Hauntological Pedagogies: Confronting the Ghosts of Whiteness and Moving towards Racial and Spiritual Justice

M Nathan Tanner

doi:10.3390/rel13010083

Abstract

The purpose of this conceptual article is to bring critical theoretical frameworks and discourses used in educational research on leadership, pedagogy, and policy into conversation with literature on hauntology. Furthermore, this work aims to pursue avenues for theorizing and developing notions of hauntological pedagogies by evoking the language and imagery of ghosts to confront the political, social, and spiritual problems in U.S. schooling contexts that stem from whiteness. This article is grounded in the critical discourses of antiracism, BlackCrit, critical pedagogy, critical race theory, critical whiteness studies, decolonial studies, and TribalCrit. By juxtaposing historical and contemporary case studies in U.S. schooling, this study demonstrates that whiteness, apart from constituting a socially constructed set of power relations, takes on religious or spiritual qualities. Critical educational researchers and practitioners will benefit from engaging with this work as it can help them conceive of and strive for more epistemologically, racially, and spiritually just schooling environments.

Highlights

Since antiquity, peoples from vastly different parts of the globe have produced accounts of ghosts; apparitions or specters that exist somewhere in between time and space (Clarke 2012)
Since Du Bois first attended to the critical study of whiteness, it has always been discussed in quasi-spiritual ways like those Euro-American ghost stories of the pre-modern era (Clarke 2012; Leonardo 2002; Lipsitz 1998; Mills 1997; Roediger 1991)
I develop an argument focused on how these pedagogies have formed essential ways for Black and Indigenous peoples to collectively confront the ghosts of whiteness

Summary

Introduction

Peoples from vastly different parts of the globe have produced accounts of ghosts; apparitions or specters that exist somewhere in between time and space (Clarke 2012). Hauntological Pedagogies: Confronting the Ghosts of Whiteness and Moving towards Racial and Spiritual Justice.

Objectives

Results

Conclusion