Decolonizing the Curriculum in Higher Education: A Hauntological Exploration

• In Event: Remembering the Future: Hauntological Intersections Between the Past and the Yet-to-Arrive

Abstract

This paper explores how a pedagogy of hauntology might be enacted taking into account the ghosts of apartheid. To do so, it shows how the absent/presences of the there/then here/now and the effects of the past/present on people's lives and the environment, are important considerations in a higher education curriculum. Situated in engineering education in a South African university of technology, the paper investigates how the curriculum can be used to animate injustices of the past.

Jacques Derrida (1994) understands hauntology as an ongoing conversation with the ghosts of the past, aiming at inventing a different future rather than fixing the past. For Derrida, hauntology addresses the specters of communism that haunt Europe. In the case of District Six, a notorious area of forced removals in central Cape Town, South Africa, hauntology addresses the ghosts of apartheid, colonialism, racism and oppression that are brought forth by the geomatics techniques that are used in a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) course. These ghosts are not necessarily people, but also streets, public amenities, houses, and land.

We call this methodology a pedagogy of hauntology, which interrogates narratives that offer closure or erasure and instead underscores the importance of the ethico-onto-epistemological openings created by ontological in/determinacy of time/being, where the past is not left behind but is diffracted through the present and the future. A pedagogy of hauntology responds to the lively materiality of ghosts of colonialism and apartheid, renewing pedagogical engagements in higher education with entanglements of responsibility and justice. What we think is past and forgotten is revealed as a forceful presence affecting everyday life.

Geomatics ttechiques make evident the ghostly presences of roads, buildings and cultural activities of District Six upon which the White campus was built. These techniques were used to animate and reveal the organized systemic violence perpetrated over an extended period through apartheid laws, which would otherwise appear removed from visibility. The geomatics techniques make it possible to apprehend the materiality of organized and systematic colonial and apartheid forces, revealing the systemic destruction of buildings and social fabric which appear removed from human vision in the current times.

using GIS tools of this profession that bring to the surface the materiality of the forced relocations in District Six rendered invisible through dis/continuous chronological periods. The geomatics techniques enabled tracing and re/turning the ghosts of the apartheid machinery which used abusive systems of power and organized forces to destroy property, land and people’s lives. The marks on the land which were revealed through the techniques are situated on the very location that students were studying engineering - they are “ghostly non/existence” (Barad, 2018, p.231) in multiple places at the same time (there/here, then/now). This alerted students to the ghostly matters of apartheid, and to the effects of the colonial past on the people and the land of District Six.

By telling the story of apartheid violence related to District Six in Cape Town through the lens of GIS, we show how sensibility towards nonlinear time, in/determinacy and dis/continuity are useful posthumanist pedagogical concepts to address the specters of the past/present.

Authors

• Michalinos Zembylas, The Open University of Cyprus

• Vivienne Grace Bozalek, University of the Western Cape

• Siddique Motala, University of Cape Town