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.

Hauntology of Trash in Environmental Education

A post by Rangga Kala Mahaswa, Gloria Bayu Nusa Prayuda, and Luthfi Baihaqi Riziq

1 Introduction

In Postscript on the Societies of Control (1999), Gilles Deleuze argues that capitalism is geographically separated into first-world capitalism and third-world capitalism. First-world Capitalism is characterised by the absence of involvement in production, more about regulating the flow of surplus, signified by stocks, and offering services instead of products. The third world still maintains the old way of buying raw materials and selling finished products (Deleuze, 1999, p. 4). The levels of production, types of products capitalism offers, and geographical conditions, therefore, separate the first and third worlds. The term “Third World” itself has become bad connotative nowadays: it signified poor and developing countries starting in the Cold War period (Wolf-Phillips, 1987, p. 1313). The connotations “poor” and “developing” are a kind of stigma. Many countries have tried to overcome it to reach the ultimate stage: becoming a developed country using economic or educational policies. Indonesia is one of the many countries in the Global South that has attempted to become a developed country characterised by rapid economic growth.

(2/2) Specters in the Computer: A Hauntological Interpretation of Vaporwave

A post by Borna Šućurović

**This is the latter part of the article; the former comes before.

Fisher's Intervention: Lost Futures and the Spectral Not Yet

Before we bring Derrida's hauntology in connection with vaporwave it is important to note two additional points, the first of which has to do with terminology. Throughout the French original of the Specters of Marx Derrida uses two 'names' for specters: la spectre and le revenant. While the former tries to express at once all of the properties explained in the previous chapter, the latter places particular emphasis on the reversible function of spectral existents. Le revenant – in both French and English languages – denotes a 'returning ghost', one who returns from somewhere. By using this name Derrida is attempting to show how specters return into temporal planes they do not belong to and within which certain forms of the work of mourning are already underway. As Merlin Coverley writes in the third chapter of his Hauntology;

(1/2) Specters in the Computer: A Hauntological Interpretation of Vaporwave

A post by Borna Šućurović

Introduction

 

On February 29th, 2016 a video entitled S U N D A Y S C H O O L was uploaded to YouTube and quickly became known as one of the first examples of what has since been dubbed simpsonwave. The video follows Bart Simpson's time spent going to Sunday school and getting to know Jessica, the daughter of reverend Lovejoy with whom he falls unhappily in love. While these events are taking place, the song Teen Pregnancy by Blank Banshee – in which an androgynous voice repeats the phrases "I'm just a kid" and "It was just a little mistake" over the beats of synthesizer-infused music – is playing in the background. A VHS filter is present throughout the entire duration of the video, giving off the impression that the footage was saved from a video cassette from the mid-1990s and subsequently digitized.