On unconditional hos(ti)pitality : thinking-doing strategies for dis/abling arts education

Abstract

Hospitality and diplomacy are understood as universal hosting parameters. However, they fail to address non-neurotypical perception, jeopardising the inclusiveness of arts education environments. By bringing hospitality, inclusiveness, neurotypicality, and more-than-human wildness into conversation, I argue for developing pedagogical spaces oriented to deconstructing normalcy. This article emerges at the intersection of disability studies and neuroqueerness and it is further developed through Karen Barad’s take on non-human agency and Deleuzoguattarian schizoanalysis. Jacques Derrida conceptualises hostipitality to problematise how hospitality cannot enable radical difference. I discuss this notion in dialogue with anecdotes from The Spaze, which is a schizoanalytical experiment and a procedural architecture oriented to non-neurotypicality developed at the Senselab. There, relationality is understood as always more-than-human. In this article, I furthermore examine how diplomacy’s rhetoric excludes non-neurotypical perception by enacting what Félix Guattari names normopathy, namely, the privileging of linguistic patterns, human-to-human relationalities, and typical socialities. By discussing non-neurotypicality, I aim to queer rhetoric in arts education, diffracting Derrida’s notion of hospitality to foreground the more-than-human relationality developed by Deleuzoguattarian and Baradian perspectives.