Academic language and learning in higher education: a call to Derridean hospitality

ABSTRACT

Academic Language and Learning (ALL) is a relatively recent practice field in Australian Higher Education (HE). Throughout its history, the institutional positioning of ALL has varied significantly in line with an incessantly changing HE environment. Most recently, neoliberal policies and discourses are reconfiguring the professional identities of ALL practitioners and complicating their relationship with students, increasingly depriving both of a hospitable home in universities. Implicit in these discourses is also the depoliticisation of the ALL teacher–student relation and assumptions of mastery of these educators over their object of knowledge, the students. Rather than aligning ALL practitioners with neoliberal subject positionings, this conceptual paper explores the framing of ALL practitioners, particularly their relations with students, in terms of Derridean hospitality. The article details Derrida’s deconstruction of the concept of hospitality in order to (1) examine the complex power dynamics that structure the relationship between ALL practitioners and the student guest/foreigner and (2) insist on an ethical responsiveness to student difference based on responsibility for the other and a radical opening to the new. Derrida’s ideas of hospitality, the paper argues, offers an alternative language for thinking, speaking, and enacting ALL practitioner–student relations and opens new ethico-political horizons.

KEYWORDS:

• Language and academic skills
• Higher education
• Derrida
• Hospitality
• Deconstruction
• Ethics/Politics

Introduction

Academic Language and Learning (ALL) is a relatively recent practice field in Australian Higher Education (HE), also referred to as Academic Skills Advising, Student Learning Support, or Academic Literacies Development. While the precise nature of ALL work remains contested and is subject to historical exigencies and local context (Barrow & Grant, 2012), it generally involves assisting (domestic and international) students with the language and learning development required at Australian universities. Whether classified as academics or professional staff, ALL practitioners carry out their work using a large array of pedagogies and practices reflecting ‘the variations of theoretical, historical, cultural and pragmatic conditions of local institutional environments and diverse informing disciplines’ (Aitchison & Lee, 2006, p. 236). Such disciplines include Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, Education, and Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL).

Since the inception of ALL as a practice field in Australia, ALL educators have struggled to establish a professional identity and institutional locus – a ‘home’ – in its HE institutions, with ALL practitioners continually responding to an incessantly and precipitously changing university environment. Illustrating this constant struggle is the multifarious framings of ALL practitioners as, for example, pinned to the margins (Stevenson & Kokkinn, 2007) or aspiring for a centre/discipline (Garner et al., 1995); experts of language and communication skills (Nightingale, 1988); educators responsible for program evaluation, teaching improvement and stakeholder accountability (Webb & McLean, 2002); and academics conducting teaching and research (Clerehan, 2007).

Most recently, neoliberal policies and discourses dominating Australian HE have not only created new challenges to ALL professional identities and practices but also altered the nature of the relationship between ALL practitioners and their students (Chahal, 2017; Chanock, 2011; Gurney & Grossi, 2019; Hadley, 2015; Percy, 2011, 2015). While the specifics of these neoliberal policies, their heterogeneity, degree of uptake, and impact on Australian HE has been widely discussed in the literature (e.g. Bay, 2011; Connell, 2015; Cornelius-Bell & Bell, 2020; Rizvi & Lingard, 2011; Thornton, 2014; Zajda, 2020), they commonly involve the increased positioning of educator–learner relations as an economic transaction between learners, perceived as ‘clients’ with ‘needs’; and teachers, framed as ‘providers’ meeting those needs (Biesta, 2016; Ford, 2013; Peters & McDonough, 2007). Such an economic view of education and educational relations frames ALL practitioners as mere service providers of the language/learning commodity for student clients (Chahal, 2017; Percy, 2011). It also often translates into a plethora of practices (such as teaching in large-scale lectures, delivering generic workshops, and producing online resources) which, under current mounting pressures, can be significantly under-theorised (Clerehan et al. 2014). These practices also frequently display McDonaldisation techniques of mass production (Chahal, 2017; Ritzer, 2011) and entail substantial standardisation, which severely risk homogenising students, delimiting their subjectivities, and foreclosing the unknowable they bring (Chahal, 2017; Hadley, 2015).

Implicit in these broad neoliberal discourses and practices is the simultaneous de-politicisation of teacher–learner relations; and expectations for teachers to display ‘complete knowledge’ or ‘mastery’ of their objects of study – students and educational practices (Ellsworth, 1992). On the one hand, the ‘invisible hand of the market’ is assumed to equalise relationships between teachers and students as it posits both as subject to the market forces of supply and demand. On the other hand, to produce practices that ‘work’ in addressing supposed student demand, teachers are presumed to possess (or aim to possess) causal, predictable, secure, and therefore, ‘complete’ knowledge about their students (Biesta, 2016).

Among other critiques, the first assumption masks the intricate power dynamics that still exist between educators and students, as well as the ways in which teachers have been divested of their professional authority as ‘questions about the content and purpose of education become subject to the forces of the market instead of being the concern of professional judgement and democratic deliberation” (Biesta, 2016, p. 31). The second assumption – the expectation of reaching ‘complete knowledge’ of, or ‘mastery’ over, students – denies the irreducible alterity of the student as other, i.e. as a uniquely singular being who ‘cannot be reduced to the Same, … [who] escapes the cognitive powers of the knowing subject, … and before whom [the knowing subject is] called to justice, to justify [itself]’ (Critchley, 2014, p. 5).

As ALL practitioners negotiate the competing demands of diverse neoliberal policies and discourses in Australian universities, they regularly confront the ‘face’ of this student other, which holds them to account and demands justice: a student who cannot understand why, when they have been promised ongoing writing support upon enrolment, are subsequently informed that the number of ALL appointments is limited; a student who has been advised by her supervisor to ‘fix her grammar’ but is told that teaching grammar is beyond the remit of ALL practitioners; a student on a bridging visa, with no work rights or financial assistance, who desperately resorts to ALL appointments as the only means of obtaining free language support but is cautioned against this dependency on services; an Indigenous student who is expected to adopt the ALL conventions of Australian universities with little, if any, acknowledgement of these institutions’ violent settler colonial past (Connell, 2015; Cornelius-Bell & Bell, 2020).

Thus, the schism between ‘what is’ (the accepted discourses and practices) and ‘what ought to be’ (ethical responses towards students) forces itself on the ALL practitioner and professional decision-making becomes fraught, torn between managerial demands of compliance and performativity, and those of ethical responsibility towards students. Ultimately, in such a HE context, both ALL practitioners and students can find themselves as strangers/foreigners in an unwelcoming environment which increasingly enforces rigid and hostile conditions and denies them the prospects of inhabiting a hospitable home.

This paper is conceived at the interstices of the relation of ALL practitioners with the student other in Australian universities under current neoliberal regimes. It counters ALL practitioner preoccupations with establishing a professional identity which aligns with these discourses, reactively produces an excess of practices lacking theoretical basis, ignores the critical positioning of practitioners within power dynamics and in ethical relations with students, and ultimately prevents both practitioners and students from finding in universities a hospitable home. As such, the present paper is purposefully conceptual in nature. It utilises Derrida’s theorisation on hospitality as a means of framing the role of ALL practitioners in relation with their students politically and ethically. Building on Chahal et al. (2019), which investigates specific ALL practices using this lens, this article details Derrida’s deconstruction of the concept of hospitality in order to (1) acknowledge and analyse the complex power dynamics that structure the intersubjective relationship between ALL practitioners and the student guest/foreigner; and (2) insist on an ethical responsiveness to student difference based on responsibility for the other and a radical opening to the new. Derrida’s hospitality, the paper argues, offers an alternative language for thinking, speaking, and enacting ALL practitioner–student relations, thereby opening new ethico-political horizons (Peters & Biesta, 2009).

Derrida, hospitality, and ALL

While Derrida’s engagement with the concept of hospitality appears in his later work, it is consistent with his overarching approach of deconstruction, which attempts to destabilise accepted foundations and to disclose the violence which is masked in their espousal (Popke, 2004). By subverting established foundations, deconstruction acts as a critical tool for not only understanding but also intervening in and transforming the world (Derrida, 1998b). As discussed in Chahal et al. (2019), in the case of hospitality, Derrida destabilises the notion of the ‘being-at-home’ (Cheah, 2013) by scrutinising hospitality’s constitutive elements (host, guest/foreigner, home), its modalities (conditional and unconditional) and their aporia, and its relationship to ethics and the openness to the new.

Using this lens, the following sections detail the main tenets of Derridean hospitality and examine the complex power dynamics, the politics, that structure the relationship between ALL practitioners and the student guest/foreigner. They also show how Derridean hospitality associates ALL responsiveness to student difference with an inscribed ethical undertaking based on responsibility for the other and a radical opening to the new.

The politics of hospitality: host, guest/foreigner, home

To Derrida, hospitality is a gesture of welcoming which reveals three constitutive elements: the host who offers the welcome to a home, a guest/foreigner who seeks access to it, and the place/home where hospitality occurs. Hospitality has spatial and temporal dimensions (Pickering, 2019). Temporally, hospitality imposes time limitations after which the guest is seen as overstaying their welcome. Spatially, hospitality can be physical or symbolic. Physically, the space can be a home, a city, a country or a classroom (Kostogriz, 2018). Symbolically, the space of hospitality can represent a metaphorical dwelling place, be it that of ‘one’s identity, one’s space, one’s limits, [of] the ethos as abode, habitation, house, hearth, family, home’ (Derrida & Dufourmantelle, 2000, pp. 149–150).

Framing ALL work as hospitality is not inconceivable. As discussed in Chahal et al. (2019), ALL practitioners, like all university educators, can be considered as hosts who extend a welcome to students, conceived as guests/foreigners, during their stay at university. The ALL welcoming gesture is offered in both spatial (physical and symbolic) and temporal terms (Pickering, 2019): ALL practitioners welcome the student guests spatially, in the physical home of universities (e.g. classrooms, offices), and temporally for the duration of their candidature. Symbolically, ALL practitioners welcome the student to the world of HE, the local institutional culture, and specifically the ALL practices embodied in different disciplines. ALL practitioners can therefore be considered as the ‘masters’ – experts – of the ALL field, deploying diverse disciplinary, pedagogical, research and experiential knowledge as they welcome the student guest/foreigner to the ALL home.

While ALL practitioners can be conceived as hosts in the university, they can simultaneously be considered as guests of the university. The university provides ALL practitioners with a home where they can host students and practice their field of expertise. The university also decides on the spatial and temporal conditions of its hospitality: where in its physical space ALL practitioners are positioned (e.g. in its central services, faculties, libraries); how they are made symbolically intelligible in terms of their role in the institution (e.g. as academic skills advisors, academics, or service providers); and for how long university hospitality is extended to them (e.g. while Australian HE provided significant expansion of ALL units in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, currently, and as evidenced by considerable budget cuts, it seems to consider them as unwanted guests, or at least as guests that are tolerated in small capacity (Malkin & Chanock, 2018). (For detailed accounts of how the terms of Australian universities have changed towards ALL historically, see Chanock, 2011; Gurney & Grossi, 2019; Percy, 2011, 2015).

Power dynamics

A key characteristic of hospitality that Derrida unpacks is the power dynamic – the politics – which structures the intersubjective relationship between host and guest/foreigner. Referring to the etymology of the word, Derrida (2000) demonstrates how the original Latin uses a single term (hospes = hostis + pets; French hôte) to denote both host and guest and to associate the two with meanings of hostility (hostis) and power (pets) (Kakoliris, 2015). A politics of hostility and power thus defines the host/guest relationship: while the guest can intrude as an unsavoury foreigner, become parasitic, or threaten the very existence of the host, the latter can dictate the rules of hospitality and exercise control to prevent potential transgressions (Chahal et al., 2019). For Derrida (1999, p. 18),

what is thus announced is … a politics of hospitality, a politics of capacity, of power … with regard to the hôte, be he the one welcoming (host) or the one being welcomed (guest). Power of the hôte over the hôte, of the host over the guest or vice versa.

As can be seen from the above, Derrida’s conception of hospitality refuses to ignore the inescapable and complex dynamics that structure the subjects of hospitality (host and guest) in relations of power and vulnerability. Framing the relations between ALL practitioners and students as Derridean hospitality thus provides a lens for acknowledging and critically analysing the politics shaping these intersubjective relationships. As discussed in Chahal et al. (2019), such dynamics can be particularly illustrated in the practice of individual appointments. Positioned as hosts, ALL practitioners offer important work: they extend a welcoming gesture to the student guest, inviting them to enter the home of academic discourses, ‘develop [their] capacities to communicate effectively in academic spheres and … negotiate the demands of tertiary study’ (Gurney & Grossi, 2019, p. 942). However, through these individual consultations, ALL practitioners can also impose their ‘master’s’ role and enforce strict conditions of hospitality to prevent possible transgressions on the part of the student other. For example, ALL practitioners can restrict the length of appointments as well as their frequency. They can also define what ALL feature to diagnose (e.g. writing structure as opposed to grammar) and how to address it.

In these appointments, ALL practitioners are simultaneously vulnerable to the potential threat of the student other. A key threat can manifest itself as a form of ‘parasitism’ with some students becoming over-reliant on ALL assistance, returning repeatedly to appointments seemingly without having taken on board or responded to previous ALL advice (Ashton-Hay et al., 2018). This type of parasitism not only raises concerns about the overuse of limited resources (the time and effort of the ALL host) but also defeats the pedagogical and time-intensive aims of these appointments in helping students gain critical academic literacies and become independent learners.

The critical analysis of individual appointments through the lens of Derridean hospitality highlights power/vulnerability from the point of view of not only the ALL host but also the student guest/foreigner. Students may experience the role of ALL practitioners ambiguously as hosts who offer much-needed ALL hospitality but who also have the potential to turn hostile. Students may ask for ALL hospitality to guide them through academic conventions and may value it greatly (Chanock, 2007). However, they may also be confronted by the fact that, like all practised hospitality, ALL hospitality is conditional and imposes limits. Such limits may not only take the form of restricted access to services. Like all educational interventions, ALL practices can disturb students’ own sense of sovereignty necessarily, such as through highlighting their ALL weaknesses, emphasising academic conventions, or more generally exposing and asking students to respond to ‘what is other and different, to what challenges, irritates or even disturbs’ (Biesta, 2016, p. 27). This is because, in line with Biesta (2016, p. 29), a central task of education is to not only create a climate for learning, but also to challenge students with difficult questions that enable them to respond to the world and ‘to show who they are and where they stand’ as singular human beings.

Since the current paper focuses on the politics of intersubjective relationships, the above discussion has described the power dynamics that may be experienced directly by ALL practitioners and students as hosts/guests in interpersonal relations during individual appointments. Derridean hospitality, however, can also capture some broader fields of power in which both ALL practitioners and students operate. For example, the restrictions that ALL practitioners can place on students in individual appointments not only illustrate practitioners’ role as hosts within the university who have the power to dictate the content of, and limit student access to, these appointments. It also illustrates the guest role that ALL practitioners simultaneously occupy within the university: the number, length and even the content of individual appointments often depend on the decisions of the university (in its role as host of ALL guests) around ALL unit budgets, the number of ALL staff employed, and the ratio of students the latter are expected to support. As both hosts and guests, ALL practitioners are thus the subjects of, and subjects to, the field of power of specific HE institutions.

Likewise, at a more global level, the commodification of the teacher–student relationship in neoliberally governed universities places students in subject positions in which they occupy the role of guests who, in implementing neoliberal demands, may inadvertently threaten ALL practitioners with all the expectations that customer service models entail (Chahal, 2015; Gurney & Grossi, 2019). For example, university students are frequently required to participate in teaching evaluation or student satisfaction surveys which subject ALL practitioners to stringent neoliberal performativity measures (Barnacle & Dall’alba, 2017). Additionally, neoliberalism’s reduction of education to a service that implements ‘what works’ interventions often encourages students to favour instrumentalist approaches to learning which privilege efficiency and effortlessness over practices that may be highly rewarding but are slow or arduous (Biesta, 2016). This may not only misdirect students in viewing ALL work as a proofreading or ‘language-fixing’ service (Chanock et al., 2004) but also compel ALL practitioners to adopt simplistic interventions (e.g. ‘top ten tips’ resources) that meet the demands of their ‘clients’ but forfeit addressing complexity and nuance in ALL.

Destabilising mastery over a home

While Derrida recognises a constitutive difference between host and guest/foreigner, he simultaneously profoundly disturbs this distinction, particularly the ‘being-at-home’ of the host. The latter is destablised by the transposition of the roles of host and foreigner (hôte as both guest and host, as in above quote). This transposition does not simply refer to the possibility that the host may, one day, become a guest or a guest a host. Rather, the host can be considered as always already a guest: since we all come into a world already inhabited by human and non-human others, we all constitute guests of this world, a world that includes the foreigner as well as the house or territory to which the host lays claims (Still, 2010).

In exposing the structuring power relationships of hospitality, Derrida’s philosophy can destabilise the comfortable position of ALL practitioners as benevolent hosts and reveal its fragility through recognising the transposition of the host/guest roles. This transposition is most evident in the practice of team-teaching, when an ALL practitioner is invited to conduct ALL training alongside the discipline lecturer (Schneider & Daddow, 2017). As discussed in Chahal et al. (2019), in these contexts, ALL educators inhabit an ambivalent role as both hosts and guests. On the one hand, teaching in a subject lecture gives ALL educators authority as ‘masters’ of the ALL field and carves them a place of hospitality in an institutionally recognised setting. Simultaneously, however, ALL practitioners are invited to these lectures as guests by subject lecturers. The latter may be threatened by this guest who may not only occupy their space of hospitality but also make claims to knowledge of their disciplinary discourses (Macdonald et al., 2013).

The transposition of the host/foreigner roles in the context of the ALL practitioner is further exacerbated by current neoliberal university environments where ALL educators (as well as other HE academics and staff) are increasingly deprived of a ‘home’: constant restructures disperse ALL practitioners across different units of the university (e.g. faculties, service centres, libraries) and enforce a loss of academic and research status (Clerehan, 2007). Increasing performativity demands, based on managerial measures and values, can similarly discipline ALL staff and reduce their work to prescriptive, quantifiable outcomes and the service of the language and learning commodity (Chahal, 2017). These demands also often conflict with professional judgement on effective educational practices (Barnacle & Dall’alba, 2017; Gurney & Grossi, 2019). This loss of sovereignty over a defined ‘home’ not only makes it difficult for ALL practitioners to play the role of host but also highlights how easily this role can be transposed with that of the foreigner.

The role transposition of ALL practitioners explains their recurrent struggles for a ‘home’, frequently expressed in the calls to be recognised professionally as belonging to ‘the centre’ or academically as forming a discipline. For example, in its position statement, the Association of Academic Language and Learning (2010) insists on ascribing to practitioners a ‘range of knowledge, professional insights, and expertise’, including qualifications, experience and research specifications which reinforce ALL practitioners’ centrality to university concerns (Stevenson & Kokkinn, 2007). Founding ALL educators Garner, Chanock and Clerehan (Garner et al., 1995) similarly sought to appropriate a specific ‘home’ for this field of practice through calls for establishing ALL as an academic discipline. Such calls aim to not only unite ALL work but also provide practitioners with a common object of study and an institutionally intelligible identity associated with the reassuring rigours of disciplines.

However, Derrida’s philosophy of hospitality cautions against making absolute claims to sovereignty – our ‘right’ to ‘be-at-home’ within an appropriated space of hospitality. Derrida (1999, pp. 15–16) warns against the ‘originary violence’ (a violence always-already at work) whenever claims of appropriation of a home are made:

To dare to say welcome is perhaps to insinuate that one is at home … and that at home one receives, invites, or offers hospitality, thus appropriating for oneself a place to welcome … the other, or, worse, welcoming the other in order to appropriate for oneself a place and then speak the language of hospitality.

Rather than seeking a secure home to appropriate, Derridean hospitality encourages the contemplation of the idea that, in order to offer hospitality, ‘it [is] necessary to start from the dislocation of the shelterless, the homeless … [since] perhaps only the one who endures the experience of being deprived of a home can offer hospitality’ (Derrida & Dufourmantelle, 2000, p. 56). Unsettling the search for a unified identity, a ‘home’, places ALL practitioners in the fragile but simultaneously powerful position of addressing student difference beyond the confines of dominant discourses. This position helps keep ALL practitioners open to the new and mindful of relations of mastery and dominance.

Destabilising mastery over the other

In addition to questioning our very right to ‘be-at-home’ within an appropriated space, Derrida’s hospitality disturbs the host’s sense of sovereignty – the being-at-home with oneself (Derrida, 2001) and mastery over the guest/foreigner (Kostogriz, 2018). In being-at-home with oneself, the host perceives the other through the lens of ipseity, a ‘position of indivisible, unshaken and unlimited power of self-identity’ (Kostogriz, 2018, pp. 35–36), which ‘seeks to reduce all otherness to itself’ (Critchley, 2014, p. 5).

This reduction of the other to the self-same yields a sense of mastery and is often achieved by imposing unity and fixity on the other’s plurality and changingness (Kostogriz, 2018). To Derrida (2001, p. 17), ‘being at home with oneself … supposes a reception or inclusion of the other which one seeks to appropriate, control, and master according to different modalities of violence’. However, since the other is radically singular and resists any reduction to the self-same, this other is inherently unknowable and can never be completely mastered (Kostogriz, 2018). The other’s singular alterity thus disturbs the universe of the host and destabilises the host’s sense of being-at-home with oneself and over the other.

Derrida’s ideas on hospitality serve as critical warnings for ALL practitioners against framing their host role in terms of ‘mastery’ over the student other. Like all educators, ALL practitioners are faced with a widely diverse range of students (who bring different knowledges and modes of relationality) and may be disturbed by their irreducible alterity. In HE, this radical otherness is frequently addressed with regimes of identification, labelling and classification (Chahal et al., 2019; Percy, 2011, 2015), which tame difference by dividing it into recognisable categories and imposing on it a label or ‘name’. These technologies of classification also often combine with multiple regimes of continual monitoring. Throughout their history, ALL practitioners have adopted such institutionally established categories of student difference for support provision: the non-traditional, EAL (English as an Additional Language), international, CALD (Culturally and Linguistically Diverse), STEM (Science Technology Engineering Maths), or ‘at-risk’ student. They have also often merged them with multiple and equally well-established regimes of monitoring such as measures of academic performance, course satisfaction and student experience.

While identification and continual monitoring schemes arguably allow ALL practitioners to offer ‘targeted’ help to students and check their progress, Derrida’s ideas on hospitality highlight how such categorisations risk reducing the radical alterity of students. Determining student characteristics according to classificatory labels and devising practices targeting the identified cohorts prescribe the students’ unknowable otherness, their plurality and changingness, with fixedness and unity thereby reducing them to the ‘self-same’ (Kostogriz, 2018). Additionally, such categorisation and monitoring regimes implicate ALL practitioners in a conditional hospitality which reinforces the power of the ‘masters of the house’ and embroil ALL practitioners in increasing mechanisms of calculation and control. As discussed in Chahal et al. (2019, p. 899), labelling and monitoring students ‘not only allows ALL practitioners to offer help to students. It also permits them to identify “transgressors” and impose on them any number of potentially punitive measures’.

Finally, classification and monitoring mechanisms can restrict the ability of ALL practitioners to think, imagine, and make claims to alternative relations with students and interventions which fall outside the rigidity of these established classifications. Instead, Derridean hospitality would call ALL practitioners towards a ‘demand of the heterogeneous[:] an art and poetics … , so inventive, and adjusted to the other … that each experience of hospitality must invent a new language’ (Derrida, as cited in Langmann, 2010, p. 343). This language is based on ‘openness and an exchange among diverse ways of knowing’ (Rober & DeHaene, 2017, p. 378). It is an exchange which entails mutual listening and speaking – a dialogue.

Modalities of hospitality, aporia, and openness to the new

Derrida distinguishes between two modes of hospitality: conditional and unconditional hospitality. As detailed in Chahal et al. (2019), conditional hospitality is the mode of hospitality which is practised in everyday life and in different cultures. These laws of hospitality are practical. They recognise the right of the foreigner to hospitality but also limit this right by imposing conditions. Unconditional hospitality, on the other hand, is a pure, absolute, or hyperbolic Law (Derrida, 2005). It entails a host opening the space of hospitality, completely and unquestioningly, to an unpredictable and unknowable other, and is therefore impossible to practice (Langmann, 2010; Still, 2010).

These two modes of hospitality are ‘mutually dependent and constitutive, revealing an impassable aporia or paradox’ (Chahal et al., 2019, p. 897): on the one hand, the conditional laws of hospitality impose necessary political, juridical, and moral terms on unconditional hospitality since, without these concrete limitations, the host would be completely overtaken by the foreigner (Price, 2013). On the other hand, without reference to the unconditional law of hospitality, the adopted conditional practices would constitute mere calculation. The importance of the aporia between the adopted conditions of hospitality (possible hospitality) and the imperative of unconditional hospitality (the im-possibility of hospitality) is that it keeps both in tension and therefore in constant movement (Kakoliris, 2015). The im-possibility of hospitality thus constitutes the very condition of possibility of hospitality and opens a space for the coming of the new, for the ‘being open to what comes, to the to-come, to the other’ (Raffoul, 2008, p. 272).

In ALL, the two modes of hospitality and their aporia are illustrated in the common but conflicting demands faced by ALL practitioners: the ideal of offering as much ALL support as is needed by students, in whichever form this may take, and for however long (unconditional hospitality); and the practical demands of restricting this potentially unlimited and unpredictable support (conditional hospitality). While these competing demands may be experienced as an ongoing tension, they enable ALL practitioners to set unconditional hospitality as a regulatory influence on conditional hospitality, with the aporia between the two constantly unsettling identities, relations and practices in order to transform these into more hospitable ones and avoid them being reduced to calculation, hostility or control. As Derrida (2005, p. 6) suggests, it is ‘always in the name of pure … hospitality that it is necessary, in order to render [conditional hospitality] as effective as possible, to invent the best arrangements … , the least bad conditions, the most just legislation’.

The aporia between conditional and unconditional hospitality also enables ALL practitioners to be open to the new. The demand of unconditional hospitality not only prevents ALL practitioners from simply adhering to accepted conditions of hospitality. It also enables them to imagine and make claims to novel practices, alternate relations with students, and ways of being which fall outside the limits of these conditions (Price, 2013). In other words, in obstructing the conditions of hospitality from foreclosing the possibility for ALL practitioners to imagine radical alternatives, unconditional hospitality also encourages the possibility of encountering the new.

Finally, hospitality’s aporia suggests that ALL practitioners can never be assured of reaching a final ‘home’ or, to use a common ALL nomenclature, achieve a final ‘best-practice’. To Derrida, since conditional and unconditional hospitality constantly subvert each other, there is no fixed or achievable state of hospitality; hospitality is ‘always yet to come’ (Derrida, 1998a, p. 67). Consequently, framing ALL work as Derridean hospitality ensures that it displays a constant dynamism which interrupts stagnant modes of being and complicit practices and pushes against their limits, thereby allowing the opening of a space for the coming of the new and unforeseeable.

Ethics

Derrida defines hospitality as ethics – ‘not simply one ethic amongst others’ (Derrida, 2001, p. 16) but ethics itself; ‘the whole and the principle of ethics’ (Derrida, 1999, p. 50). Since hospitality is a gesture of welcome which is inherently directed to the other, it is ‘the very name of what opens itself to the face [of the other], or, more precisely, of what “welcomes” it’ (Derrida, 1999, p. 21). Because it thus defines all intersubjective encounters, understood as an openness to the other and therefore a radical relation with alterity, hospitality is ethics (Raffoul, 2008).

Another key reason for equating hospitality with ethics is related to hospitality’s constitutive aporia which, as an undecidable, always requires a judgment or a decision to be made. As suggested by Derrida (1992, pp. 41–43),

ethics, politics, and responsibility … will only ever have begun with the experience of aporia. When the path is clear and given, when a certain knowledge opens up the way in advance, the decision is already made, it might as well be said there is none to make: irresponsibly, and in good conscience, one simply applies or implements a program [making] of ethics and politics a technology.

Because hospitality constantly negotiates the boundaries between the conditional and unconditional laws of hospitality, it forms ‘the unstable site of strategy and decision’ (Derrida, 2005, p. 6). Hospitality is ethics ‘because without the assurances and certainties of conditions, rules and predetermined outcomes, we are forced to analyse complex ethical circumstances, make decisions and take responsibility for our stance’ (Chahal et al., 2019, p. 897). For Derrida, hospitality as ethics is thus a radical experience of the indeterminate – of the perhaps– and an antidote to any ‘abdication of our ethical responsibility’ (Popke, 2004, p. 302). The aporia between conditionality and unconditionality opens us to the unknown and indeterminable and compels us to deliberate on ethicality towards the other.

Framing ALL practice as Derridean hospitality thus opens a space of possibility towards ALL practitioner–student relationships which are defined by an ethics of alterity, consisting of a radical opening to, and taking responsibility for, the other. Derridean hospitality thus associates the role of ALL practitioners with an inscribed ethical undertaking. This ethicality invites practitioners to turn ‘from subject-focused accountability … to Other-based responsibility’ (Kostogriz, 2018, p. 33). It places ALL practitioners and students in an intersubjective encounter which commits both host and guest ‘to being-for-the Other by its sheer co-existence’ (Kostogriz, 2018, p. 34). Accordingly, rather than purely viewing ALL practitioners as subjects or ‘masters’ and students as objects of ALL knowledge, Derrida’s ideas place both in common spaces of hospitality. Because this common space of hospitality is contested, it requires that ‘both the host and the guest accept, in different ways, the uncomfortable and sometimes painful possibility of being changed by the other’ (Rosello, 2001, p. 170).

This aporia, or impossibility, at the threshold of hospitality invites ALL practitioners to maintain the exercise of professional and ethical judgement as a means of showing responsibility for the other. It encourages them to sustain the resistance to performativity and compliance demands that involve the adoption of wholly calculative measures, facile answers or expedient interventions. It recognises the inherent un-decidability behind every choice made but demands a response or judgement based on ethical considerations. This response

cannot be ultimately calculated in advance and thus prefabricated (and thus prescriptive, universal and applicable over time and across all contexts). Having to decide … means having to … be absolutely responsible, for how and to whom we respond.

(Anderson, 2015, p. 56)

Conclusion

This conceptual paper used the lens of Derridean hospitality to provide an alternative framing of ALL practitioners in their relation to students and student otherness. This re-framing counters the subject positionings prescribed by current neoliberal regimes in Australian HE, which reduce the teacher–student relationship to an economic transaction, conceal its power dynamics, ignore its ethical demand, and ultimately obstruct practitioners and students from the prospect of finding in universities a hospitable home. As such, the paper engaged with Derrida’s concept of hospitality and its key themes in order to analyse the role of ALL practitioners and students as ‘hosts’ and ‘guests’ in HE and to acknowledge the complex power dynamics which structure their intersubjective relationship. The article also called for the continual evaluation of ALL practitioners’ absolute claims to ‘mastery’ over a home (a field/discipline) or a guest/foreigner (the student other as object of knowledge) since such claims risk embroiling ALL practitioners in inhospitable practices of control and foreclosing the arrival of the new.

Re-framing ALL relations with students in terms of Derridean hospitality, it was additionally argued, opens possibilities towards alternate ALL practitioner–student relationships and practices which are inscribed with an ethics of responsibility towards the student other. This re-framing emphasises professional judgement, ethical considerations, and decision-making as critical to showing such a responsibility. It encourages a continual dynamism that transcends conditional neoliberal performativity and compliance measures and highlights the call of unconditional hospitality for opening to the new. Openness to alterity can create a common home to both host and guest/foreigner, a place of exchange (even if sometimes uncomfortable) based on mutual speaking, listening, and welcoming the new.

Framing ALL practice as Derridean hospitality thus offers an alternative language for thinking, speaking, and enacting ALL practitioner–student relations which links it to the ethico-political horizons of deconstruction (Peters & Biesta, 2009). As Deutscher (2005) suggests, deconstruction provides techniques for identifying contradictions in politics and therefore serves as a critical intervention tool. It renders what is taken-for-granted more alien and enables the formulation of ‘new forms of ethics and responsibility’ (p. 24). In offering new ways for thinking, speaking and practicing ALL, Derrida’s deconstruction of the concept of hospitality allows for ‘the irruptive emergence of a new “concept”, a concept that can no longer be, and never could be, included in the previous regime’ (p. 24).

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Dr Stephen Price, Dr Britta Schneider and Dr Michael Hallpike for their invaluable support in thinking through this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dana Chahal

Dana Chahal is an Academic Skills Advisor for research candidates at RMIT University. Dana has over 20 years of experience teaching and researching in Higher Education in Australia and internationally. In the last 14 years, Dana has worked as an Academic Language and Learning (ALL) practitioner in Victorian universities. While she has investigated empirically different areas of ALL practice (such as genre pedagogy and peer learning), her most recent research focuses on integrating theoretical/philosophical ideas in conceptualising the role of ALL practitioners in tertiary institutions.