Interfering with Borders, Becoming-with Others: Parisian Welcome Cultures and the Ontological Politics of Bordering

This research, located in the interdisciplinary field of border studies, investigates and conceptualizes de/bordering processes from the perspective of welcome cultures, that is from grassroots movements of refugee solidarity that emerged in Europe after the 2015 "long summer of migration". It locates in Paris, a city that is both home to a plurality of heterogeneous forms of grassroots welcome and an exemplification of the continuity of bordering practices and controls away from European and French territorial borderlines.

The research examines Parisian welcomers’ participation in the ontological politics of bordering that is the politics of what borders are, should be, and might be. In doing so it shows how ordinary European subjects are and become "response-able" in de/bordering processes through the practice of welcome and details how the phenomena of welcoming and bordering are entangled. The research is based on a year-long ethnographic fieldwork in Parisian welcome cultures, and its insight builds on the range of concepts that emerged from the "practice turn" in border studies when the field started thinking about borders, not just as territorial lines but as made and un-made in "the mess" of everyday life as well as through more official and formal practices close and away to borderlines. The dissertation brings them in dialogue with a new materialist, non-dualist, immanent approach to ontology.

After a presentation of the context and aims in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 provides an overview of border theories and how adopting a new materialist ontology shapes this research approach to ontological politics. Chapter 3 presents the ethnographic work in more detail and discusses how adopting a new-materialist ontology leads to an ethnographic practice that is “diffractive”, that is, based on "becoming-with" and "thinking-with" others.

To attend to the entanglement between welcoming and bordering and welcomers’participation in the ontological politics of bordering, the following Chapters diffract welcomers' practices along the concept of ethico-onto-epistemology (Barad), which signifies the entanglement of ontology (being), epistemology (knowing), and ethics(valuing). Chapter 4 examines the entanglements between bordering and welcoming through the lens of knowing and sensing. It focuses on how repeated encounters between the situated-knowledges of welcomers and exiles contribute to the unfolding and materialization of new border-ed/ing realities in the city of Paris. The Chapter describes how these shifts have real, material consequences, including the materialization of ParisianBorderland(s). Chapter 5 shifts its focus to the entanglement between bordering and welcoming through the lens of be(com)ing and doing. This Chapter shows how welcomers elaborate various trans-corporeal and more-than-human bodily metamorphoses, which interfere and undermine what borders can do in the context of Paris. Chapter 6 examines the entanglement between bordering and welcoming through the lens of valuing and imagining. This Chapter investigates inclusive spaces built by welcomers as heterotopia, as sites where responsibility and response-ability in relation to bordering is cultivated through various mundane doings aimed at “doing good”. Chapter 7 summarises the main findings of the previous analytical Chapters and explores how welcomers can be viewed as a figure for inhabiting and critically living in European borderlands. This Chapter delves into the welcomers art and practice of becoming-vulnerable, thickening, and re-problematizing borders, proliferating contact-zones and non-innocent forms of border multiperspectivisms, and conclude with reflections about fabulating borders beyond the human.