Haunting as Method: Convoking Spectral Histories and Ideologies in Speculative Research

• In Event: Justice-Oriented Writing and Composing Through the Speculative

Abstract

Education research’s renewed interest in the speculative has coincided with an influx of future-oriented methods of data generation and analysis (Garcia & Mirra, 2023; Mirra & Garcia, 2020). As a divergent but complementary line of inquiry, we understand speculation as a past, present, and future-oriented practice (Otieno, 2018; Toliver, 2022) that manifests along multiple, sometimes ephemeral, timelines. Namely, this paper takes up the concepts of haunting (Gordon, 2008) and hauntology (Derrida, 1994) to interrogate how histories can recur and shape the ways youth compose and work towards their speculative visions of civic life. Building on this session’s focus on speculative thinking, Paper 1 considers how youths’ practices of composing towards civic justice in two separate research projects occurred at the intersections of many timelines and situated histories.
“To be haunted,” writes Gordon (2008), “is to be tied to historical and social effects” (p. 190). Thus, to understand contemporary systems of societal organization (e.g., late-stage capitalism) we must understand how their developments have emerged in relation to the ghostly legacies of past social movements (e.g., Marxism). By revisiting data from two research projects – an online role-playing game community of suburban white boys, and an out-of-school critical civic inquiry community of urban Indonesian American girls – the presenters engaged in a cross-case analysis to trace how youths’ understandings of real and imagined civic environments were informed by (un)conscious hauntings of personal, familial, and transnational histories. Through multiple rounds of coding, memo-writing, and collaborative analysis, they found that youths’ conceptualizing of just social futures required contending with unjust pasts. In the former project, for example, a youth Game Master (GM) grappled with histories of racism and sexism as he used Dungeon & Dragons sourcebooks to author a role-playing adventure that featured a dark-skinned, matriarchal race of elves named The Drow. In the latter project, an Indonesian American youth drew on her family’s complicated transnational history of establishing lives in the U.S. to begin ideating and composing a civic action project: a documentary film that would depict the civic place-making practices of diverse people in her city. This youths’ democratic goal as she composed this multimodal text – to speculate towards an urban public sphere characterized by more nuanced understandings of the diverse communities comprising it – was haunted by her knowledge of the sociopolitical precarities navigated by her two Southeast Asian immigrant parents (e.g., ethnic and sectarian violence in Indonesia, racial and economic precarity in the U.S.).
This paper has twofold implications. First, the presenters will highlight how youth learned to “cope [and] grow with being haunted” as they speculatively composed towards civic justice (Yoon, 2019). Careful to not conflate hauntological methods of inquiry with “damage-centered” research (Tuck, 2009, p.409), the authors will spotlight how humanizing interpretations of present and future societies are situated in relation to spectral events and beliefs of the past. Second, the presenters will share methods of data generation (i.e., interview protocols, inquiry communities) and analysis (i.e., coding schemes) that convoked – or called forth – historical and ideological specters.

Authors

• Alex Corbitt, Syracuse University

• Ankhi Guha Thakurta, Boston College