Since the 2015 European “hospitality crisis” (Lendaro & al. 2019), there has been an increase in community-based, citizen, and individual initiatives of hosting refugees in homes or private environments. These “intimate” engagements, whether undertaken in the name of an ethic of hospitality, solidarity or charity, are not new; they were a key form of refugee reception after the world wars or the breakup of Yugoslavia (Marchetti 2020), and have been institutionalized in countries such as Canada through private “sponsorship programs” (Reynolds and Clark-Kazak 2019). What seems novel is how these practices, that often started out as spontaneous and informal acts of solidarity towards refugees, are increasingly institutionalized across Western Europe and perceived as an opportunity to foster the “integration” of refugees or develop refugee resettlement programs. This project looks at this recent trend, by focusing on formal programs of private hosting in which ordinary residents are paired with asylum-seekers or refugees to “build bridges” between them and their host society. These initiatives vary from a commitment to meet a refugee once a week for several months to share activities, to offering them housing on a long term-basis. Non-profit organizations and sometimes state-mandated actors mediate the relationship between hosts and hosted. This research aims to understand how these private hosting programs, while being intimate acts of hospitality, articulate with asylum, reception and integration policies. How are they shaped by the assumptions, categorizations and asymmetries underlying these policies, while at the same time, shaping them? How do ordinary residents participating in these programs attempt to contest the bordering practices of these policies, while becoming enrolled in the production and implementation of migration policies? In other words, what are the entanglements between the private and the public at stake in these intimate encounters? This project will be developed along three axes: 1) documenting the diversity of private hosting programs in two European countries 2) exploring the everyday practices of inter-mediation at stake in these initiatives and 3) analyzing the actual relation of hosting at play between the host and the hosted within private environments. This anthropological project is situated in the field of critical migration studies, at the intersection of literature on social movements, private hosting of refugees, and neoliberalization of asylum reception. It will rely on multiple case studies in France and Switzerland, on ethnographic methods and intersectional analysis. Theoretically, it will contribute to better understanding the complex nexus between solidarity movements with refugees, migration control and the privatization of the asylum field. Our project will also provide an empirically based account of the diversity of these formal programs, the processes of intermediation and selection they rely on, their complex articulations with asylum and integration policies, and the extent to which they enact new ways of practicing and imagining refugee reception in Western Europe. Through diverse disseminations means, it will contribute to provide insights about the potential and limitations of these new forms of private hospitality in Europe.