This project is a tangible, material response to scholarly writing on hauntology and place, including Avery Gordon’s Ghost Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures, and Dylan Trigg’s The Memory of Place. More broadly, it is concerned with the misconception that place can ever be static or neutral. Rather, place is a shifting reflection of the people and institutions which inhabit and shape it. In this respect, we will also be looking to Patricia J. Williams’ critical legal scholarship. She argues for a “reconceptualizing from ‘objective truth’ to rhetorical event” which she projects will create “a more nuanced sense of legal and social responsibility” because “so much of what is spoken in so-called objective, unmediated voices is mired in hidden subjectivies and unexamined claims” (Williams ). This project asks: What are these unexamined claims? Who are they serving? What benefits can we reap from exposing the shadows of these claims to the light? Drawing extensively on the notions of publicizing and politicizing mental health presented in Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, as well as the similar aims of externalizing internal struggles argued by Harry Specht & Mark E. Courtney in their text on the evolution of the field of social work, Unfaithful Angels, this project is concerned with the creation of an academic culture of social awareness and self-scrutiny. Maybe the futures we want to cultivate are not lost yet. Maybe the same technologies that often isolate and distract us can lead us to a greater sense of wonder, collective mobility, and depth of experience. 

 

This project will combine physical markings and digitized content spanning across different modes of communication to facilitate critical engagement with the place of EWU’s campus. Rather than a leg-less intellectual exercise, the project will push, constantly, toward the “something to be done” Avery Gordon describes as an essential response to understanding the function of sociological hauntings. While horizontally the project seeks to level with the overlapping communities its audience inhabits, the project will also not sacrifice vertical depth or complexity. Rather than imparting a simple lesson, the project will destabilize our relationship to place. This will have multiple outcomes for users.