Haunting and the Educational Imagination

In a time when it seems like we've run into the limits on what Marx, Dewey, and Freud might hold for liberatory critique, this peculiarly uplifting book seeks to identify some promising thinking and teaching practices, especially for work in our contemporary “corporate university of excellence.” With auto-ethnography as a baseline for reflection on her personal teaching life in this troubling political era, as well as an insistence that all students are future teachers whether they seek formal work in classrooms or not, Barbara Regenspan selects insights descending from her horribly imperfect trinity (Marx, Dewey, and Freud), to revaluate what it means to have “obligations to unknowable others” in our complex and global reality. Drawing on an interdisciplinary cast of contemporary social theorists such as Avery Gordon, Deborah Britzman, Maxine Greene, Bill Readings, and Alain Badiou, this book traces hauntagogical thinking and related classroom practice—hauntagogy—pedagogy aimed to create wide-awakeness through the unearthing of acts of historical and interpersonal hauntings. Balanced between critique and hope, Regenspan offers the field of Educational Studies including teacher education, but also higher education more generally, a way of conceiving of the classroom as a place where contradictions in discourses are mined with and for our students who will be future teachers in the formal or informal sense. Here is a view of what historical materialism might hold for the relationship between democracy and education and what that relationship means for new, wild, conceptions of self, politics, and spirituality.
Cover design by Madison Kuhn.