Sensing, imagining, doing Europe: Europeanisation in the boundary work of welcome cultures

ABSTRACT

In the article, we shed light on and problematize the everyday sensing, imagining, and doing of Europe in the boundary work of welcome cultures. By relating the practices and performances of the welcome cultures to a long tradition of thought problematizing European identity around the notion of cosmopolitanism, we read welcoming activities as openings for imagining and doing an inclusive Europe in a space apart from and beyond the institutional violence of exclusive borders. It is our argument that through the everyday activities of welcoming, ‘other Europes’ emerge, heterotopia, materialized as ‘elsewheres’ articulated in resistance to and as well as mirroring and mimicking the EU and state bordering. We thereby illuminate how European welcome cultures open for renegotiating and reimagining the boundaries and contours of what it means to be European, and this is sensed, imagined and performed in the everyday practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Other Europes
• bordering practices
• ethnography
• welcome
• heterotopia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Doing Europe does not belong to European citizens but rather is constantly made both beyond Europe and by non-Europeans and ‘denizens’. Migrants are also entangled in the doing and becoming of Europe and their participation in welcome practices is one aspect of their participation in Europe’s ontological politics (Mol 1999).

2. As in ’multi-coloured’ in a metaphorical sense.

3. The mistrust intensified in the aftermath of events on New Year’s Eve 2015 in Cologne, where male refugees harassed several women partying.