Recognition before correction

Epistemic hospitality in the academic advising contact zone

Abstract

This paper argues that academic correction and relational care, typically treated as separate registers within academic language and learning practice, are better understood as a single, fused act within the one-to-one advising encounter. This fusion, this paper proposes, rests on a precondition that has received comparatively little direct attention in existing scholarship: recognition of the student as a specific knower, before any assessment of their claims. Drawing together academic literacies theory, Pratt and Canagarajah’s account of the contact zone, Zembylas’s affective hospitality, and M. Fricker’s account of epistemic injustice, the paper develops the concept of epistemic hospitality, an advising disposition through which recognition is sustained in practice, naming disciplinary norms as situated while engaging a student’s existing reasoning as a legitimate resource. The paper concludes with implications for how academic language and learning advisors might frame disciplinary expectations while maintaining recognition of students’ own epistemic resources.