Welcoming in the Other: Derridean Hospitality and Evangelical Teachers

• In Event: Naming the Elephant in the Room: Considering Multiple Frameworks for Researching Religions in Education

Abstract

Objectives or purposes:
This paper attends to what it might mean to welcome in the other within educational contexts that largely privilege performances of Christianity, both by teachers and by students (Burke & Segall, 2017). I consider, more specifically, what kind of welcoming in of the other is made (im)possible by the discursive figurations that shape evangelical Christian teachers’ performance of hospitality within their classrooms.

Theoretical Framework:
I draw on Derridean deconstruction of hospitality--a deconstruction of what hospitality has come to mean and what sociopolitical commitments are hidden within the concept itself--to frame this inquiry. Derrida’s examination of the responsibilities and commitments of hospitality, both in philosophical and religious literature opens up space for possibility within an impossibility--what Derrida terms an aporia. Derrida sees multiple aporetic constructions in hospitality. First, the unlimited nature of hospitality is always based on the limitations of such a welcome. There can be no hospitality without finitude, or without some limit to demarcate the beginning and the end of hospitality. If there is not finitude, the receiver of hospitality is no longer a welcomed other, but a parasite. There can equally be no hospitality without sovereignty, or without the power of the host to make decisions about when and to whom hospitality is offered. The host must be in possession of their own house in order to offer hospitality, because what will the host offer if he has nothing to offer at all? Derrida (1997/2000) points out that “since there is no hospitality without finitude, sovereignty can only be exercised by filtering, choosing, and thus by excluding and doing violence. Injustice, a certain injustice . . . begins right away, from the very threshold of the right to hospitality” (p. 55). This paper considers what violences are inevitable and what hospitalities might be made (im)possible by the discourse of evangelicism that shapes the classroom practice and beliefs of evangelical Christians

Modes of Inquiry and Evidence:
In order to consider the limits and affordances of Derridean hospitality as a guiding framework, I draw on a portraiture (Lightfoot-Lawrence & Davis, 1997) study of three evangelical Christian teachers. This portraiture study examined early career evangelical Christian teachers and their navigation of moments of hesitation where they felt a pull between their religious identities and their teacher identities. Data included interviews, focus groups, artifacts, and reflective journals. From the data analysis, I created portraits of each of the study’s participant.

Conclusions and Significance:
This presentation highlights the usefulness and limits of poststructural theoretical approaches (like Derridean deconstruction) in examining dominant discursive figurations and understandings about the role of religion in public education that may be taken for granted. The use of a framework like Derridean hospitality insists that educational researchers consider their own inquiry as a place of violence and hospitality, while they simultaneously consider classrooms as places of violence and hospitality. Juzwik & Mckenzie (2015) called for more complex and complicating portrayals of religious identities, religious discourses, and religious performances in educational research; poststructural theoretical frameworks hold space for this complex and complicating inquiry.

Author

• Heidi L Hadley, Missouri State University