Hospitality: Concept, Practices, and Tensions

9:15-9:30

Opening remarks by Fanny Forsberg Lundell. Head of Department, Professor, Department of Romance Studies and Classics, Stockholm University.

9:30-10:30

Keynote Speaker Jón Viðar Sigurðsson. Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History, University of Oslo

Hospitality (in the Viking Age)
Abstract
This paper examines hospitality in the Viking Age as a vital social, cultural, and political institution. Practices such as gift giving and feasting were not benign acts of generosity, but strategic instruments embedded in systems of reciprocity, obligation, and hierarchy. Gifts created lasting ties and often placed recipients in positions of indebtedness, while feasts provided highly visible arenas where wealth, influence, and social rank were displayed, negotiated, and affirmed. These practices reveal forms of friendship that were simultaneously personal and political, shaped by material exchange and the cultivation of alliances.
Rather than proposing a fixed definition of hospitality, the paper emphasises its procedural and performative dimensions. Hospitality always involves both a giver and a recipient, whose interaction unfolds within culturally regulated rules and expectations. Crucially, these exchanges take place in specific venues and are observed by an audience whose judgement shapes the reputations of both host and guest. Hospitality therefore operates not as a private courtesy but as a social performance governed by tradition, where deviations from established norms could entail significant consequences. Viewed in this way, hospitality emerges as a key mechanism through which Viking Age communities articulated identity, negotiated status, and managed the boundaries between insiders and outsiders.

Chair: Tzortzis Ikonomou (Senior Lecturer in Italian, Department of Romance Studies and Classics, Stockholm University.)

10:30-10:45

Coffee Break

10:45-12:15

Panel 1. Hospitality as Mediation and Encounter
Elise Gandon (PhD, Maîtresse de conférences/Associate Professor. Université Lumière Lyon 2) Museums as Hospitable Spaces: Informal Language Learning and Collaborative Mediation for Adult Migrants in Lyon.
Everita Andronova (PhD student at the Department of Slavic and Baltic Studies, Finnish, Dutch and German, Stockholm University) From Undeudsche to Lettische and Latviešu ‘Latvian’: Practice of Hospitality in Early Written Latvian (16th–17th cc.) Texts.
Isabella Varricchio (PhD student at Department of Teaching and Learning at Stockholm University). Towards an intercultural philosophy teaching.
Chair: Rakel Österberg (Associate Professor of Spanish Linguistics, Department of Romance Studies and Classics, Stockholm University.)

12:15-14:00

Lunch Break

Anna Terzi. (PhD student at the Department of Romance and Classical Languages at Stockholm University) When Acceptance is Only Apparent: Discursive Hospitality in Italian Political Talk.
Víctor Ramírez Rivas (PhD Candidate in Linguistics). Discord Servers: Inclusion-Exclusion Environments.
Ghizlane Benabderrahmane (LLC laboratory, Abou Bekr Belkaid University) Living Beside the Unwelcomed: Hospitality and Moral Silence in The Zone of Interest.

Chair: Gianfranco Selgas (Researcher at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, and a Guest Researcher at the Nordic Institute of Latin American Studies, at the Department of Romance Studies and Classics, Stockholm University).

10:45-11:00

Coffee Break

11:00-12:15

Keynote Speaker: Peter Jackson Rova, Department of History of Religions, Stockholm University
Eating with others/eating by others: Probing the deep past of hospitality and hostility
Abstract
Institutions of hospitality, sacrifice, and poetic praise in early Indo-European societies formed a shared ideological matrix linking food-sharing, kinship, fame, and heroism. By drawing on Greek myth (e.g., Prometheus and Hermes), hymns of the Rigveda, and epic traditions such as the Odyssey and Beowulf, this presentation seeks to show how ritualized commensality defined boundaries between gods and humans, hosts and guests, patrons and poets. Sacrificial feasting both created symbolic kinship and staged hierarchy, while violations of hospitality – figured in monsters like Polyphemus and Grendel – dramatized threats to that social order.
Fame and social eating thus emerge as mutually reinforcing mechanisms by which early societies imagined hierarchy, negotiated inclusion and exclusion, and sustained civic religion.

Chair: Anthony John Lappin (Lecturer in Spanish Literature, Department of Romance Studies and Classics, Stockholm University).

12:15-14:00

Lunch Break

Elisa Viteri Márquez, (PhD student at the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Stockholm University) & Miguel Tofiño-Vian (Creative Writer, Stockholm University). “The Process is The Piece”: Speculative Fiction as Methodology for Interdisciplinary Understandings of the More-Than-Human.
Chair: Santi Luca Famà-Berglund (Doctor in Italian Literature, Department of Romance Studies and Classics, Stockholm University).

10:15-10:30

Coffee Break

10:30-12:00

Panel 5. Hospitality Without Hosts: Symbiosis, Ritual, and Mediation.
Kate Montgomery. Hospitality as Symbiosis: Lessons from Lichens.
Isabella Schilcher. The Sword as Shintai: Inviting and Hosting the Kami at Isonokami Shrine.
Carla Alanis. Hosting Presence: Material Mediation in Contemporary Latin American Literature.
Chair: Mickaelle Cedergren (Professor of French, Department of Romance Studies and Classics, Stockholm University).

12:00-14:00

Lunch Mingle

14:00-15:00

Keynote Speaker: Christophe Premat. Professor, Department of Romance Studies and Classics, Stockholm University.
The Host and the Enemy: Hospitality, Sovereignty, and the Paradox of Welcome.
Abstract
Hospitality is frequently presented as an ethical virtue or a humanitarian imperative, yet it is inseparable from relations of power, sovereignty, and exclusion. This lecture examines the constitutive tension between hospitality and hostility by exploring how the act of welcoming is conditioned by law, authority, and the right to refuse. Far from being a purely moral gesture, hospitality emerges as a paradoxical practice in which openness depends on control, and the promise of friendship is constantly shadowed by the possibility of enmity.
Drawing on a genealogy of hospitality, the lecture places Jacques Derrida, José Ortega y Gasset, and María Zambrano in dialogue with Francophone African thinkers such as Achille Mbembe and Valentin-Yves Mudimbe. Derrida’s distinction between unconditional hospitality and its necessary juridical conditions exposes the aporia at the heart of welcome: hospitality must be offered without reserve, yet it can only exist through borders, rules, and sovereign authority. Ortega y Gasset’s reflections on coexistence and crisis illuminate the political anxieties that shape collective responses to alterity, while Zambrano’s philosophy of exile reframes hospitality as an ethical relation grounded in dispossession, vulnerability, and the loss of mastery.
Francophone African thought radicalizes this paradox by situating hospitality within the histories of colonial domination, racialized borders, and forced mobility. Mbembe’s analyses of sovereignty and necropolitics reveal how contemporary regimes of movement transform the foreigner into a permanent suspect, while Mudimbe’s critique of epistemological enclosure shows how the Other is welcomed only insofar as they remain intelligible within dominant frameworks of knowledge. By mobilizing the semantic proximity between hospes (host/guest) and hostis (enemy), the lecture argues that hostility is not an accidental deviation from hospitality but one of its internal conditions. Hospitality thus appears as a fragile and unstable practice, suspended between ethical openness and sovereign closure. Acknowledging this tension allows hospitality to be rethought not as a moral comfort zone, but as a critical concept for understanding contemporary conflicts over borders, rights, and belonging in a postcolonial world.
Chair: Juan Carlos Cruz Suárez (Associate Professor in Spanish, Department of Romance Studies and Classics, Stockholm University.)