Listening to the Friendly Ghosts: Embracing the past to move within the present in RPPs

• In Event: Histories, Hauntings, and Hard Other Knowledges: Examining the Specters of Research Practice Partnerships Advancing Justice

Abstract

Purpose & Objectives
This paper shares a conceptual argument for how feminist theoretical conceptualizations of haunting and ghosts (Kosmina, 2020) can attune researchers to the affective dimensions of research collaborations that impact how and whether RPPs are sustained over time. We argue that these lenses hold potential to fuel the perseverance necessary to keep moving through the challenges, ebbs, and flows, that accompany partnerships. We take the interruptions of COVID-19 in one RPP as a context to examine how the hauntings of that recent past can be (re)conceptualized as friendly ghosts that hold potential to guide partners through disruptions that can otherwise threaten the sustainability of multi-year RPPs.
Perspective(s)
Research on RPPs and school, community, and university partnerships often emphasizes the challenges of sustainability, the relational dimensions of maintaining long-term partnerships that aim toward justice-centered goals (Ghiso & Campano, 2024; Davidson & Penuel, 2019), and strategies for maintaining and nurturing those relationships over time. We take up questions of sustaining partnerships through feminist humanities scholars’ theorizing of haunting and ghosts that builds on Derrida’s (1993) conception of hauntology in concert with the legacy of women writers who invoke ghosts as manifestations of memory that collapse the past into the embodied present and dreams of more just futures (Romdhani, 2017). As Kosmina (2020) argues, haunting’s atemporality propels continual movement within the slipperiness of the past, present, and future. We harness these lenses to challenge linear conceptions of time that, we argue, can cause temporary sticking points to feel like endpoints.
Methods
Our paper arises from an RPP (2018-present) with a Title 1 public elementary school in which university- and school-based educator-researchers engaged and studied a model of school-embedded professional learning to collaborate on classroom discussion practices that honor children’s knowledge and engage substantive questions of identity and equity. Here, we draw on teacher and researcher correspondence, reflections, and artifacts to trace how the concepts of haunting and ghosts help us in making sense of our pandemic challenges and what it means to sustain within concrete and affective uncertainties.
Warrants
We discuss and illustrate three areas in which the sense of being haunted circulated alongside ongoing sustenance and reassurance through the histories of relationships and shared goals built over time (e.g., friendly ghosts): 1) Affective responses to interruption and change, including sensations of inadequacy and fear amid the love, care, and desire for ongoing work; 2) The blurring of suspension and continuance; 3) The shifting realities and pressing needs of schools.
Offering a conceptual lens that contributes to knowledge about sustaining RPPs through inevitable challenges that can threaten to upend them, the paper closes by discussing how the fluid temporality of ghosts can fuel perseverance through memories of relationships, spaces, and feelings that are always alive and lively in the swiftly moving present in partnerships. Like other theories that orient toward process rather than endpoints, tracing ghosts and recognizing hauntings can support propelling movement within uncertainty.

Authors

• Elizabeth Dutro, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Erica Caasi, Denver Public Schools