Hospitality is an important concept in contemporary discussions of national and international ethics and politics, especially when it comes to issues of migration and citizenship (Bulley 2015; Rosello 2001). From legal documents such as the European Union’s Dublin Regulation that governs political asylum to political conversations about the status of undocumented immigrants and refugees in Europe and the United States, (in)hospitality is at the heart of how governments and individuals make decisions about whether or how to welcome the Other as ‘stranger.’ Questions of being and belonging, sociocultural norms, laws, policies and politics, are all important factors that shape how to welcome and make space for strangers.

Theorizing hospitality in the humanities and the social sciences has been strongly influenced by Jacques Derrida’s writings, which make him, along with Emmanuel Levinas, “the concept’s foremost theorist” (Bulley 2015, p. 185). The field of education, and particularly educational theory, is no exception. Derrida’s (2000, 2002a, 2005) conceptualization of hospitality as ethics undergirds most discussions of hospitality in teachers-students interactions (e.g. Ruitenberg 2015; Hung 2013), discourses of cosmopolitan hospitality in education (e.g. Gregoriou 2003; Hansen 2010; Langmann 2011; Peters and Biesta 2009), and analyses of critical pedagogies of friendship and hospitality (e.g. Zembylas 2015). All of these works highlight that the ethic of hospitality has important educational implications in the ethical question of how to welcome the Other—the student, the stranger, the non-citizen.

Recent work published in this journal (Sinha and Rasheed 2018) has introduced some interesting new trajectories in theorizing hospitality by highlighting the importance of embodied experiences and the materiality of race in discussions of the tensions inherent in the notion of hospitality as ethics (Bryzzheva 2018; Rasheed 2018; Ruitenberg 2018; Sinha 2018)—such as the tension between ‘conditional’ and ‘unconditional’ hospitality (Derrida 2000, 2002a, 2005). This work responds to a lacuna in educational theory literature to grapple with the materiality of bodies in raced spaces (Sinha 2018). If we do not pay attention to the materiality of the raced body, suggests Sinha, we will fail to understand “how the ethic of hospitality is complicated and interrogated by the experience of racialized educators in their interactions with white students” (2018, p. 216). Similarly, Bryzzheva’s (2018) essay points out how educational spaces are already marked by whiteness that limit how hospitality takes place, especially if white educators fail to question these spaces. All in all, this recent work has begun to explore some aspects of hospitality that have not been addressed so far in educational discourses informed by Derrida’s ethic of hospitality.

This article seeks to reaffirm these new trajectories in theorizing hospitality in educational theory by pushing beyond the framework influenced by Derrida. In particular, I want to build on Bulley’s (2015) argument that Derrida’s notion of hospitality as ethics may be inadequate in helping us understand how we use hospitality in actual acts of hospitality and what their consequences are. For example, when the meaning and implications of hospitality is explored in contexts of racialized bodies within white educational spaces, as discussed in some of the essays mentioned above, then it is inevitable to pay attention to everyday acts of hospitality as they are manifested in a particular space. This space is constituted by the materiality of bodies and material boundaries that are simultaneously affirmed and crossed; it is within these boundaries that hospitality as ethics takes place. Importantly, though, hospitality is not only spatial and material, but also deeply affective—hence, Ryder’s (2015) term affective hospitality—namely, emotions and affects structure the experience of hospitality, a dimension that has gone fairly unnoticed in the literature on hospitality as ethics (Ryder 2015). In all examples of hospitality, argues Ryder, “the structural laws of hospitality cannot easily be separated from what could be considered the underlying emotions that are felt when encountering a stranger at our doorstep” such as fear, happiness, and curiosity (2015, p. 159).

I would argue, then, that theories of affect (Greg and Seigworth 2010; Sharma and Tygstrup 2015) raise important questions about the role of emotions and affects in rethinking the tensions highlighted by Derrida and educational theorists such as Ruitenberg (2015) alike: How do affect and emotion create new types of subjects and new relations and encounters between those subjects in particular contexts of hospitality, with a particular host and a particular guest (Ruitenberg 2015, p. 70)? What new spaces or possibilities of ethics and politics are generated by such relations and encounters within practices of hospitality that disrupt the assumptions regarding who/what can be a host, a home, and a stranger? How can pedagogy and curriculum in particular educational settings get organized so that teachers and students identify, interrogate and perhaps transform the conditions of affective hospitality?

This article begins by revisiting the notion of hospitality as ethics as proposed by Derrida and further elaborated in educational theorizing, addressing in particular how recent work attempts to respond to what has been missing from this discussion in relation to issues of embodiment and space. The second section outlines how actual acts of hospitality may be (re)conceived as spatial and affective relational practices. The third section takes on thinking about these issues from the lens of affect theory, turning in particular into the concepts of ‘affective atmospheres’ and ‘atmospheric walls’ to examine what they imply for theorizing hospitality. Finally, the last section explores some ethical, political and pedagogical implications of how teachers and students in particular contexts may reconsider some aspects of hospitality as ethics, paying attention to the micro-politics of hospitality as ethics, namely, its spatial, material and affective enactment in the everyday.

Hospitality-as-Ethics: Derrida’s Philosophy of Hospitality in Education

To appreciate Derrida’s (2000, 2002a, 2005) understanding of hospitality, we should situate it within the oeuvre of his broader political philosophy—one which is concerned with how to welcome the Other, especially the people who have been excluded from any system of politics or law and ask for refuge or justice. We can see this, for example, in Derrida’s concern for the so-called sans-papiers (people without papers/identity or ‘illegal aliens’) and the attempts to criminalize hospitality being offered to potentially illegal migrants (Derrida 2005, pp. 8–9). Therefore, Derrida distinguishes between laws of hospitality—as conditional and limited welcome based on legal restrictions and exclusions—and the law of hospitality—as unconditional, unlimited and absolute welcome of the Other beyond any legal or political dimensions.

These two senses of hospitality—namely, the conditional and the unconditional—are not oppositional, but rather full of paradoxes and tensions (Hung 2013; Ruitenberg 2015; Sinha 2018). On the one hand, for example, true hospitality requires that it is unconditional; on the other hand, absolute and unconditional hospitality is impossible within the legal and juridical system of nation-states. Ruitenberg (2015) identifies three fundamental tensions within which hospitality is caught: the non-dialectical tension between visitation (unconditional) and invitation (conditional); the tension between the simultaneous protection and surrender of the home, when a stranger/guest is received; and, the tension between offering hospitality to reciprocate for having been received, and hospitality as an unconditional gift. These tensions highlight the complexities and ambivalences in collective and individual attempts to negotiate the relation between the law and the laws. In other words, it is impossible for conditional hospitality to be understood without unconditional hospitality; the laws of conditional hospitality are destined to emerge out of the law of unconditional hospitality (Hung 2013). As Derrida has pointed out, “a politics that does not maintain a reference to this principle of unconditional hospitality is a politics that loses its reference to justice” (2002b, p. 101).

More importantly, these tensions highlight the deeply ethical dimensions of hospitality. In fact, for Derrida, hospitality is “ethicity itself […] the principle of ethics” (Derrida 1999, p. 51). As he further explains:

Hospitality is culture itself and not simply one ethic amongst others. Insofar as it has to do with the ethos, that is, the residence, one’s home, the familiar place of dwelling, inasmuch as it is a manner of being there, the manner in which we relate to ourselves and to others, to others as our own or as foreigners, ethics is hospitality, ethics is so thoroughly co-extensive with the experience of hospitality. (Derrida 2001, pp. 16–17, original emphasis)

In this famous and frequently cited quote, Derrida emphasizes that ethics-as-hospitality has to do with an individual’s ethos—namely, the “habitual way of being and the habitual place of being” (Ruitenberg 2015, p. 52, original emphasis) in the world. In other words, being ethical is always a matter of “answering for a dwelling place, for one’s identity, one’s space, one’s limits” (Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2000, p. 149). The challenge, then, is how to move from hospitality at an abstract level (e.g. ethics-as-hospitality that interrupts one’s self) to a concrete action (e.g. towards the sans-papiers) (Bulley 2015). As Bulley argues,

while ethics is hospitality in an abstract sense, as it defines the ethos and its relation to the other, the concrete material practice of hospitality is only one way in which this ethos and relation is expressed. Therefore, […] concrete hospitality is a spatial, relational practice with affective dimensions. (2015, p. 188, original emphasis)

I will come back to the idea of hospitality as a spatial and affective practice in the next section. For the time being, I want to revisit educational theorizing on hospitality, focusing in particular on Claudia Ruitenberg’s work, whose contributions have been influential in taking up Derrida’s arguments and advancing an ethic of hospitality in education. My purpose is not to provide a comprehensive review, but rather to show how increasing interest in Derrida’s philosophy of hospitality has recently begun to acknowledge that ethics-as-hospitality—the central theme in educational theorizing over the years—is always already “becoming political” (Dikeç et al. 2009, p. 9). In other words, recognizing hospitality’s relation to materiality and affectivity is what makes hospitality a complex interplay of ethics and politics (Bulley 2015).

Ruitenberg (2015) has theorized over the years an ethic of hospitality in education that is distinguished both from discourses of inclusion and moral education that views ‘welcoming’ of the Other as a virtue (see also, Ruitenberg 2011). Inclusion differs from the ethic of hospitality, explains Ruitenberg, in that inclusion presupposes a whole in which the Other is going to be incorporated, whereas the ethic of hospitality does not seek to fit the guest/stranger into the space of the host, but rather to accept that the arrival of the Other can change that space (2011, p. 32). Similarly, the ethic of hospitality differs from attempts to treat ‘welcoming’ of the Other as a virtue, because the latter bolsters rather than decentering the ethical subject—which is what an ethic of hospitality aims, namely, to create ethical relations (ibid.). Also, within discourses of ‘welcoming’ the Other as a virtue, feeling comfortable in the presence of strangers is important; however, in an ethic of hospitality, argues Ruitenberg, “the question of whether the host feels comfortable in the presence of the guest is irrelevant” (ibid., p. 33).

Although Ruitenberg is right to argue that feelings of (dis)comfort ought perhaps to be irrelevant in an ethic of hospitality, in practice such feelings—emotions and affects, more generally—are not irrelevant at all. They are, in fact, extremely relevant and important, as Ruitenberg (2009) herself acknowledges in some of her other work, when she talks about the role of political emotions. Ruitenberg makes an important distinction between ‘political emotions,’ which are generally understood as those emotions that are directed toward a societal object, such as homelessness, compared to ‘moral emotions’ that are directed toward a personal or interpersonal object. However, in the above quote suggesting that the host’s feelings of comfort are irrelevant, Ruitenberg’s critique of the cultivation of moral emotions promoted by discourses of virtue also throws out the potential of political emotions emerging in the process. This suggestion seems to ignore a powerful driving force in acts of hospitality, namely, how citizens are taught (in schools, media, politics) to feel about their being and belonging to a community or nation-state (Zembylas 2018b).

Ruitenberg (2015) rightly points out that “an ethic of hospitality operates in the tension between the abstract idea of an absolute, unconditional hospitality and the demands of hospitality in a given place and time” (2015, p. 14). She is especially interested in how ethic of hospitality invites a re-examination of educational practices and principles, focusing in particular on thinking “anew” the roles of teachers, schools, teachers-students relationships and curricula (ibid., p. 7). The ethic of hospitality, she points out, provides a new orientation through which the teacher makes a place for students in the world, honors their particularity, and gives them what they need to take this place in the world. As she explains, “hospitality in education can only be invented anew each time in a particular context, with a particular host and a particular guest” (ibid., p. 70).

In fact, recent work that undertakes a critical reexamination of educational hospitality involving racialized bodies and spaces (Bryzzheva 2018; Rasheed 2018; Ruitenberg 2018; Sinha 2018) highlights that our theorizing so far may have stopped short of succeeding in “do[ing] the best one can, knowing that one’s best can never be good enough” (Ruitenberg 2015, p. 15), if this ‘best’ is not grounded in actual educational contexts—namely, in contexts in which embodiment and materiality are taken into consideration. For example, Sinha (2018) shows that taking into consideration the materiality the non-white, raced body changes how ‘home’ and ‘ownership’ are conceptualized and felt in acts of hospitality. Thus hospitality can be offered in ways that still keep racialized bodies in certain (normative) spaces (Ahmed 2007; Yancy 2014, 2017). Similarly, Bryzzheva (2018) acknowledges the materiality of particular bodies in universities, pointing out that they are “normed along the values that continuously privilege White bodies and whiteness” (p. 248); hence, an ethic of hospitality that fails to grapple with this issue is short-sighted, suggests Bryzzheva.

Ruitenberg (2018) admits that “educational hospitality has been seen predominantly as taking place in putatively racially neutral spaces” (p. 261). She correctly emphasizes that the issue is not resolved by asking students to interrogate “their centered positionalities”, as Sinha (2018) seems to suggest, because an ethic of hospitality is not a form of moral education or a matter of correcting false beliefs or ignorance that are ‘fixed’ by cultivating in students more desirable moral dispositions (p. 260). Also, the issue is not resolved by rejecting an ethic of hospitality altogether, if one realizes that it is impossible for a racialized or marginalized teacher to be good educational hosts; teachers can protest the conditions that undermine an ethic of hospitality (Ruitenberg 2018). The question remains, however, what does a renewed theorization of hospitality look like in concrete educational spaces in which hospitality is recognized as a spatial and affective relational practice?

Hospitality as a Spatial and Affective Relational Practice

My inspiration for rethinking the ethical and political sensibilities of hospitality in this article comes from affect theory, which has various strands of argument as well as different disciplinary approaches (see Greg and Seigworth 2010). In general, scholarship on the affective turn during the last two decades (e.g. Ahmed 2004; Bennett 2005; Clough 2007; Cvetkovich 2012; Gandhi 2006; Sedgwick-Kosofsky 2003) refutes hard distinctions between power/resistance, public/private and generally the world ‘out there’ (external) and the body (internal), foregrounding the entanglement between the socio-political and the biological (and psychological).

One of the most influential approaches in the affective turn takes up the ideas of Gilles Deleuze (1988), who proposes affect as a body’s capacity to affect and be affected, where a ‘body’ can in principle be anything (Anderson 2014). Following Deleuze, Massumi (1996, 2002) makes a distinction between affect and emotion, pointing out that emotion works at the discursive level in relation to which the felt intensity of experience is articulated, whereas affect is an autonomous force, an intensity that travels between and across human and non-human materialities, exceeding, connecting and transforming these (Vrasti and Dayal 2016). Affects, then, are understood both as processes and products: they are processes in the sense that a body acts upon another; affects are also products as the capacity of a body to affect and to be affected (Anderson 2014). In this sense, affects are not just feelings or emotions but forces and intensities influencing a body’s modes of existence within particular spaces (Dewsbury 2009; Thrift 1996, 2008).

Such theoretical developments are helpful in rethinking hospitality in many ways; at least three areas of contributions can be identified in this regard. First, developments in affect theory challenge rigid oppositions between the individual and the social, or between body and mind, and stress the importance of bodies and affects in efforts to explore and understand spaces of embodied movement and practices (McCormack 2003; Thrift 1996, 2008)—such as spaces within which (in)hospitality is embodied and enacted. In other words, the focus on bodies and ‘affective spaces’ (Reckwitz 2012) suggests that action is conceived less in terms of individual willpower or virtue and more via embodied, collective capacities and contextual affordances (Anderson and Harrison 2010). In this sense, bodies are actualized through practical relations, that is, they are relational bodies. This idea opens up the importance of bodily connection to others and productively explores the ways that affects work on and with us to produce transformative relations (Hemmings 2012).

Second, developments in affect theory highlight the notion of affects as practices. For example, Wetherell (2012, 2015) argues that every social practice has affective, material and discursive dimensions that are entangled. In this sense, hospitality is situated within a broader network of forces, intensities and encounters that entail specific affective, material and discursive elements. This understanding of hospitality is important, because it allows educators to trace the specific practices through which affects of hospitality are constituted, circulated, perpetuated or interrupted (e.g. see Bryzzheva 2018; Sinha 2018). Given that there is a multiplicity of ways with which affects of hospitality could be produced, fixed understandings of hospitality are rejected, therefore, the attention is directed at examining the particular assemblages within which hospitality emerges or is interrupted. Theoretically and methodologically, then, nothing is taken for granted, as pre-existing, or essentializing, but the entanglement of affective, material and discursive elements hints at the inventiveness of hospitality that comes to mean and feel differently to different people and settings (cf. Zembylas 2017).

Finally, developments in affect theory highlight that the ethical and the political are always implicated in and emergent from the diverse sensibilities of embodiment and materiality, that is, how bodies come together in space and open up possibilities to extend ethical relations (McCormack 2003; Thrift 2008)—e.g. ethical relations of hospitality. McCormack (2005) has called this “an ethics of enactment” (p. 142), referring to the ways in which embodied practices take place in affective spaces and enhance our capacities to enact new forms of transformative action and responsibility. A central concern for educators is how to turn these possible openings into actual spaces and practices for ethical encounters and political engagement that have transformative possibilities (Zembylas 2017)—e.g. how encounters in/beyond pedagogical spaces may become the locus of hospitality. For students and teachers this means that they need to trace how power operates through affect and how affective life in educational settings and beyond is imbued with power relations (ibid.). The field of hospitality, then, is both ethical and political, which means that it cannot be limited to judgments made upon the basis of preexisting moral codes or rules (cf. Popke 2008, 2009).

Altogether, these three contributions highlight that hospitality can be theorized as a spatial and affective relational practice (Bulley 2015). It is a spatial practice because it clearly involves the crossing of borders and thresholds—“whether they are in the form of walls” or “the more or less clearly defined boundaries that separate communities” (ibid., 188). What hospitality works to do, then, according to Bulley, is to produce a space in which the affective and material practice of my crossing is made possible. However, at the same time, hospitality delimits space, as it becomes a particular space that may exclude your crossing. In this sense, the work of hospitality is “both maintaining and disrupting […] both consolidating and transformative” (ibid., p. 189, original emphasis). It is this spatial relation, argues Bulley, that helps distinguish the actual conduct of hospitality from other forms of ethical responsibility-taking for others. Offering a stranger money or a sandwich in the street may be a charitable but not a hospitable gesture as it involves no crossing of spatial boundaries (ibid.). In the same sense, ‘welcoming’ students in the classroom might end up being simply a polite and often sentimental and humanitarian practice, unless it grapples with the material particularities and complexities of racialized spaces and their consequences.

Hospitality is also an affective practice because it takes place within specific affective-relational structures (Bulley 2015; Ryder 2015). Hospitality does not come into existence abstractly or merely as a matter of language; it becomes alive through specific practices that are spatial, affective, and material and may have normalizing or disruptive effects, thus there are different ways of engaging with hospitality. The enactment of hospitality, then, is propelled by the material-affective infrastructures and the embodied interpretations that teachers, students and educational settings make of them within specific contexts. Concepts such as ‘affective atmospheres’ and ‘atmospheric walls’—that are further theorized in the next section—provide a framework through which educational theorizing might be enriched and adopt a greater sensitivity to the entanglement of material and affective infrastructures and the embodied effects of hospitality in educational settings.

The idea that hospitality can be theorized as a spatial and affective relational practice raises new questions such as: What does it feel like to be at ‘home’ or be a ‘host’? What does it feel like to be a ‘stranger’ or be hosted somewhere? How do propensities for enacting these practices emerge in educational spaces? What fuels students’ and teachers’ ethical and/or political sensibilities to engage in these practices? How do the little things pertaining to feeling, bodily sensation, and atmosphere inflect or deflect practices of hospitality? What are the dangers when teachers and teachers are not sensitive to the affective and material complexities involved in acts of hospitality? These and many other questions highlight how hospitality is both spatial and affective, ethical and political. Treating hospitality as a process and product of affectivity and materiality does not mean we need to romanticize it as a space in which comfort will be bounded. Rather, hospitality is an ambivalent and ambiguous space which holds a series of opposites—belonging and non-belonging, identity and difference, presence and absence, materiality and ideality, singularity and generality—in relations of tension.

Affective Atmospheres and Atmospheric Walls

So far, I have argued that while Derrida’s notion of hospitality has been illuminating in theorizing hospitality in education, the lens of affect theory reminds us that educational hospitality can be further enriched by exploring the implications of theorizing hospitality as a spatial and affective relational practice. Building from this idea, I want to turn now to the notion of affective atmospheres (Anderson 2009; Bissell 2010; McCormack 2008), borrowed from the field of cultural geography, as a possible form through which hospitality as a spatial and affective practice becomes visible or imaginable. I find this concept interesting, not least in part, because it holds a sense of ambiguity, just as hospitality does, in its affective impact. Synonymous with mood, aura and ambience, atmospheres “traverse distinctions between peoples, things and spaces,” and they exceed the bodies that produce them (Anderson 2009, p. 78). In this sense, atmospheres—atmospheres of hospitality, for instance—are uncertain places, yet they are noticeable as a surrounding influence that affect all those who are present (McCormack 2008).

Böhme (1993) is generally credited with invoking the concept of ‘atmosphere’ to denote a form of space without borders that is filled with a certain tone of feeling and creates shared experiences through relational place encounters (Buser 2014). In other words, atmosphere is not bounded and cannot be reified as a thing (Bissell 2010), but rather it is a feeling of what is around (Ahmed 2014). As Anderson notes, “epochs, societies, rooms, landscapes, couples, artworks, and much more are all said to possess atmospheres (or be possessed by them)” (2009, p. 78). In this sense, classrooms and schools, for example, possess atmospheres that can be hospitable or not; this is not a matter of an individual teacher’s or student’s influence on others, but rather collective affects. Atmospheres, then, are relational, material and affective; by attending to these elements, atmospheres “provide a means to consider the ways collective affects are not reducible to the individual bodies from which they emerge, yet they also provide insights into how place experience informs […] meaning-making around themes of identity and subjectivity” (Buser 2014, p. 236).

The concept of affective atmospheres provides a framework through which research and theorizing in education might adopt a greater sensitivity to the affective, material and relational dimensions of hospitality. While embodied encounters and materialities in educational spaces are characterized by collective/shared qualities, they are simultaneously transpersonal and shift through bodily interactions; as such, they encompass transformative possibilities. I use the idea of affective atmospheres, then, as an opening for engaging with the ways in which affects of hospitality touch us and take hold of us. The focus on affective atmospheres attends to those unpredictable affective encounters that cannot be traced back to the feeling of emotions of an individual (Anderson 2009). The experience of atmospheres is “suddenly and powerfully encountered as with the crossing of a boundary” (Finn 2016, p. 33), such as when passing from one sphere to another—e.g. when a space is made available to a guest/stranger who is welcomed to one place but not to another.

To illustrate how the concept of atmospheres can be used to understand the circulation of privilege and exclusion in relation to hospitality, I turn to Ahmed’s (2014) notion of ‘atmospheric walls’ which she understands as techniques for “making spaces available to some more than to others” (n.p.). In this sense, “A wall is a technique: a way of stopping something from happening or stopping someone from progressing without appearing to stop this or stop them” (ibid.). In other words, atmospheric walls are subtle and invisible mechanisms that are meant to keep out those who do not have the ‘right of access.’ To the selected few, it offers the comfort of inclusion; to the rest, it produces anxiety, horror and discomfort. For Ahmed, this becomes a crucial way of talking about racial exclusion and whiteness:

I think whiteness is often experienced as an atmosphere. You walk into a room and you encounter it like a wall that is at once palpable and tangible but also hard to grasp or to reach. It is something, it is quite something, but it is difficult to put your finger on it. When you walk into the room, it can be like a door slams in your face. The tightening of bodies: the sealing of space. The discomfort when you encounter something that does not receive you. (Ahmed 2014, n.p.)

This is how a “stranger is created,” says Ahmed (ibid.)—when a body is not attuned to the rest, but faces a wall. As she further explains, an atmospheric wall “can involve conscious decisions and collective will” and they can be the product of habituation or institutional design. To talk about atmospheres, then, when issues of diversity, whiteness and racialization processes are examined in educational institutions and the society, is to also inevitably touch upon “the politics of disturbing, organizing and making legible social organization, which invariably includes striations and divisions that come back to haunt who we are and how we can act in the world” (Vrasti and Dayal 2016, p. 1003). What would be productive, therefore, in theorizing and researching hospitality in education is how “to construct spaces without walls, deprivileged atmospheres that have entry requirements which are transparent and as low as possible, offer freedom of movement, and sanctuary for all manner of vulnerabilities” (ibid., original emphasis).

Following Ahmed (2014), the study of hospitality-as-ethics as proposed by Derrida and as have been further elaborated in the context of education can be invented anew by paying attention to affect and atmospheres, while being aware of the materiality of bodies moving and interacting in particular spaces and the production of walls that perpetuate racial and social structures. Dewalling racialized spaces in schools, for example, is not merely a matter of simply acknowledging the phenomenological difference that characterizes raced bodies of color and how educators may honor the alterity of their students. Rather, an ethic of hospitality that is looked at through the lens of affect and actively strives to dewall atmospheres

requires that we become aware of class and colonial dimension of many of the taken for granted and innocently functional arrangements operative in Western liberal societies, from the ideal of responsible citizenship/subjecthood to the rules of assessment, etiquette, and advancement, guarding access to our institutions and fields of action, as well as the values promoted in our normative discourses and the desires perpetuated in our ‘structures of feeling.’ (Vrasti and Dayal 2016, p. 1004)

Dewalling atmospheres in schools, as an inextricable dimension of an ethic of hospitality, essentially requires what Spivak calls “the unlearning of one’s privilege as an act of ethical responsibility” (1990, p. 42), that is, engaging in acts that undo the walls raised by hierarchical social divisions and perpetuate normative perceptions of security and trust. At every step of the way, an ethic of hospitality that is inevitably contextualized within the liberal order of things faces the risks of reiterating the walls experienced by undocumented, racialized, working class, queer, and differently abled bodies (cf. Vrasti and Dayal 2016). Schools in Western liberal societies are by definition embedded in these structures, therefore, paying attention to how hospitality may be enacted through dewalling atmospheres is ultimately an ethical and political task—a task of tearing down the obstacles of access and making spaces for more unruly arrangements where teachers and students can shape their own conditions of being and becoming (ibid., p. 1004).

Ethical, Political and Pedagogical Implications of Theorizing Affective Hospitality

Based on the delineation of the above ideas from affect theory, the question is now: How might we rethink hospitality as ‘affective’, and what might be the ethical, political and pedagogical implications of doing so? In this last section of the essay, I argue that educational theory and pedagogical practice can benefit from a reconceptualization of hospitality in ways that foster its potential as a spatial and affective relational practice. Paying attention to the unrelenting operations of material and affective forces in everyday manifestations of hospitality in educational spaces offers an understanding of hospitality that supplements and extends existing theorizations emerging from a Derridean ethic of hospitality. A greater awareness of the micro-politics of hospitality in its everyday enactment in various educational settings can show educators how specific practices of hospitality work to produce affective spaces in which the socio-historical context of privilege may be interrupted (see Sinha 2018).

It is, therefore, extremely valuable to rethink hospitality in terms of the capacities for affecting and being affected, and specifically how these capacities are differently produced, restrained, and enhanced in some educational settings compared to others (cf. Tolia-Kelly 2006)—e.g. manifested as atmospheric walls that (re)create certain exclusions/inclusions (e.g. see Finn 2016). Discussing the implications of paying attention to affect, Tolia-Kelly (2006) suggests that what is required is a continued critical engagement with historical contextualizing of the affective capacities of bodies. Theorizing hospitality as a spatial and affective practice, then, offers an ethical and political orientation to pedagogical practice, because it enables educators to approach bodies as historically specific entanglements that are practiced through particular techniques—e.g. majoritized students’ or teachers’ questioning of the belonging of ‘diverse’ students; using language that perpetuates certain exclusions (see Shirazi 2018).

As Shirazi explains, the limits of hospitality can be identified through specific examples that show “how the possibilities of recognition of belonging are highly conditional” (2018, p. 111). The conditionality of hospitality, she says, can be seen both in moments where the (affective) attachments of students of color are interrogated, and in moments in which “they interrogate a welcome premised on the hostility to modify the host subject’s mode of inhibiting space deemed to be their own” (ibid.). Therefore, I would argue that taking seriously the affective potentialities of specific acts of hospitality in educational settings—e.g. acts that may willingly or unwillingly reiterate normalized techniques that raise walls against ‘strangers’—can be the starting point for new visions of educational policies and pedagogical practices that recognize the complexities of affective hospitality (Zembylas 2017). As Shirazi further suggests:

Hospitality—with its focus on domicile, welcome, and what it means to be a host vs. stranger in a place—puts the affective experience of belonging (as a feeling of being at home) in relation to the politics of claiming a home. Domicile is the basis of extending and limiting hospitality; the host is the master of the home, and thus to be welcoming affirms one’s claim of ownership and indigeneity. For a hospitality that is premised on White normativity to work, stable categories and hierarchies of difference are required. (2018, pp. 11–112, added emphasis)

Given this point, then, an important ethical and political task in education lies in developing alternative compelling forms of sociality, conviviality and hospitality that have the potential to unsettle belonging and its affective attachments beyond familiar comforts.

To put this differently, what is needed is an orientation “to a different […] sensus communis, a different structure of feeling” associated with the good life for all (Helms et al. 2012, n.p.). Similarly, Amin and Thrift also argue that we need to actively cultivate “alternative feelings so that new affective connections can be forged and a general desire for other ways of being in the world can emerge” (2013, p. 158). These comments tap into the question of how we might resist particular affective atmospheres that build walls against ‘strangers’ in educational settings and beyond, and suggest that we need alternative structures of feeling that will help create other kinds of ethical and political communities (Stephens 2016, p. 193). In other words, attending to and through affect in practices of hospitality points to the significance of cultivating an ethical and political sensitivity that is responsive to hospitality’s transformative potential. This idea also suggests a different ethos of hospitality that “works toward encounters that open us to a generous sensibility, one that might be capable of reenlivening our affective engagement with others and fostering a heightened sense for what might be possible” (Popke 2009, p. 84).

Conceptualized in this way, then, attending to affective hospitality (Ryder 2015) opens up new questions about how to create, sustain and extend material and affective relational practices of hospitality in educational settings: How does affective hospitality become part of pedagogical practices? How can practices of affective hospitality be redirected to change normative encounters and relations? Finally, how might the cultivation of some forms of affective hospitality in educational settings forge or restrain productive encounters with others, setting limits to struggles against social injustice and inequality? These questions challenge our understandings of just what manifestations the ethics and politics of hospitality might take in pedagogical practices in the wake of acknowledging the affective complexities of hospitality.

Furthermore, these questions reveal that there are also important risks that accompany attempts to pay attention to the affective complexities of hospitality in educational settings (see Zembylas 2017). Here I want to share two such risks. First, there is the risk of how to handle pedagogically the inevitable emotional tensions that arise when teachers struggle to create hospitable and equitable spaces in classrooms (Bryzzheva 2018; Rasheed 2018; Ruitenberg 2015; Sinha 2018). As I have argued elsewhere (Zembylas 2018a), discomfort—especially from white teachers—is inevitable in pedagogical efforts to take into consideration the affective, material and discursive assemblages of raced bodies and whiteness. Hence, it is necessary for teachers to develop affective skills how to handle productively and strategically these tensions without reinforcing existing atmospheric walls, but rather contributing to dewall these atmospheres.

Second, there is the risk of assuming that affects and emotions can be ‘engineered’ and deployed instrumentally for the pursuit of expanded affective hospitality. For example, there is serious risk from the emotional ideology of a sentimentalized hospitality that—intentionally or unintentionally—invests in feelings of guilt to motivate sympathy for ‘strangers’; this approach is unlikely to establish productive pedagogical opportunities for acts of hospitality that challenge affective infrastructures of injustice (Zembylas 2016). Therefore, it is important for educators to constantly interrogate their pedagogies of affective hospitality and whether they might (unwittingly) contribute to reinforcing existing atmospheric walls by attempting to ‘manipulate’ the affective atmosphere in a classroom (Zembylas 2017, 2018a).

In summary, the purpose of paying attention to the complexities of affective hospitality is to create those pedagogical spaces so that symmetries and asymmetries of hospitality are not merely recognized, but they are critically challenged for their affective consequences. To fulfill this task, theorists and practitioners in education need to constantly renew our conceptualizations of hospitality so that transformative possibilities are embraced. It is not enough to utilize a language about the ethic of hospitality that fails to grapple with its affectivity and materiality. Undoubtedly, there are definite dangers to romanticize the potential of affective hospitality, yet if there is any potential towards ‘better’ practices of hospitality in educational settings by paying attention to the affective and material elements of these practices, we must attend to them with urgency.

Conclusion

The point of departure of this article has been that hospitality in education has not been theorized in terms of emotion and affect, partly because its law(s) have been discussed in ways that have not paid much attention to the role of emotion and affect. Yet, recent work theorizing hospitality and embodied encounters in educational spaces shows that “hospitality is a dissatisfying ethic” (Ruitenberg 2018, p. 262), if it fails to grapple with the materialities—I would also add, with the affectivities—of particular bodies within particular settings. My analysis here extends this work and pushes hospitality to do more, to broaden our understanding of the ethics and politics of hospitality by considering it as a spatial and affective relational practice. Experimenting with concepts from affect theory such as the notion of affective atmospheres and atmospheric walls can be valuable in helping us—educational researchers, theorists, policymakers, practitioners—pay attention to hospitality as embodied ethical and political practice.

Derrida writes that hospitality “must be so inventive, adjusted to the other,… that each experience of hospitality must invent a new language” (Naas 2008, p. 26). At the same time, an ethic of hospitality as proposed by Derrida and as it has been further elaborated in the context of education, do not fully explore how affects and emotions are inextricable elements of hospitality. To invent, then, a new language of experiencing hospitality, as Derrida suggests, we need to venture more into thinking about the interaction among ethics, politics, affect, materiality and space and how it both produces and is produced through specific practices of hospitality in educational settings.