Haunting Wholeness: Inviting Ghosts on the Bridge So We Can Transform

Abstract

In this article, I share my journey toward haunting wholeness in the social justice work that I am beginning to take up as a scholar, teacher, and community member. I evoke Avery Gordon’s notion of haunting, defining it as an experience in which “that which appears to be not there is often a seething presence, acting on and often meddling with taken-for-granted realities.” Investigating hauntings that take place in our lives can take us to a “dense site where history and subjectivity make social life.” Should we dwell and work in this site, should we take up hauntings and their “ghostly things,” I believe, as Gordon does, that we can conjure “a very particular way of knowing what has happened or is happening,” an affective and transformative way of knowing about our moving and relating in the world with others as social beings.