Leaving me ajar: Education for hospitable identity

Hospitality, the reception of the other, is a perennial ethical demand, but one which is felt acutely in contemporary Western societies, because of increased ethnocultural diversity. In this dissertation, I argue that an important aim of education should be to shape students' identities in such a way that they have a capacity for hospitality. Educating for hospitable identity hinges on the conception of identity informing the educative efforts. Currently, identity is commonly conceived of as narrative, and narrative conceptions of identity range from "folk conceptions that treat stories as selfevident, to more refined hermeneutical approaches that theorize narrative structuring and its role in human lives. I examine these narrative conceptions of identity, and discuss their limitations for educating for hospitable identity. I propose an alternative, poststructuralist conception of identity, which disrupts and augments narrative conceptions. I argue that an understanding of identity in terms of hospitality is served well by an analysis of discursive performativity: the effectiveness of language is both dependent on previous iterations and vulnerable to subsequent iterations. Understanding identity, likewise, as fundamentally dependent on the other, and vulnerable to the incoming of the other, identity is left ajar. In order to foster an understanding of such a state of ajarness, I draw on aesthetic education to suggest a pedagogical model for the training of "deconstructive regard," a mode of engagement with human artifices ranging from tangible works of art to conceptual artifices such as identity categories. With deconstructive regard, presence and absence are seen as co-dependent, and as both separated and joined by their border. Finally, I consider educational questions which might benefit from analysis in terms of hospitality and, in particular, in terms of hospitable identity. This discussion provides examples of how curriculum, assessment, pedagogy, teacher identity, and school discourse can be left ajar. Ajarness is not a deficiency to be overcome, but, on the contrary, a necessary feature of discursive practices such as education and identity formation, and a condition for the gesture of hospitality.