Performing kinship with illegalised migrants. Comparing hospitality practices in Brussels and Rome

While the so-called European migration crisis has been echoed with increasingly hostile EU border policies and anti-migrant rhetoric, it has also prompted many citizens' solidarity initiatives towards migrants across the continent. In this context, hosting migrants at home emerged as a new, puzzling and exciting phenomena. This project aims to be one of the first to conduct a systematic analysis of the hospitality practices - providing shelter at one's home - and the strong affective family-like relations (fictive kinship practices) emerging between migrants illegalised by the State and their urban resident hosts in Brussels and Rome. Drawing on ethnographic research methods, this project seeks to find answers to the following questions. How do citizens and migrants deal with power asymmetries in such intimate hospitality relationships? How do these relationships develop over time (i.e. when the migrant no longer stays with the host, reaches a new destination or obtains asylum)? As well as how do they intersect with such identity markers as race, class, gender or different urban, societal, and political constellations?