Conversing Graciously with Ghosts: Haunting, Pedagogy, and the Tensions of Teaching

Abstract

This dissertation explores the personal, relational, and structural hauntings that shape pedagogical practice, drawing on Avery Gordon’s concept of haunting (1997) and Eve Sedgwick’s reparative reading (2003) as central interpretive frameworks. Through a blend of methods informed by psychoanalytic, autoethnographic, and arts-based modes of inquiry, I engage with the ghostly residues of my past teaching experiences to better understand the unconscious forces that shape pedagogy and the contradictions inherent in critically conscious teaching. I begin by mapping the haunting forces that pervade public education in the United States, focusing on neoliberalism, White supremacy, and ableism as structural hauntings that shape institutional practices, pedagogical relationships, and the psychical lives of educators and students. These forces manifest in hyper-individualism, meritocratic logics, and institutionalized dispossession, creating tensions that complicate the work of teachers striving for justice and liberation. Through psychoanalytic and critical theoretical perspectives, I examine how these hauntings operate at both systemic and unconscious levels, influencing affective and relational dimensions of pedagogy. To explore these themes, I develop an inquiry process grounded in reflexivity and creative nonfiction, culminating in a collection of letters to former students as a method of engaging with pedagogical ghosts. These epistolary narratives, accompanied by reflexive analyses, serve as sites of both mourning and repair, revealing the ambivalence that accompanies efforts to reconcile past pedagogical choices with present critical consciousness. The process of writing itself emerges as a reparative practice, offering a means to navigate the tensions between critique and care, despair and hope. As I weave together insights from critical pedagogy, psychoanalysis, and personal reflection, I contend that teaching within a haunted educational system is necessarily fraught with paradox. Rather than seeking resolution, this dissertation embraces ambivalence as a necessary condition of ethical pedagogy, arguing that critically conscious teaching requires a willingness to dwell in uncertainty, acknowledge complicity, and remain open to reparation. In doing so, I offer a vision of pedagogy as an ongoing process of negotiation, care, and becoming—one that recognizes both the weight of haunting and the possibilities of hopeful praxis.