In Search of Welcome: Tracing Hospitality in the Sicilian Borderlands

My work currently explores bordering and reception practices at Europe's Mediterranean edge. I examine the interrelatedness of local praxis and political narratives (around hospitality, tolerance, conviviality, diversity, welcome, etc.) with national and supra-national structures of power, social abandonment and marginalization, ideas of peripherality and modernity, and processes of re-making social and cultural identities. I am interested in how inclusion and exclusion are inscribed affectively, politically, existentially, and in the imaginaries of people involved on the ground ('locals' and 'newcomers' alike). My geo-political vantage point is southern Italy, with a particular emphasis on Sicily and the Central Mediterranean.