Hospitability: The Communicative Architecture of Humanitarian Securitization at Europe's Borders

This paper explores the communicative architecture of reception at the peak of Europe's 2015-2016 migration crisis. Drawing on fieldwork at one of Europe's outer bordersthe Greek island of Chiosthe paper examines the border as a site where refugee and migrant reception takes place and where the parameters of Europe's ethico-political response to the crisis are set. The paper demonstrates that the continent's double requirement of security and care produces a new and highly ambivalent moral order, hospitability. Constituted through techno-symbolic networks of mediation, hospitability reaffirms dominant theorizations of the border as an order of power and exclusion but goes beyond these in highlighting micro-connections of solidarity that simultaneously coexist with and attempt to challenge this order.