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.

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/

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.

The Ghost of the Ottoman Scourge: Ottoman Hauntology and Dystopia in Socialist Yugoslav History Textbooks (1945–1990)

A post by Bakir Ovčina

INTRODUCTION

In 1991, prominent Yugoslav Communist-turned-dissident Milovan Đilas reflected on how the egalitarian utopia of Marxism-Leninism was rapidly coming to its end. He pondered whether a ‘body of new and attractive ideas might arise – perhaps a call for a new utopia’ (Djilas and Urban 1991, 178). When the world was looking to the future, former Yugoslavia was in a deep crisis. Djilas did not believe Yugoslavia would fall apart (Djilas and Urban 1991, 175). He was wrong. The end of the Bolshevik utopia in Yugoslavia brought a devastating war. In that war, Serb forces sought to create their own new utopia, ‘a state cleansed of any “foreign” elements – a nationally pure Greater Serbia’ (Weitz 2003, 236). Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević’s promised state was bound up in utopian language of ‘all Serbs in one state,’ ‘fast railways’ and ‘Swedish job protection’ (Korać 2014). This utopia also meant wholesale genocide of the Bosniak/Muslim population in Bosnia, culminating on 11 July 1995 in Srebrenica, where the forces of General Ratko Mladić, in his words, ‘took revenge on the Turks’ by butchering some 8,372 men and boys (Suljagić 2021, 1). The ‘Turks’ he referred to were the Bosnian Muslims, identified with the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire (ca. 1299–1922) controlled much of former Yugoslavia, Southeastern Europe, Western Asia and North Africa. Its influence profoundly shaped the culture, customs and language, of especially the Balkan nations (Lory 2015, 391–404). Maria Todorova (1997, 46–47) argued it is ‘preposterous to look for an Ottoman legacy in the Balkans. The Balkans are the Ottoman legacy.’ However, this heritage has been often maligned, and the Ottoman Empire vilified.

Participatory researchers shadowed by ghosts: a hauntological book review of “Empathy” by Genzer, Ben Adiva, and Perry

A post by Sheng-Hsiang Lance Peng

Are you haunted by ghosts of the past and phantoms of your future? Welcome to the spooky realm of hauntology

A post by Alasdair Macintyre

Do you believe in ghosts? Every year, Halloween serves up the usual images of spooks, skeletons and witches – but these ideas aren’t just the domain of fiction or trick-or-treating. There is also a philosophical concept that embraces ghosts.

It is called “hauntology”, and it might just make you a believer.

The word hauntology was invented by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida for his 1993 lecture Spectres of Marx.

Derrida was a whimsical guy, and the words “hauntology” and “ontology” both sound identical when spoken in French.

Ontology is the philosophical study of existence and being, dating back as far as ancient Greece. In Derrida’s mind, ontology was shadowed by hauntology, a state of non-being.

Hauntology is that eerie zone where time collapses and our past memories and associations haunt our minds, like a ghost.