“This Is a White Space”: On Restorative Possibilities of Hospitality in a Raced Space

On Online Practices of Hospitality in Higher Education

“…Recent work published in this journal has opened up new trajectories for re-thinking hospitality in education as an affective, spatial, and relational practice (Zembylas 2019 ). Scholars have critiqued and taken further a Derridean hospitality-as-ethics framework, proposing a less metaphorical view of hospitality, and proposing one that accounts for emotions, spatiality and affectivity, encompassing everyday practices (Zembylas 2019 ; Sinha 2018 ; Rasheed 2018 ; Bryzzheva 2018 ). In this section we discuss our understanding of the current debate on hospitality in education, starting with Derrida’s work, presenting the critiques that have been moved to it, and finally positioning ourselves within the debate.…”

“…Critiques based on the metaphorical enactment of hospitality have been moved both to Ruitenberg’s framework and to Derrida (Zembylas 2019 ; Santoro 2016 ; Eppert 2011; Sinha and Rasheed 2018 ; Sinha 2018 ; Bryzzheva 2018 ; Rasheed 2018 ). Building on Bulley’s idea of hospitality as spatial and affective (Bulley 2015 ), Zembylas ( 2019 ) further develops the concept of affective hospitality in education by drawing on affect theory.…”

“…He argues for a re-conceptualization of hospitality as a material and affective practice which needs to pay attention to how bodies interact in particular places, building or demolishing ‘atmospheric walls’ (Ahmed 2014 ). Shilpi Sinha ( 2018 ), Shaireen Rasheed ( 2018 ), and Lyudmila Bryzzheva ( 2018 ) in their respective essays, similarly discuss ‘racialised bodies’—referring to non-white bodies—pointing out that these have received scarce attention in the hospitality-as-ethics framework. The authors’ dissatisfaction with such framework alludes to the impossibility to make it work in the classroom where there are non-white bodies and spaces: racialised students and teachers, inhabiting spaces marked by ‘whiteness’ as these are supplanted by white structures and white social systems and order, are excluded from a truly hospitable framework.…”

“…The adoption of an ethic-of-hospitality framework that follows Derrida’s conceptualisations and the insoluble tensions he identified (Derrida 2000 , 2001 , 2002a , b ) has been supported in particularly by Claudia Ruitenberg, who developed and applied such framework to curriculum and pedagogy (Ruitenberg 2011a , b , 2015 , 2018 ). Other authors, writing on Studies in Philosophy and Education , have argued for a concept of hospitality that accounts for affectivities and the (spatial) materialities, developing the idea of affective hospitality , which would be the basis for transformational pedagogies (Zembylas 2019 ; Sinha 2018 ; Rasheed 2018 ; Bryzzheva 2018 ).…”

Teaching Online in an Ethic of Hospitality: Lessons from a Pandemic

“…While Kant had touched on it in Perpetual Peace, in 1795, Derrida explores a conceptualization of hospitality that is not bound by territory but is rather unconditional, offered to the one we do not even know the name. Even though Derrida did not apply the metaphor specifically to the realm of education, its postulates have been greatly embraced by academics when conceptualizing hospitable education (e.g., Biesta & Egéa-Kuehne 2001 ; Bryzzheva 2018 ; Hung 2013 ; Peters & Biesta 2009 ; Ruitenberg 2016 ; Zembylas 2020 ). Although the characteristics of hospitality can be analyzed in different ways (cf.…”