Hauntological Social Studies: More-Than-Human Deviances, Imbrications, and Proliferations of Possibility

This edited volume operationalizes the figure of the ghost and subsequent hauntings through Derrida’s framing of ’hauntology’--in an effort to attend to the liminal spaces that exist between presence and absence throughout social studies contexts (and beyond). Traditionally, social studies education and its tenets of economics, civics, geography, government, and history have been concerned with how bodies become (re)produced, (re)located, destroyed, and remembered across vectors of time. However, as this work argues, the maintenance of strict demarcations of time becomes problematic by closing opportunities for students to engage with the complex ways that (material) bodies shift within temporal encounters. As such, this book is primarily concerned with pursuing--and positioning--such haunted encounters as generative lines of inquiry that grant us (e.g., educators, students, researchers) the ability to think differently about history, the present, and the future. In a distinct move toward a ’pastpresentfuture’, this volume challenges the boundaries of social studies teaching, learning, and research by interrupting majoritarian temporal/material positionings that stymie how social and ecological justice is narrativized, understood, and perhaps most significantly, attained in the future.

Bretton A. Varga is Assistant Professor of History-Social Science at California State University, Chico. His research and approach to meaning-making are shaped by a commitment to cultivate hope, imagination, speculation, care, love, and justice across more-than-human contexts. In particular, his scholarship works with(in) critical posthuman theories of temporality, materiality, and feeling to unveil harmful structures, logics, and practices that perpetuate racial injustice and ecological precarity.