Convivial reflexivity in the changing city – a tale of hospitality or hostility?

Abstract

The article interrogates whether citizens’ (embodied) encounters with migrant populations (newcomers and settled) enable or hinder convivial reflexivity in a multicultural city of compounded crises. Convivial reflexivity refers to the embodied process of identity-making that is rooted in the context of everyday life and emerges at the juncture of embodied encounters with the Other and the intense mediation of migration that shapes citizens’ perceptions and practices. The article draws on a four-month intense ethnographic study in an Athenian neighbourhood and reveals how, even in a very tense environment of crises and intensified racism, everyday encounters in the city could mediate class solidarities and support the emergence of networked commons against national and racial hierarchies. The article aims to move beyond claims of conviviality as a natural outcome of urban encounters, and instead to reveal a convivial reflexivity that understands urban encounters as an assemblage of cognition, affect and embodiment.