What is it about?
We usually think of hospitality as welcoming and caring for other people. This article asks what happens when we broaden that idea to include our relationships with animals, microorganisms, ecosystems and the Earth itself. Looking at hospitality at different scales, from the microscopic life within our bodies to our relations with other species and ultimately the entire planet, it shows how deeply human life depends on other forms of life. The article argues that hospitality can help us think differently about how we live together in a time of interconnected social, health and environmental crises. Rather than seeing humans simply as hosts who manage the world around them, it invites us to recognize that we are also guests and participants in complex networks of mutual dependence.
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Why is it important?
Climate change, biodiversity loss, pandemics and other interconnected crises make it increasingly difficult to think about human well-being separately from the health of other species and the planet. What is distinctive about this article is that it uses the familiar idea of hospitality to connect relationships operating at very different scales, from cells and microbes to animals, ecosystems and the Earth. In doing so, it challenges the assumption that humans are always the hosts and everything else is our guest. This shift encourages a more humble understanding of our place in the world and opens up hospitality as a practical and ethical way of thinking about care, responsibility and coexistence. Ultimately, the article asks how such a broader understanding of hospitality might contribute to a more sustainable and convivial future for humans and other forms of life.
Perspectives
I have long been interested in hospitality because it seems so simple and familiar, yet becomes much more complicated as soon as we ask who has the right to welcome whom, and on whose terms. In this article, I wanted to push that question further. What if humans are not always the hosts? What if we think of ourselves as guests of other species, of ecosystems, or even of the planet itself? Moving between very different scales helped me see hospitality less as a one-off act of welcoming and more as an ongoing relationship of care, reciprocity and adjustment. I find this particularly important today because many of the crises we face remind us that humans are neither separate from the rest of life nor fully in control of it. For me, rethinking hospitality therefore also requires humility: learning how to live with others, human and non-human, in a shared world that none of us can claim entirely as our own.
Professor Noel B. Salazar
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Restorying hospitality in times of biopolitics and polycrisis: A multi-scalar, more-than-human perspective, Hospitality & Society, March 2026, Intellect,
DOI: 10.1386/hosp_00108_1.
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