Adapting intercultural research for performance: Enacting hospitality in interdisciplinary collaboration and public engagement

This article theorises the process of adapting my research on intercultural communication for public performance in collaboration with a theatre company. I frame the collaboration as taking place within a hospitable institutional space (Phipps and Barnett, 2007) and then consider what it means to enact hospitality interpersonally, given that the condition of its possibility is at the same time the condition of its impossibility (Derrida, 2000). I suggest that the enactment of hospitality can be understood through the application of an intercultural theoretical framework based on Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1986) concept of outsideness, and that this framework can be applied to both the collaboration with the theatre company and to the purposes of public engagement with research. I conclude with a consideration of the relationship between hospitality and hope, and a call to move towards a ‘condition of possibility’ (Gibson-Graham, 2008) for working as academics, for interdisciplinary collaboration, and for living.