Rachele Shamouni (QMUL) - 2019-20 Students
r.shamouni-naghde@qmul.ac.uk

The heritage of hospitality. A case study in Paris - La Chapelle

My project consists in thinking about the ‘heritage’ of ‘hospitality’. My broadest research question is “Can hospitality be regarded as heritage? If yes, how and under which conditions?
In order to deal with this question, I start from a very broad definition of hospitality as: practices whereby humans meet each other. As for the notion of heritage, I prefer not to start from a definition, but I keep in mind two references. The first one in David Harvey’s (Harvey, 2001) that heritage is a historical process rather than the end of history and that it is the dialogue that any present has had with its past. The second is Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s idea that heritage is a meta-cultural production whereby cultural production is represented in spaces (lists, archives, records) separated from the living communities that perform them. Through this theoretical prism, I look at the case study of a free breakfast offered everyday since 2016 in Paris – La Chapelle.

Primary supervisor: Prof Alison Blunt, QMUL
Secondary supervisor: Anna-Louise Milne, University of London in Paris