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 cul-tures. 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 renegotiat-ing and reimagining the boundaries and contours of what it means to be European, and this is sensed, imagined and performed in the everyday practices