Ghostwriting journal 4: ambiguity & uncertainty

A series of journals in which Lance Peng contemplates his teaching practice.

Ambiguity, it turns out, is everywhere in teaching. Not just in the big theoretical sense but in the tiny emotional shifts of the classroom, in the between certainty and not-knowing, in the uncomfortable but generative spaces where I’m not entirely sure what I’m doing and perhaps neither are my students.

And that’s the bit I keep returning to: ambiguity not as an obstacle but as a strategy. Uncertainty not as a gap but as a dimension.

When I try to tease apart the difference, I realise I’ve been operating with both for years, sometimes deliberately and sometimes by accident.

Ghostwriting journal 3: AI-dentity and emotional labour

A series of journals in which Lance Peng contemplates his teaching practice.

Experimental week!

This week was my big experimental session....the one where I leaned into the AI stuff. AI-dentity. Emotional labour. The unsettling weirdness of being seen (or mis-seen) by a machine. I’d been planning this session for weeks.

And it turned out to be one of my favourite teaching moments this term.

Ghostwriting journal 2: dark pedagogy

A series of journals in which Lance Peng contemplates his teaching practice.

Reading Lysgaard on dark pedagogy left me thinking about how loaded the word pedagogy already is. It disguises itself as neutral but it always carries the weight of human-centred assumptions: what we value, what we call knowledge, what we erase and it gives us a comforting illusion that the world is narratable, graspable. Yet beyond that little bubble lies Thacker’s world-without-us: indifferent and unmoved.

Ghostwriting journal 1: why discomfort?

A series of journals in which Lance Peng contemplates his teaching practice.

There’s something deliciously strange about lecturing from a glowing rectangle while my colleague, the ever-brilliant Dr Jeremy Chang, holds court in the flesh, oceans away. Together we co-teach a course titled Dark Pedagogy for master’s and PhD students at the Institute of Education, National Sun Yat-sen University. He walks among them, I haunt them from afar (a spectral presence through Wi-Fi) and it’s all very on brand.

Craft, clay and chronotopes

A feature piece by Lance Peng with reflections by Roderick Geerts

There is something haunting about craft….about the soft spiral of a thumb pressed into clay, the dusty ridges of a pot retrieved from earth after centuries of burial, the quiet alchemy of throwing, shaping, firing. The past is never just the past in archaeology, especially not when it takes form again (not metaphorically but literally) on a wheel, under the hands of someone who knows. This is what first struck me when I encountered Rodericvs, the living, breathing, spinning extension of Roderick Geerts, whose work as both a PhD researcher in Roman archaeology and a master ceramicist/experimental archaeologist slips and slides across temporal boundaries with an ease that is anything but casual. To me he is a time traveller of a particular kind: one who neither romanticises the past nor reduces it to data. Instead he crafts it….coils it, shapes it, burns it and in doing so, opens up a different kind of relation to history: one that is intimate, material, affectively charged.

Turning from the Ruin: A Hauntological Analysis of ZA/UM’s Disco Elysium

A Bachelor thesis with reflections from Lilja

Link to thesis, Turning from the Ruin: A Hauntological Analysis of ZA/UM’s Disco Elysium
https://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn%3Anbn%3Ase%3Ahh%3Adiva-55473

Synthesised nostalgia: Exploring Inal Bilsel’s retro-futuristic sounds

A feature piece by Lance Peng on Inal Bilsel

With over two decades of experience in the music industry, Inal Bilsel has carved out a unique artistic identity—one that fuses music, visual arts and speculative narratives. A multifaceted composer, performer and educator, Inal’s work is a journey through contrasting worlds: fact and fiction, nostalgia and future dystopia, narrative and conceptual abstraction. His sound is influenced by science fiction, retro-futurism and musical hauntology, a genre that evokes the echoes of lost futures and fragmented memories. Whether through electronic compositions, orchestral pieces or immersive audio-visual performances, he pushes the boundaries of what music can communicate.

Hauntological Form: Where We Might Find the New in Contemporary Videogames

A post by James Sweeting

Introduction

To answer the question “where might we find the new” this paper will provide insight into the circumstances that encapsulate contemporary videogames. Acknowledging that since the start of the new millennium the future has been increasingly difficult to locate, simultaneously, contemporary videogames have been preoccupied with looking towards the past for answers. Nostalgia has often been considered as a potential source for the state of reverie that the past provides, whether that be from history or media form. However, nostalgia is not the source of the increasing reliance on the past, rather it is the identifiable symptom of something else, that being hauntology. 

Roots to Routes: Community Resilience through Ancestral Knowledge

A post by Lance Peng

In a world where progress and innovation are often prioritised, I highlight the need to reconnect with the past, drawing on the wisdom passed down through generations. Mnemohistory, which focuses on how societies remember and reinterpret their history, shows that communities don’t just preserve events but also pass on cultural practices, stories, and shared experiences that shape their identities, and by tracing developmental paths through this historical knowledge, we can see how communities use their past to deal with present challenges and plan for the future. This approach goes beyond written records, exploring how the act of remembering and reimagining the past connects with shaping the future, with ancestral knowledge serving as a key resource in strengthening community resilience.

Hauntology and nostalgia in the touristed landscapes of Sarajevo

A post by Marta Roriz

Introduction

Tourism has today a significant impact on cities and urban lives around the world. Urban tourism and the exploration of local topographies as tourist destinations have led to a complex co-production and co-consumption of urban spaces by tourists and local residents. The significative increase of tourism following the Second World War, in both developed and developing countries, is the result of various economic, technological, social and political changes (Wearing, Stevenson and Young 2010; Graburn 1989; Urry 2002), leading Crick (1989: 310) to describe it as “the largest movement of human populations outside wartime”. People travel for pleasure, but also to experience new places as well as to return to the familiar and the known. Some are motivated to learn about other people and cultures, while others seek to gain insights into the self through travel (Wearing, Stevenson and Young 2010).

Motherhood : on haunting and failure

A PhD thesis with reflections from Anna Johnson

Link to thesis, Motherhood: on haunting and failure

https://eprints.kingston.ac.uk/id/eprint/56830/

The Synthetic Landscape

A post by Ian Chamberlain

In the following paper ‘The Synthetic Landscape,’ I will highlight and examine some of the core values at the heart of my practice. These will include my approaches to making, the themes and concepts I explore, and most importantly how I see these connections. I will overview some of my past works and focus on three bodies of work that I see as pivotal in the development of my practice, bringing together process and core conceptual concerns.

Empty echoes of empty dishes

A post by Hilary Tsui, contributing to the Shadows under the mistletoe theme

I grew up celebrating the Winter Solstice

A day to mark the longest day in winter

But also a time where we feel closest to each other and home

Home is my grandparents’ cooking

Food so delicious that we joked they are a restaurant powerhouse

Tong-Hing Restaurant, we called it

Home is my grandfather’s stash of biscuits and toffee

The dining table forever adorned with his favourite Danish butter cookies

Accompanied by the crinkle of candy wrappers

Stories wanted: Shadows under the mistletoe

The Chiaroscuro is a blog that dances with the spectres of memory—a place where the past is never truly gone but lingers like an elusive shadow, slipping between moments of our everyday lives. Here, we’re fascinated by those fleeting glimmers of memory, the eerie remnants of what once was but somehow never left. Each story, reflection, and image we feature weaves nostalgia together with the uncanny, exploring how the echoes of yesterday reach out to touch the present, haunting us in unexpected ways. This season, as festive lights twinkle and winter settles in, we’re gathering short, evocative pieces on the theme Shadows under the mistletoe.

Towards a Hauntology of Life and Death

A post by Lucas Gronouwe

Philosophically questioning the relation between life and death is usually considered to be the proper territory of movements such as existentialism and Lebensphilosophie. This belief is instigated by the explicit treatment of the life-death relation by authors such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Sartre who, each in their own way, exposed and examined the presence of death in our daily lives. With the rise of poststructuralism – undermining the existentialist ideal of a free and autonomous individual – subjects such as life and death also lose their central importance, as they are replaced with historical, linguistic, and textual concerns. Or so one thinks, because the case of Jacques Derrida provides us with a vivid counterexample in this regard.

Doing Justice to Poetry: Gadamer and Derrida on Reading Paul Celan

A post by Lucas Gronouwe

INTRODUCTION

What does it mean to do justice to a text, be it philosophical, literary, or poetic? In this regard, what is the task of philosophical hermeneutics, the discipline traditionally concerned with explanation and interpretation? This is the question at stake in the ‘Gadamer-Derrida encounter’, an intellectual debate that retains its relevance, not only because it has ‘animated contemporary philosophy’ (Di Cesare 2004, 74), but also because the practice of reading and interpreting texts makes up a large part of research and education in the humanities as such. By revisiting the diverging hermeneutical strategies of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jacques Derrida, this paper seeks to determine how we can engage in the practice of reading and interpreting in a righteous and just manner. 

Five Poems by Jennifer Maritza McCauley

Poems by Jennifer Maritza McCauley

Past

I swallow the past, steadying myself against the back of a young birch tree. The past is pulped, palpable; it is large and too-huge to choke down. When I live in the present, I feel newly cleaned and scrubbed by sun. When I face the day brightly, I see the world through baby-eyes; I see freckles of color and rainbowed-light. So what to do?

What I shall do: I shall defy hauntings. I digest the past, in all its spikes; then I will forget it. I will know the past; it has kissed me blithely and squatted in my house; I will feel the wild grip of past and know it still struggles under my skin but I will not see it. It will be in me, but I will not love it. The past: that ghosted hunger; look, I’m going to ignore my appetite.

Oh present, I open my mouth to consume you in full.

Sonja Stojanovic. Mind the Ghost. Thinking Memory and the Untimely through Contemporary Fiction in French. Liverpool UP, 2023.

A post by Catherine Nesci

Sonja Stojanovic. Mind the Ghost. Thinking Memory and the Untimely through Contemporary Fiction in French. Liverpool UP, 2023. xi + 307 pp. 

This book offers fascinating insights into the return of ghosts and memorial passages across generations in contemporary French-speaking narratives about the Shoah, the Algerian War of Independence, the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994, and mass crimes during the Balkan Wars of the early 1990s. Starting with an expected and yet fresh discussion on haunting and spectrality in Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, and continuing with a most innovative review of recent texts by Hélène Cixous, whose writing opens and weaves lines of communication with the disappeared, Sonja Stojanovic highlights the key notion of double suffering (double souffrance or double douleur in Cixous), which allows empathy and listening to the cry of others, without appropriating the latter’s suffering.

Hauntology and Lost Futures: Trauma Narratives in the Contemporary Gothic

A post by Emma Dee

Introduction

We begin, not with a text, but with an image.

This is a depiction of a painting by Caspar David Friedrich, a well-known German Romantic painter and explorer of the sublime. Not only is this a representation of what many of us might think of when we hear the term ‘Gothic,’ but the story of this particular image might help elucidate a concept of hauntology that this article is exploring. This picture is not the original.

D(igital)éjà Vu: AI, Mnemohistory, and the Future of Memory

A post by Sheng-Hsiang Lance Peng

Mnemohistory, a term coined by German Egyptologist Jan Assmann, refers to the study of how societies remember and construct their historical narratives. Unlike traditional historiography, which focuses on the objective recording and analysis of past events, mnemohistory emphasises the subjective processes through which memories are formed, preserved, and transmitted across generations. It explores the ways in which collective memory shapes, and is shaped by, cultural, social, and political contexts. Mnemohistory investigates the symbols, rituals, and narratives that communities use to create a sense of shared identity and continuity with the past. Originating from the Greek word “mnemos” meaning memory, and “historia,” meaning enquiry or knowledge, mnemohistory looks into the interaction between memory and history, recognising that our understanding of the past is not static but constantly reinterpreted through the lens of present concerns and future aspirations.