“A Chance to Talk Like This”: Gender, Education, and Social Haunting in a UK Coalfield

Abstract

This chapter draws on Avery Gordon’s concept of ‘social haunting’ to examine social class in some former mining villages in the north of England. It uses ethnographic research to focus on the intersection of class and gender, and examine attitudes towards education and community life more generally in former coal mining communities. Whilst it is recognised that the ‘geography of gender relations’ and ‘ideology of virility’ characteristic of such settings has been challenged by social and economic change, it is also argued that such processes continue to play out in an unfinished, revenant performance of gender which serves to limit the range of individual and community futures imaginable for young people. As an antidote, a critical community practice of ‘working with social haunting’ is proposed.