The Guestbook Project is an ongoing artistic, academic, and multi-media experiment in hospitality. Directed by philosopher Richard Kearney and sponsored by Boston College, the project's core themes are the relationship between host and stranger; violence and reconciliation; the citizen and the alien.

Guestbook Announces Hospitality Youth Prize

‘Exchanging Stories – Changing Histories’

In Spring 2015, Guestbook will be awarding an International Prize for the best video of exchanging stories between youths in divided communities. The Prize will go to the most imaginative and inspiring digital project that represents the creative overcoming of divisions between opposed traditions, religions and cultures. The goal is to have both parties 1) tell their respective histories of enmity, and 2) retell these stories in a way that creates a shared future from the past.

The videos will be digitally made and not exceed five minutes. An international jury will judge the competition and the prize will be awarded by a well-known figure at a ceremony at Boston College. The winners will be flown to Boston for the award where they will screen their work and engage in conversation with students from the BC/Guestbook Seminar on ‘Narrative Imagination: From Hostility to Hospitality’. All applicants will participate in the Guestbook interactive website and blog where the competing videos from divided communities throughout the world are posted.

Sample Video - Dokto or Takeshima: "Between Islands" (2013)

Sample Video - In Peace, Apart (2014)

Recent Guestbook Publications and Films

Books:

Hosting the Stranger: Between Religions, edited by Richard Kearney and James Taylor, Continuum, New York (2011)

Phenomenologies of the Stranger, Between Hostility and Hospitality, edited by Richard Kearney and Kascha Semonovitch, Fordham University Press, New York (2011)

Special edition of the journal Religion and the Arts, Hospitality: Imagining the Stranger, edited by Chris Yates, (2010)

On Hosting the Stranger, edited by Thomas Epstein, New Arcadia Review (2010) 

Traversing the Heart: Journeys in Interreligious Imagination, edited by Richard Kearney and Eileen Rizo-Patron, Brill, Leiden (2011)

Films (2012):

U.S.-Mexico Border: Under Strange Sun 

Dokdo or Takeshima: Between Islands 

Films (2011):

Mitrovica: Facing the Stranger Across the Divide - Young People of Serbia and Bosnia Speak Up (Petra and James Taylor) 

Beyond the Walls: Derry/Londonderry (Martin Melarkey) 

Jerusalem: Across the Divide (Sarit Larry)

PROJECT OVERVIEW
HOSTING THE STRANGER

FACING THE STRANGER IN DIVIDED COMMUNITIES (2010-2011)

Jerusalem: Across the Divide (2011)

Mitrovica: Young people of Serbia and Bosnia Speak out (2010)

Derry/Londonberry: Beyond the Walls (2011)

U.S.-Mexico Border: Under a Strange Sun (2012)

Dokdo or Takeshima: Between Islands

WELCOMING THE STRANGER ACROSS RELIGIONS (2010-2011)

Skelligs: Crossing Thresholds at the Edge of the World (2010)

Bangalore: Reconciling Strangers - A Peace Council (2010)

Glenstal: Rites of Hospitality (2009)

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