Hauntings

Session Submission Type: Paper Session (90 minute)

Description

What is the role of hauntings and ghosts in theorizing social life and the sociological imagination? In this session, we invite submissions that analyze hauntings, ghosts, and similar specters as distinctive forms of epistemology co-constitutive of race, class, gender, sexuality, political economy and culture. The panel invites scholars to trace, for example, how ghosts manifest in the everyday: from the intimate to the geopolitical and beyond, and ask questions such as: how do we account for the unseen and invisible? What methods are best suited to study ghosts? Submissions may be traditional academic papers or more creative works that investigate hauntings, race, gender, and class from multiple perspectives and forms. We are particularly interested in papers that use hauntings and ghosts to theorize and investigate structural themes and issues such as indigenous dispossession, enslavement, climate, abolition, and borderlands, among others, and who draw on intellectual traditions such as the Black Radical Tradition, decolonial theories, postcolonial theories, queer of color critique, Black, Indigenous and women of color feminisms, and mad studies, among others.

Sub Unit

• Race, Gender, and Class Section / Hauntings

Presider

• Ingrid E. Castro, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts

Individual Presentations

• Chasing Ghosts: The Forgotten Maps of Black Women’s City Space - Whitney Richards-Calathes, University of the West Indies

• Ghosts of Slavery: Race in the Making of Hegemonic Turkishness - Aysegul Kayagil, SOAS, University of London

• “Haunted Me The Most,” Black Feminist Hauntology and the Black Lives Matter Movement - Jalia L. Joseph, James Madison University

• Hungry Ghosts: Three Hauntings in the Chinese American Diaspora - Charlotte Xue Lian Wang, Columbia University

• The Sixth Sense: Race as Psychoanalysis' Interruption - Endia Hayes, The University of Texas at San Antonio; Seth Robinson, The University of Texas at San Antonio

Discussant

• Ingrid E. Castro, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts

Session Organizer

• Victoria Reyes, University of California-Riverside