Notes toward a methodology of haunting

Abstract

This article considers the methodological implications of Avery Gordon’s work on haunting for the field of memory studies. Like Gordon, we take issue with forms of positivist social-scientific research which fail to even acknowledge (let alone reckon with) ghosts. Specifically, we emphasize how these methodological orientations to research and knowledge production are thoroughly ensconced in Euro-western knowledge paradigms that rationalize colonialism. To do so, we draw on Indigenous studies scholars, many of whom have themselves expanded Gordon’s approach to haunting. By bringing insights about haunting as a methodology to bear on the field of memory studies, we aim to provoke a wider conversation about haunting’s usefulness, including its risks and limitations, as an approach to producing knowledge about violent pasts and their durability in the present.

I have hoped to draw attention to a whole realm of experiences and social practices that can barely be approached without a method attentive to what is elusive, fantastic, contingent, and often barely there.

—Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 2008 [1997]: 26

Introduction

Since memory studies’ emergence as a field, questions of methodology have loomed large. Described even in its early days as “a nonparadigmatic, transdisciplinary, centerless enterprise” (Olick and Robbins, 1998: 106), memory studies is now a radically interdisciplinary field, and many scholars have been inspired by its political potential and marveled at its rapid development (which Olick (2008) described, in the inaugural issue of this journal, as the field’s “metastatic growth” (p. 26)). Among these scholars was sociologist Sharon Rosenberg, who, by the mid-2000s, began to wonder about what might be at stake in and/or overlooked amid the speedy development of this politically charged field. In her 2010 contribution to the edited collection, The Future of Memory, a volume of critical reflections on the then-state of the field, Rosenberg worried that despite (or perhaps in part because of) its rapid development, the field of memory studies was struggling to grapple methodologically with its own insights about how difficult pasts press on the present. She imagined new scholars arriving to the field and wondered about their (and the field’s) future, knowing that frequently, in memory studies, “you cannot but stumble into questions that leave you faltering” (Rosenberg, 2010: 246), that “nights are hard, that time slips, that forgetting can be necessary to getting by” (pp. 246–247). Rosenberg wanted to provoke more discussion on what we might do about the fact that as a project of the modern university, by the early 2000s memory studies already seemed invested in getting its scholars to do what good subjects of the modern university must do: publish, produce, secure grants, create courses, majors, degrees and graduate programs—and thus, implicitly, find ways to suppress, downplay, or deny our stumbling, our hard nights, and the questions that leave us faltering.

Rosenberg called this phenomenon memory studies’ haunting paradox: “[W]hat I am continuously struck by,” she wrote, “is a haunting paradox at the crux of what it means to undertake ‘study’ of traumatic events and their legacies in the contemporary university” (p. 246). This haunting paradox, she argued, arises from a tendency to avoid, for the sake of scholarly productivity and our capacity as scholars to claim knowledgeable expertise, the fuller implications of haunting’s challenge to Euro-western knowledge paradigms. As Rosenberg insisted,

in encountering the remembrance of those who have died violently . . . we are encountering not only losses that are readily recognizable as such (lives, bodies, capacities . . .), but also losses to normative claims for knowledge acquisition as a rational and objective practice. (pp. 249–250)

If scholars in the field do not grapple collectively with the loss of those latter claims—that is, claims to certainty, rationality, objectivity, detached scholarship—then Rosenberg worried that the field would eventually be “too readily incorporated into the normative and hegemonic projects of the modern university” (p. 259) at the expense of the very forms of justice and visions for less violent, less damaging futures to which many scholars of memory (and the communities with/on behalf of whom we work) are so committed.

Fourteen years on, we are still trying to work out the implications of this haunting paradox for our own work in memory studies. Rosenberg, who supervised two of our PhDs, died the same year her essay was published, so we never got to learn from what would have been her ongoing efforts to address this haunting paradox in her own work in the field. Our work with Rosenberg was directed at the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in Canada (Rosenberg et al., 2010), and today this crisis persists. Our work has continued, and it would be fair to say that as our own lives have become ever more entangled with the modern university, and as we started to think about how to train our own graduate students (whose projects frequently draw on the field of memory studies), our own work remains both haunted and animated by Rosenberg’s (and our shared) unfinished project. The question of how to use the concept of haunting methodologically in our own research (and of how to train others in its methods) has preoccupied us ever since. For example, if, as Rosenberg suggested, there is good reason to wonder about “the very terms on which . . . memory studies is being rendered as a field of inquiry” (p. 248, emphasis original), then what exactly are those terms? How do we name them? Work within (or beyond) them?

This essay is a response to our wondering about methodology. In it, we focus on one approach in particular that has gained rather remarkable popularity in and beyond memory studies: the notion of haunting. While haunting has been deployed as a framework for research across many different fields, its semantic fluidity, status as metaphor, and linguistic cachet have also played a role in its entanglement with the “interrelated concepts of memory, materiality, nostalgia, [and] trauma” (Surface-Evans et al., 2020: 1). Yet, despite haunting’s popularity as an academic orientation, little attention has been paid to its particularities and peculiarities as a methodological approach. For example, in the handbook Research Methods for Memory Studies, the works of Jacques Derrida and Avery Gordon, two key theorists of haunting, are not cited by any of the volume’s contributors (Keightley and Pickering, 2013). In this article, rather than develop instructions for how to use haunting as a methodology (which would seem antithetical to the very project of haunting), we offer instead some thoughts about why haunting matters to questions of methodology, particularly for memory studies scholars and activists, and to our own research on Canada’s extremely high rates of violence again Indigenous women. We begin by briefly historicizing haunting as a concept, and then review how haunting has been conceived and/or practiced as a methodology in extant scholarship. Next, we consider how haunting might be put to work as a hesitant, faltering approach to investigating, as Hunt (2014) (Kwakwaka’wakw) describes it, “that which is rendered outside the knowable world” (p. 31)—or rather, that which is impossible to measure or prove using conventional empiricist approaches to knowledge production and their attendant assumptions about what counts as evidence. Elaborating on the logic of colonial approaches to knowledge making, Hunt analyzes “the work of discourse in creating and sustaining boundaries around what is considered real and, by extension, what is unable to be seen as real (or seen at all)” (p. 29). In this article we ask: how might haunting as an approach to methodology help us see (or maybe better: feel, sense, encounter) that which “is unable to be seen as real (or seen at all)” (Hunt, 2014: 29)?

Put another way, this article is an exercise in tracing the concept of haunting itself. By surfacing the ways in which haunting has been put to work methodologically, we make a case for haunting as an approach that might call on us to examine not just the kinds of fleeting and seemingly immeasurable realities which shape those violent events, structures, and aspects of the world to which so many scholars of memory attend, but the very terms on which we do so. Such terms, we argue, necessarily entail a reckoning with the epistemologies and relationships most often rendered invisible, silent, or past in conventional Euro-western approaches to knowledge production. Such a reckoning, we suggest, entails encounters with ghosts, as well as a degree of surrender and greater openness to the stumbling, the hard nights, and the questions that leave us faltering. As Rosenberg (2010) put it, “The scholarly expectation is that we ‘move on’ to new work, do not get ‘stuck’ in the old. But haunting does not let go quite so easily” (p. 247).

Historicizing haunting

The development of haunting as a concept is often attributed to Jacques Derrida and Avery Gordon (see, for example, Auchter, 2023: 117), though we have discovered in our research that their parallel work with the concept did not unfold sequentially (with Gordon coming after and building on Derrida), as the story is often told. It is true that on the evenings of 22–23 April 1993, at the University of California, Riverside, Jacques Derrida presented a plenary address at the conference “Whither Marxism? Global Crises in International Perspective,” and that 1 year later, the contents of that plenary address would be published in Derrida’s now foundational book, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. It is also true that in Specters of Marx, Derrida theorizes hauntology, and he is therefore often credited as being the first to conceive of “haunting”—that is, this framework for thinking about ghosts “in the name of justice” (Derrida, 1994: xviii) and as explicitly political figures (as opposed to merely paranormal or moral figures, as in the spiritualist movement of the nineteenth century).

Yet, 5 years before Derrida presented that plenary address, and 6 years before the publication of Specters of Marx, on August 27, 1988, in Atlanta, Georgia, at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA), while she was a doctoral student at Boston College in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, Avery Gordon presented a paper called “Ethnography as Fiction, Fiction as Social Science” in which she had already begun to think about the important phenomenon that is haunting—via, as she puts it, “a woman ghost” (Gordon, 1990: 485). Scheduled to present in the Culture Section at the ASA, Gordon (1990) recounts her journey to the annual conference thus:

I was on my way to a conference with an abstract and a promise. The path seemed straight-forward: a promise to speak professionally about a method of studying culture within the present historical landscape of what might be named postmodern America . . . I was on my way to a conference with an abstract and a promise but then I got distracted by a photograph and had to take a detour, a psychoanalytic detour that led me to follow the traces of a woman ghost. (p. 485)

Gordon was referring to the ghost of Sabina Spielrein, a woman once a patient of the psychiatrist Carl Jung, then his lover, and a woman who would later become a psychoanalyst in her own right (who at the time of the distracting photograph was, like Gordon, a doctoral student in the last year of writing her dissertation). Spielrein had been invited to gather as “part of the ‘feminine element’ representing Zurich” (McGuire in Gordon, 1990: 487) with her colleagues on 21–22 September 1911, in Weimar, Germany, at the Third Psychoanalytic Congress, but—at least according to the photograph Gordon encountered—Spielrein may not have arrived. In response to Spielrein’s absence from this photograph, Gordon (1990) set out to discover “how to research from within a photograph where a woman is seemingly not-there” (p. 486). In this way, even as a graduate student, Gordon was already pursuing what Derrida would years later describe as “this being-there of an absent or departed one” (Derrida, 1994: 5). And in said pursuit, Gordon had already registered the ways in which psychoanalysis and feminism had set the stage for challenging “‘empiricist forms of reasoning’” (Rose, as qtd. in Gordon, 1990: 486) which “normalized social science” (Gordon, 1990: 489), those forms of reasoning that Derrida—again, years later—would claim “one thinks one knows by the name of knowledge” (Derrida, 1994: 5).

To complicate the story further, neither Gordon nor Derrida are the founding thinkers here, though each is a major figure in the literature on haunting. Gordon gives direct credit to novelists Toni Morrison and Luisa Valenzuela for lessons learned about haunting from their creative writing (Gordon et al., 2020: 338). Of authors like Valenzuela, Gordon writes, “I started taking women fiction writers from the Southern Cone seriously as theorists and methodologists because they were forced into a language that could represent, literally conjure, political disappearance” (Gordon, 2018: 97). Valenzuela’s writing necessarily responds to a question of life and death and of methodology, answering the question: “How do you get close to that which is very dangerous and will kill you?” (Gordon, 2018: 98). As methodologies, fiction and haunting can each offer answers, but neither renders the threat of that which is dangerous and will kill you less real. Gordon’s framing, through Morrison and Valenzuela, thus exposes haunting’s usefulness prior to its association with what is called “the spectral turn” in fields like memory studies. ¹

The dominance of Gordon and Derrida in the literature on hauntings should make us curious (if we value their work at all) about who is not present, or rather whose absence might register as a “seething presence” (Gordon, 2008: 8) in familiar ways of historicizing haunting. Dominant ways of rendering a history tend to arise from dominant positionings—whether of identity (whiteness) or of disciplines (philosophy, sociology). In other interdisciplinary fields, including Black studies and Indigenous studies, a different historicization is possible. For instance, we can find early traces of haunting in Anna Julia Cooper’s 1892 book, A Voice from the South. A Black scholar born into slavery in the southern United States, Cooper, became a sociologist, educator, and activist who “identifie[d] arrogant perception and objectification as epistemological components of domination” (May, 2004: 75). Vivian May suggests that “Cooper’s conundrum lies in needing to break open the constraints of the rules of rhetoric and philosophical argument while also following them sufficiently to be recognized and listened to” (p. 80)—a conundrum that, in Cooper’s time, may have been quite like how to get close to that which might be so dangerous as to kill you. Cooper shows that as positivism emerged with an authority to supplant religious authority, science too was haunted by all it disallowed, including knowledge and experience that would continue to interrupt normalized scientific endeavors for centuries. In Indigenous studies, prominent Lakota scholar Deloria (2003). writes: “I conclude that our ancestors lived in a strange condition in which they were in touch with the spirits constantly, and I see that as a goal for our present activities” (p. xvii, first published 1973). Deloria is better known for his work confounding Euro-western notions of linear time than for his contributions to hauntology, while Cooper is more likely to be read as a founding figure of Black feminist thought. These scholars may not have used the language of haunting explicitly, but the work they were doing to upend Euro-western epistemologies necessarily required dealing with some ghostly matters. Several contemporary scholars in Black and Indigenous studies have drawn on and expanded Derrida’s and/or Gordon’s work on hauntings, though they are to date less frequently engaged by scholars in memory studies, including ourselves (see, for example, Coly, 2019; Lovelace, 2021; Morrill et al., 2016; Saleh-Hanna, 2015; Tuck, 2018; Tuck and Recollet, 2017; Tuck and Ree, 2013).

So, despite the common origin story, it is clear that there were writers and theorists thinking about haunting and ghosts well before the publication of Derrida’s Specters of Marx. And Gordon and Derrida, whose names now often appear together as dual foundational voices in the development of haunting, were also thinking quite differently about what haunting might be and why theorizing such a concept might matter. A fulsome discussion of the differences between Gordon’s and Derrida’s work is beyond the scope of this article, but suffice it to say that where they differ most is in relation to “the something to be done” (Gordon, 2008: xii) when a ghost appears. ² For Gordon, and for the writers she follows, that “something to be done” had to extend beyond an awareness of the limits of knowledge and of the other’s otherness:

Awareness of the limits of knowledge, awareness of the impossibility of knowing it all, and awareness of the dangers of being a know-it-all are certainly important conditions of a just praxis, but they are not sufficient in and of themselves. (Gordon, 2011: 7)

Methodology looms large in Gordon’s (1990) writing and she clarifies: “Perhaps the key methodological question is not: what method have you adopted for this research? but what paths have been disavowed, left behind, covered over and remain unseen” (p. 491). In other words, how do we learn to perceive that which is not there and read not for what is present, but for what is absent?

Haunting as a methodology: a brief review

It is in Ghostly Matters where Gordon theorizes haunting as a framework—something like a methodological approach, or perhaps more accurately, a kind of critique of methodology. Haunting, for Gordon, is “the language and the experiential modality” (Gordon, 2008: xvi) by which we might aim to understand how “abusive systems of power make themselves known and their impacts felt in everyday life” (p. xvi). It is both “a method of knowledge production and a way of writing” (p. xvii). It involves “a particular kind of social alchemy” (p. 6), one that “draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and always a bit magically” into feeling, hearing, sometimes seeing, and grasping at “how that which appears to be not there is often a seething presence” (p. 8). It invites us to “go beyond . . . turning social relations into just the things we know” and demands that we move “toward our own reckoning with how we are in these stories, with how they change us, with our own ghosts” (pp. 21–22). As Gordon insists, “social life . . . does not obey our rules of method and our disciplinary organization of it” (p. 27), and she seeks “. . . a method attentive to what is elusive, fantastic, contingent, and often barely there” (p. 26). To know these relationships, these multiple effects, creative ways of paying attention are required. Our usual, disciplinary attempts to measure or assess the validity of forms of evidence simply won’t do—we will miss things, important things. Moreover, it appears that the requirement for creative attention is contingent upon an undermining of dominant forms of knowledge production because of how these can otherwise obscure, illegitimize, or keep out such access, precisely for their bias toward that which can be directly measured, seen, and known.

Haunting, then, does not deal in rigidity or definitions, neat explanations, empiricism, or objectivity. Rather, haunting seeks to explode empiricism and upend objectivity: it is so often the thing that causes us to stumble, to struggle through hard nights, and to come up against questions that leave us faltering. Indeed, renowned for challenging sociologists (and other scholars across the social sciences and humanities) to rethink our engagements with empiricism and objectivity, Ghostly Matters has been hugely impactful, especially for those of us looking for ways to grapple with the repetitions of forms of violence that have been differentially suffered, witnessed, and indeed perpetrated by so many of us over the course of the past several centuries—repetitions that continue to occur despite the amassing of statistics and empirical data proving the extent of the violence and resulting in ever-increasing commitments to prevent or end it. Gordon (2011) offers a methodological account of haunting that foregrounded research as an encounter, pushing her readers to recognize that haunting is always asking something of us:

The ghost demands your attention. The present wavers. Something will happen. What will happen of course, is not given in advance, but something must be done. I think this emergent state is also the critical analytic moment. (p. 3)

We turn, now, to a brief review of haunting’s methodological impacts, to make the elements of that “critical analytic moment” (p. 3) more explicit.

What we share here about haunting as a methodology is not the result of a formal review process such as a systemic or scoping review, but rather observations from a more “homemade” review process which was challenging because of haunting’s metaphorical and interdisciplinary nature. ³ In the literature searches that were completed, innumerable results drew on the language of haunting, ghosts, and the spectral precisely as metaphors, with little to no engagement with the literature on haunting. At the same time, innumerable results engaged deeply with the literature on haunting, but either drew on conventional methodologies (e.g. close reading, archival study) or understood haunting as primarily a theoretical starting point rather than a kind of methodological commitment. While the line that separates scholarship in the latter case from scholarship that surfaces haunting’s methodological impacts can be particularly thin, we have done our best to trace the major developments of haunting as a methodology (rather than strictly a metaphor or theory) over the past three or so decades (1990–2023).

What we have found, by and large, is that haunting’s methodological impact is traceable less through scholars’ different application (or even reinvention) of their methods and more through how scholars approach the project of knowledge production. For example, in 1997, sociologist Bell (1997) argued that ghosts are “terrifically specific” (p. 815), which is to say that they inhabit places, and that places are therefore haunted. Bell conceded that these ghosts are “invisible to our current science,” that “[n]o laboratory instrument, no metered machine, no photographic negative will ever detect them,” but insisted that “we should have no doubt that they are, still, very real” (p. 832). Bell committed to haunting not by adapting, inventing, or discovering methods that could prove ghosts’ presence, but rather by opening himself up to a new way of paying attention to absence, to the possibility of witnessing the past in a present place, and to a new way of producing knowledge and writing about it as a result.

While scholarship on haunting in the 1990s wrestled mainly with ghosts as social figures and with the implications of haunting for knowledge production, in the 2000s, there is a marked increase in focus on space, place, and the everyday. Familiar with the concept of the ghost as a political figure, scholars during this period sought to decipher and develop ways of actually engaging, communing with, or otherwise encountering the ghost and its politics. They developed and/or continued a number of conceptual paths, exploring how haunting emerges in encounters with spaces and places, and on how to animate hauntings through writing practices. A particularly strong example of a text that develops haunting as a methodological approach is Grace M. Cho’s (2008) Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War. Not only does Cho address matters of time, space, and the everyday, she does so through exploratory writing practices. In her first chapter (“Fleshing Out the Ghost”), Cho includes a section entitled “Method: Dream Work, Fiction, Autoethnography,” in which she explicitly discusses her approach to using haunting as method. And crucially, throughout the entirety of her book, Cho recognizes her implicatedness in the knowledge she is producing—without letting her work become simply a story about herself (or her family): “The ghosts of my family history,” she says, “are thoroughly enmeshed in this work even when there is nothing in particular that appears to be autobiographical” (p. 42). Haunting as method has as much to do with how we write as with what we write.

As spectral studies develops throughout the 2010s (and becomes anthologized in 2015, see del Pilar Blanco and Peeren, Eds.), scholars and researchers begin to think through tensions in the field. Martha Lincoln and Bruce Lincoln, for instance, note how Avery Gordon “never considers individuals or social groups who experience haunting as something consistent with, and rooted in, their cosmology, ontology, and psychology” (p. 195). In other words, thinkers like Jacques Derrida and Avery Gordon presume that ghosts are anomalous, a break with the general order of things; and certainly, this is true for much of the West. However, for many peoples, of course, ghosts are very much a feature of everyday life and may even be fundamental parts of long-held knowledges about the world (as Gordon also acknowledges). So, Lincoln and Lincoln wonder: to what extent can we afford to assume that ghosts always return in order to impel action toward the kind of social justice that Gordon describes? What are the risks of “developing the trope of haunting without considering how ghosts are theorized by those who take them as something other than metaphor” (p. 196)? And to what extent might neglecting to articulate (or at least consider) that difference in fact re-entrench the supremacy of whiteness and Euro-western knowledge production?

Although the literature we address on haunting is very recent, knowledge about animate place and multifarious time is not new. Only since the Enlightenment, and in the Euro-western contexts of formalized rules of objectivity (Gordon’s “normalized science”), have time and space been so rigidly regularized and deprived of flexibility and agency. Within the Haudenosaunee notion of “place-thought” as described by Vanessa Watts (2013), for example, place does not lie outside of our social lives but is an active and relational feature within them. Watts (2013) writes that within Euro-western contexts, “agency has erroneously become exclusive to humans, thereby removing non-human agency from what constitutes a society” (p. 20). What an attentiveness to place as agentic might suggest (for non-Indigenous scholars in particular) is already deeply embedded in some Indigenous ways of knowing (Kennedy and Silverstein, 2023; Little Bear, 2000). The question remains: in contexts where agency has been rendered exclusive to humans, how might we learn to pay attention to what is absent (but still a seething presence, in Gordon’s terms), and to the past as active in the present, or the present in the past, or the ways both constrain and make possible different futures? How might this form of attention, this capacity to interpret absent presences, to attend to moments that challenge inanimate models of place and that interrupt linear models of time, contribute to knowledge production, to research? And, maybe even more confounding, if one could work some of this out, would it be possible to train others to pay this kind of attention and make these kinds of interpretations—to practice haunting as a methodological approach? Attending to absence is arguably foundational to memory studies as a project, where we aim to attend not just to who or what is remembered, but who or what is forgotten, disavowed, repressed. In the context of our work in Canada, we know that this is a question of how to attend to various social processes that have long worked toward—but have failed at—normalizing Indigenous disappearance. We don’t have easy answers to these questions. As Gordon (2008) insisted, “this is a particular kind of social alchemy that eludes us as often as it makes us look for it” (p. 6). But how exactly do we train our students to attend to these absences—and how do we know, recognize, or listen to a ghost when we encounter it?

We believe that starting to answer the question of who or what is absent also requires attention to the dynamics of absence and presence across large swaths of time, which in turn requires learning to interpret repetition—or time loops—but also time jumps (or gaps)—mundane time that stands still or expediates and seems to elude archiving or cataloging. This notion of time as accumulating, rather than passing, is a thread running through the literature on haunting (and a significant contribution of memory studies). Recognizing temporal repetitions, leaps, and gaps as significant requires abandoning the linear model of regular intervals of time and interrogating the Euro-western teleology it maintains. When we do this—try to take things out of colonial temporal order—the moral project that the framework otherwise maintained falls away. With that framework for time suspended, we can no longer abide by too-easy claims that the present is “better than” or “more humane” than the past; instead, we must investigate the continuities that such a delineation might hide. In short, we seek to maintain a temporally-embedded analysis but to drop the teleological aspect. Time then, like place, becomes an active aspect of a methodology of haunting—it is animate. Neither are taken for granted as stable, linear, or set, and both are examined for their workings in the present.

Haunting: a case study

To write in ways that reveal the cracks in Euro-western epistemologies and that show “our own reckoning with how we are in these stories” (Gordon, 2008: 22); to track and perceive absences in accounts (both official and unofficial) of the past and present; to confound linear time and upend the purported inanimacy of place and of the non-human: these are analytical tasks of a high order. One way we’ve learned to embrace haunting methodologically is through writing case studies (this is no accident; as Gordon (2008) insists, “I suppose you could say that the method here involves producing case studies of haunting and adjudicating their consequences,” p. 24). To do justice to such a case study requires more space than we have here, and elsewhere we offer fuller cases that attempt to grapple with the consequences of haunting for conventional ways of doing research and producing knowledge (Dean, 2015; Dean and Granzow, 2023; Granzow, 2020; Granzow and Dean, 2016). In what follows, we excerpt some analysis from our case studies to illustrate the point.

When we first read feminist historian Sarah Carter’s (1993) account of a 1921 debate in the Canadian House of Commons, we were chilled. We stopped what we were doing. We thought we had made a mistake, misunderstood, so we checked again. Hauntings are often, maybe always, first perceived viscerally, which is perhaps why they are so often not recognized as forms of knowledge (from Euro-western vantage points) and also why it is difficult to train others to perceive them. Sometimes it may seem (even in this essay) as though haunting is a methodological choice one makes (or not), but in our experience that is not how haunting works: instead, a haunting has a way of overtaking whatever direction we think we were heading or whatever form of evidence we think we were looking for and stopping us in our tracks. Once perceived, the haunting forces us to pause, to re-trace our steps, to understand something differently, and very often to start again—to expand our analysis until the social conditions that brought the ghost to our attention come flickering into view. The debate that had this effect on us, as Carter (1993) describes it, involved an effort on the part of Members of Parliament (MPs) to determine whether it should be made “an offense for any white man to have ‘illicit connection’ with an Indian woman” (p. 158). A bill to amend the Canadian Criminal Code was introduced on Friday, 6 May 1921, by the Minister of Justice, the Right Honorable Mr C. J. Doherty, who proposed that such an offense was justifiable because “Indian women are, perhaps, not as alive as women of other races in the country to the importance of maintaining their chastity, and so forth” (qtd. in Carter (1993: 158), emphasis added; Canada, 1921). His suggestion, made on the floor of the Canadian House of Commons over 100 years ago, we think bears on the repetition of extraordinary violence against Indigenous women in Canada today. ⁴ Mr Doherty’s phrasing describes Indigenous women as less alive to, but we think it reads also as less alive than “women of other races,” and we propose that what was once up for explicit debate in the House of Commons exists as a persistent question in the present. The seemingly endless amassing of statistics and inquiry reports into the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women does not assure that the question has been resolved or that Indigenous women are de facto as alive as the rest of us. Instead, such amassing of statistics points in the opposite direction. We must then interrogate how Euro-western frameworks for understanding what it means to be “alive,” and in particular those pernicious liberal humanist assumptions that might hierarchize people by categories of “aliveness,” are profoundly implicated in the continuation of such violence. Today, amid protest from activists decrying this same state tendency to categorize lives according to what now appears as an “outdated” theory of “aliveness,” the state works hard to distance itself from what was not so long ago an open matter of debate. But distancing is not the same as reckoning.

Today, activists and loved ones go to great lengths to convince politicians, police, and the wider public that Indigenous women are, in fact, human, as much alive as the rest of us. In Canada, today, this is purportedly a statement of fact—and yet it seemingly has to be asserted over and over again. When Indigenous women experience violence, when they are disappeared, when they are murdered, they are routinely dehumanized—in the courts, in the media, by the public (Acoose, 1995; Dean, 2015; Dean and Granzow, 2023; Granzow, 2020; Granzow and Dean, 2016; Hunt, 2016, 2023; Razack, 2002, 2016; Simpson, 2014, 2016). Their ghosts are demanding a reckoning. Why must so much effort be expended on making a fact’s factualness seem real? And more urgently, why and how is there a public that still feels entitled to demand such evidence of aliveness, of humanness, in order to act against violence, to seek justice? What does it say about this wider public that we seem to believe Indigenous women’s degree of aliveness and humanness is (still) an open question?

We learn from those thinking outside of the Euro-western worldview that this kind of distinction between what is alive and what is not comes from within a colonial, Euro-western ontology and epistemology, which divides the world into the animate and the inanimate; there is that which is alive and that which is not (or is less) alive (Little Bear, 2000; Watts, 2013). Auchter (2023) suggests that rather than attempt to “narrate the ghost within our frameworks of life and death and the binaries,” we might learn more from “listening to the ghostly” and animating ghosts’ capacities to challenge singular narratives (120). The question up for debate in 1921 regarding Indigenous women’s “aliveness” (to Euro-colonial morality) exposes the perniciousness of this worldview, still with us today. The fully human subject, rendered animate, alive, is also considered able to know, to study, to observe from the outside, and to report on, and so can produce the truth on and through an object. The object is inanimate, or not alive, and becomes what the subject can know. A binary pair is relied upon. Thus, only those already granted social recognition as subjects can deliberate over the status of those who lack such authority, status and agency. These positions, however, exist only in relation to each other, so within this epistemological framework, it is the process of coming to know that at once grants the knower the status of subject, and delivers that which is known as an object, as singular and deprived of any complex agency or being (Hunt, 2014; Watts, 2013). “Objectivity,” Leroy Little Bear (2000) reminds us, “is an externalization but also an appropriative process” (p. 83). In debating the relative aliveness of Indigenous women in 1921, members of the House of Commons asserted their own aliveness as beyond question and sanctioned the ongoing crisis of MMIW through the objectification and dehumanization of Indigenous women. The consequences are still unfolding. But we find hope in haunting’s potential to intervene.

Haunting as a theory of change

Indigenous studies scholar Eve Tuck (Unangax̂) argues haunting is always a “reluctant theory of change” (Tuck, 2018: 14, 45): she confesses that she does not, as an Indigenous woman, want to haunt settler subjects as a “future ghost,” (Tuck, 2018: 13, 57; see also Tuck and Ree, 2013: 643, 648) but she will commit to that future haunting so long as colonialism remains in force. “Haunting,” Tuck and Ree (2013) write,

is the relentless remembering and reminding that will not be appeased by settlers’ assurances of innocence and reconciliation . . .. Haunting doesn’t hope to change people’s perceptions, nor does it hope for reconciliation. Haunting lies precisely in its refusal to stop. (p. 642)

However, we develop a notion of haunting as a methodology, we recognize that this approach is not free of the assumptions embedded in colonial worldviews but is always a response to those assumptions and so exists in relation to entrenched onto-epistemologies. As Gordon (2008) insists, “[h]aunting always harbors the violence, the witchcraft and denial that made it” (p. 207, emphasis added). She reminds us that ghosts are not innocent, while haunting itself remains bound to the forces and orders that caused the disappearances or violent deaths and created the ghosts’ seething presences in the first place.

If our work is a reaction against colonial imperatives, then we consider it a second-order reaction—a reaction against the colonial theories of the world and modes of knowing in which we were originally trained, theories and modes that attempt to stabilize, control, settle, extract, and exploit. Much of our formal academic and experiential training has not equipped us to interrogate how keeping within disciplinary convention maintains Euro-western power and privilege, yet it has become clear to us that it does. While normalized academic knowledge production would have us delimit our fields, locate their gaps, and fill them in, Gordon (2008) suggests that haunting requires us to do something different: it is not about eradicating the gaps, she suggests, but rather “fill[ing] in the content differently” (p. 19). In their work on haunting visitations, Tuck and Recollet (2017) assert, “my stories are evidence that your thinking has gaps, and worse, acts like it doesn’t” (p. 11). Undermining established Euro-western modes of knowing (which act like they don’t have gaps) is a colossal task; it is an undermining at once of the logics of capitalism and coloniality (Mignolo, 2011). If haunting is a reluctant theory of change, its reluctance also reveals its hope that such an approach won’t always be necessary—that we might in fact learn to recognize that our thinking has gaps and to act like we know that it does, might in fact start to acknowledge the past in the present as signaling something important, something we can learn to perceive and attend to, something that demands something of us. Many scholars, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, are critical of haunting’s potential in settler colonial contexts to merely reproduce the trope of the so-called “vanishing Indian,” resulting in little more than a bunch of white social scientists going around looking for Indigenous ghosts, reifying their absence while ignoring their political calls for justice in the present (see, for e.g. Cameron, 2008; Medak-Saltzman, 2015). We share these worries, yet we also know that amassing empirical evidence of ongoing colonial violence is doing little—maybe nothing, maybe worse than nothing—to end that violence. So reluctantly, and whether we are open to it or not, we think haunting still has work to do.

(In)conclusions

To return to the concerns about the field of memory studies with which we began, we do worry that if we cannot, as memory studies scholars, find ways to adapt our methodology in response to hauntings, in another 15 years, we’ll perhaps be even more institutionalized as a field, but still struggling, individually and collectively, to contend with the fact that “nights are hard, that time slips, that forgetting can be necessary to getting by” (Rosenberg, 2010: 246–247). More urgently, we worry about the risks of re-entrenching Euro-western approaches to knowledge production through that process of institutionalization, which could have the effect of making it more, not less, difficult to track “whose lives and deaths and personhood are rendered structurally impossible by particular logics” (Auchter, 2023: 120). Yet, Gordon (2011) believed (and presumably still believes) that “in the gracious but careful reckoning with the ghost . . . we could locate some elements of a practice for moving towards eliminating the conditions that produce the haunting in the first place” (p. 5). If haunting still has work to do in memory studies, part of that work must involve maintaining the radical interdisciplinarity of our field and engaging with insights about haunting traceable in other fields (in this essay, we have turned to Black feminist studies and Indigenous studies, and there are no doubt many others). The “elements of a practice” identified by Gordon are what we stumble toward here, knowing that the outcome of ghostly matters—what Gordon (2008) calls the “something-to-be-done” which is also “something you have to try for yourself” (p. 203, emphasis original)—is always uncertain. But as Morrill, Tuck; the Super Futures Haunt Qollective (2016) explain, “The opposite of dispossession is not possession. It is not accumulation. It is unforgetting. It is mattering” (p. 2). Haunting, then, has methodological potential because of its persistent refusal to allow us—the “us” here being those of us trained and embedded in Euro-western knowledge systems and institutions—to forget the violence in which these systems, institutions, and ways of knowing are implicated. And refusing to forget is precisely what the study of memory hopes to achieve. To do so, we suggest we might take haunting, and its attendant disruptions of Euro-western knowledge paradigms—disruptions also amply evident in Black studies, Indigenous studies, and elsewhere—seriously for the many implications they hold for our methodological approaches.