One of the themes I’ve returned to in this blog is the importance of hospitality for wicked education. This is hospitality as expressed by Derrida, which centres openness to all who come, however they come and whenever they arrive. Wicked education requires deep and rich collaboration across the boundaries between academic disciplines and between academic and other communities and groups. This only truly works when those who have the power to host collaborations are willing to hold themselves open to perspectives they may not initially understand or may not want to accept. Using the analytical lens of hospitality asks us to think carefully about: who gets to host and who is positioned as guest; what power can be exercised by hosts and guests; who isn’t invited; what openings and closures are presented by the temporary spaces in which hospitality is situated; whose practices and customs are in play; and much more.

Recntly, I’ve been thinking a bit more about two aspects of hospitalty. The first was prompted by attending a recent keynote by Jen Ross and by her book on speculative methods and pedagogies. This work considers the importance of allowing learners and teachers to remain in states of uncertainty and to hold open possibilities for the emergence of futures that we have not yet been able to imagine. This is a challenge to current stories in our societies about the inevitability of particular futures put foward, for example, by powerful tech companies within neoliberal paradigms. I think that the capability to sit in uncertainty, confusion and not knowing is key to academic hospitality. We need to be able to meet unknown and maybe unknoweable others and find ways to build shared frames of reference and action that don’t require complete agreement or seamless mutual understanding.

The second lens on hospitality that I’ve been thinking about is ‘solidarity with friction’ as discussed by Daniel Crain, Juha Suoranta and colleagues in a recent paper in Postdigital Science and Education. Buiding on De Sousa Santos, these authors talk through how we can be open and engaged with the knowledge practices and perspectives situated in other cultures without slipping into an uncritical stance where anything goes. I think this is important for understanding how hospitality can be put into practice in relation to wicked problems. We can use hospitality to confront and challenge attempts to erase or marginalise epistemologies from other cultures without losing our criticality. We can hold ethical complexity and resist the urge to resolve it neatly while still asking what a given narrative privileges, what it silences and which futures it allows.

Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash