day. For some the very notion of care itself,of being valued, even as a passive subject of compassion, was aproductive feeling, one which rarely took hold in their experiencesof the asylum system.

The second point to make here is that the practices of care notedin The Talking Shop are limited by a concern with compassion as amoral response to others which allows for the maintenance of afixed and hierarchical account of charity and generosity. Here con-tours of belonging, citizenship and political presence are in partmarked, and maintained, through the assumptions and perfor-mances of normalised relations of care. In the case of those seekingasylum I have argued that such contours take on a further politi-cally charged resonance, for the challenges and conflicts embodiedhere are not simply over claims to belong within this church halltwice a week, but rather assume a spatial and affective resonanceas claims to belonging, respect and refuge beyond those walls. TheTalking Shop was therefore a space which drew together diversenarratives of welcome and reciprocity, but it was also a site whichspread outwards into relations beyond its twice weekly accom-plishment as a shared space.

It is this expansive potential which leads me to my final point.For if the drop-in centre was a site of multiple narratives, practicesand notions of acceptable generosity coming into continuous con-tact and negotiation, might there be space here for the modulationor alteration of such practices and performances. If, as I have ar-gued, the relations of The Talking Shop matter, then it becomesimportant to consider how spaces such as The Talking Shop canbe developed as sites which offer alternative visions of asylum,drawing upon both an ethical concern with care and a political fo-cus upon justice and rightful presence. Such an approach demandsa number of things; it demands a continual attentiveness on thepart of all those involved in the accomplishment of such sharedspaces – volunteers, organisers, service users and others – of theways in which their actions and reactions are responded to. In thissense The Talking Shop might foster practices of ‘critical respon-siveness’ (Connolly, 1999) through which individuals enter into ex-changes of care with an awareness of the presumptions they carrywith them. Approaching The Talking Shop in such a manner is notto radically reorder the relations at play, but rather to enter intothose relations in a spirit of open engagement through whichone is receptive to, perhaps even expects, questioning, challenging,and perhaps unsettling, responses. Responses which place in doubtthe right of some to ‘give’ in particular, presubscribed, ways.

Rethinking such modes of response and assumption is central tonot only producing spaces of care which are centred on ideas ofentitlement and justice, but also to co-constructing spaces inwhich asylum seekers become political agents – individuals whoquestion, challenge and assert their right to belong. As Korf(2007, p. 375) notes being a ‘rightful claimant to support is some-thing qualitatively very different than being a recipient that simplyreceives a gift from a generous person’, and in politically challeng-ing the discourses of care which circulate spaces such as The Talk-ing Shop we might begin the work of considering how thoseseeking asylum could actively assume the status of ‘rightful claim-ants’ to care. As this paper has suggested this shifting of positions isnot an easy task, rather it demands attention and experimentation.Even in moments of apparent openness and care presumptions ofrights and belonging can undermine the most well intentioned re-sponses. At the same time, moments of generous care might bewelcomed by those seeking refuge, despite the power relations in-stalled in such acts. Volunteers might thus consider the roles whichasylum seekers come to play in The Talking Shop through a widerpromotion of involvement in the drop-in centres’ organisation,structure and accomplishment – from tea making to the runningof this space. Such a shift might also encompass an effort to build

416 J. Darling / Geoforum 42 (2011) 408–417

shared projects of political solidarity and struggle in which allthose present have an equal investment and an equal voice, fromthe local political challenges which accrue in simply keeping TheTalking Shop open, to the solidaristic language and claims ofanti-deportation campaigns forged through the relations of drop-in space (see Nyers, 2003). The task of examining the manifoldcontours of spaces such as The Talking Shop is therefore not touncritically affirm the care they offer, but neither is it to dismissthe affective possibilities they harbour. The task put forward isone of examining how such spaces might become sites of politicalpotential and critical openness, wherein the possibility of hope is‘established in the accumulation of small acts that defy division,hatred and mutual misunderstanding, where the counter-intuitive(that is, that people refuse to be defined by the differences that aresocially ascribed to them) is intuitive’ (Back, 2007, p. 167).

Acknowledgements

My thanks to all those present at The Talking Shop for theirtime, care and patience during this research. The research on whichthis paper is based was supported by the Economic and Social Re-search Council (Award No. PTA-030-2005-00955). Earlier versionsof this paper were presented at the Geographies of Tolerance ses-sion at the AAG Annual Conference 2010 and to the School of Geo-graphical Sciences at the University of Bristol, my thanks to theorganisers and audiences at both events for their support and con-structive comments. My thanks to Ash Amin, Mike Crang, Tariq Ja-zeel and Helen Wilson for their engaging and insightful commentson earlier drafts of this paper and to Katie Willis and three anony-mous reviewers for a really detailed and helpful set of comments.Finally, my thanks to Charlie Ford for making me think anew aboutcare and generosity. All errors remain my own.

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